“So I had the weirdest dream last night … ” It’s often the start of the most boring conversation of your day. Hearing about someone else’s nonsensical unconscious is usually not very interesting to anyone bar the dreamer. But to ­Brisbane dream analyst, author and former scientist Jane Teresa Anderson, a dream is anything but nonsense, ­rather, an intriguing insight into a person’s life.

Anderson, 63, of Grange, in Brisbane’s inner north, has been studying dreams for more than 25 years and has written five books on the topic. In her latest, The Dream Handbook, The Ultimate Guide to Interpreting Your Dreams, she says the weirdness of a dream is “only its wrapping, its language”.

“Your dreams are messages about you and your life, in code,” Anderson says. “Once you have cracked the code, the meaning of your dream is revealed. When you understand your dreams, you understand why your life is the way it is.”

Instead of dismissing our dreams or letting them slip from our waking brains, Anderson believes “each dream remembered is a gift” that allows valuable insight into our unconscious. “We all dream a lot, we just don’t always remember them,” she says. “Dreams are like a mirror that helps you see and understand yourself. Dreaming also has a physiological function for your health and wellbeing. Your dreaming mind is processing the past one to two days of all your experiences – conscious and unconscious. It’s chucking out the stuff you don’t need to remember, it’s confirming in your memory what is worth remembering, it’s building your mindset, confirming your beliefs or beginning to shift and change your mind about things.

“There are techniques to get people and animals to sleep but not dream, and they suffer physiologically very badly – their emotional, physical and mental health goes downhill.”

IN HER DREAM, ANDERSON IS A FIVE-YEAR-OLD SHEPHERD boy. The boy walks along a windy road with his lambs, stops at a certain point, looks up at the hills ahead and sees a pack of wolves. She wakes in terror of being devoured by them.

This was a recurring childhood dream for Anderson (then Jane Newton), who was born in Portsmouth on ­England’s south coast. “I dreamt vividly as a child, as most children do, but I tended to recall most of them. It’s always been with me,” she says. “I used to think I must have been a shepherd boy in a past life. But now I understand the wolves represented the aggression and threat I felt in life at that age and my feelings of powerlessness. In my family, like a lot of English families in those years, we had an ­upbringing that was quite fierce and controlled. We (with siblings Dawn, now 61, and Philip, 56) weren’t allowed to say what we really wanted to say, we were punished for speaking out. We were told off a lot by my dad.

“I lived my first nine years on a very large council estate, called Leigh Park, outside Portsmouth. It was very ­working-class – we absolutely had food on the table but it was the plainest of food. Mum and Dad (Dorothy, who died in 2012 aged 80, and Philip, an accountant who died in 2006 aged 76) eventually saved up and worked their way up and ended up living quite a rich lifestyle, but that was after I had left home.”

Despite her strict upbringing, Anderson clung to any ­encouraging words from her father, who “when he was in a good mood” had positive expectations for his eldest child. He suggested that one day she could “get yourself out of all of this and go to grammar school”. Anderson was one of only three students in her primary school for that year to pass an entry exam to Havant Grammar School (now ­Havant College) in Hampshire, and went on to be the first in her family to attend university.

Identified at grammar school as a student with scientific aptitude, Anderson completed an Honours degree in ­Zoology specialising in neurophysiology at the University of Glasgow. (Her family moved to Scotland when she was 15 for her father’s job at a torpedo factory in Alexandria, northwest of Glasgow.) “I did fine in science but I think an arts degree probably would have been more suitable,” ­Anderson says. “And then I ended up studying zoology … despite the fact I’m not really an animal person at all.”

She also completed a postgraduate teaching diploma, then abandoned a PhD at London’s National Institute for Medical Research in neurophysiology because the required dissection – including cutting out goldfish eyes – sickened her. Returning to Glasgow, Anderson worked at the ­university’s Hunterian Museum as a writer and producer of travelling exhibitions before teaching biology, physics and chemistry at a Glasgow high school.

She moved to Armidale, in northern NSW, in 1984 with her then husband, and has lived in Brisbane since 1995. Looking for a new direction in Australia, Anderson ­happened to talk to several people over the space of a few weeks who told her their dreams, and she was surprised when they didn’t seem to realise the dreams’ meaning. “I could see how the dreams related to their lives. I had a few vivid dreams myself and it got me thinking that maybe it was something I wanted to pursue,” she says.

Anderson began her own research, surveying several hundred people about their dreams and comparing them with key events in their waking lives. After analysing her data, she says she found there was a clear relationship ­between a dream and the events in a person’s life in the one to two days prior.

Her work as a dream analyst had begun and her first book, Sleep On It, was published in 1994. She also established herself as a regular on radio interpreting callers’ dreams. Anderson is now the host of the podcast series The Dream Show and is founder of The Dream Academy online courses. She is married to her partner of 17 years, Michael Collins, 69, a ghostwriter (though not for her books). It is Anderson’s third marriage. She has two children, a ­daughter Rowan, 37, son Euan, 35, and two grandchildren (Rowan’s children Isobel, 7, and Sandy, 4).

ANDERSON’S LATEST BOOK HAS ­SECTIONS ON MORE THAN 40 common dreams, including ­flying, being naked in public, “slo mo” running or walking, being unprepared for an exam, and “I had sex with … !”

Each dream section features a detailed dream interpretation, suggestions of what the dream could be about in your life, looking for personal clues in your dream, followed by “dream alchemy” practices.

Anderson says this is “the ­process of working with your dreams to transform your ­spiritual, emot­ional, mental and physical life” using practices including visualisations, ­affirmations, ­dialogues, artwork, gut-reaction poetry, bodywork, giving back beliefs, story­telling and writing.

She believes decoding dreams can transform lives in a multitude of ways – from stopping uncomfortable recurring dreams to creating more fulfilling relationships.

“The bottom line is that people can get by fine without remembering their dreams and not understanding them,” Anderson says. “But the moment you remember your dreams and you learn how to analyse them, your life ­becomes so much richer because of what you understand about yourself. You can build great empathy and ­compassion when you understand your dreams. When you see a character in your dream as being an aspect of yourself – even the frightening or negative bits – you gain more ­compassion for yourself and more self-understanding. This gives you more compassion and empathy for other ­people.

“I’d love it if more people realised the benefits of understanding their dreams. The world, quite frankly, would be a better place.” ■

TO SLEEP, PERCHANCE TO DREAM

• In a good night’s sleep you have about five big dreams, usually all concerning the same question. The first big dream of the night is usually the most vivid and surreal.

• A dream is a snapshot of how you see your life and your place in it on any given night, based on your conscious and unconscious experiences of the past one to two days.

• Recurring dreams happen when you keep coming up against the same old blocks or issues without resolving them. Recurring means you are stuck, repeating, can’t get past go. That’s why most recurring dreams have unsatisfying endings.

• Nightmares are about fear. Your dreams address the problems, questions and conflicts you meet in waking life, looking to make sense of it all. What holds you back most in life is fear. If you run away from something frightening in a dream, you’ll keep running. Nothing is solved.

HOW TO REMEMBER YOUR DREAMS

• Tell yourself dreams are important. Buy an exercise book or another special book to use as your dream journal.

• Keep paper and pen by your bed and jot down a couple of words of the dream you have had, a memory jogger to read in the morning. Or keep a tape recorder by your bed to record your dream in the middle of the night.

• Set two alarms – one for the time you must get out of bed and another at about 20 minutes before. When your first alarm goes off, lay in your dreaming position (the position you usually dream in). Banish any thoughts about the day. Think of the first alarm as waking you up to your dreams and the second alarm as waking you up to your day.

– from The Dream Handbook by Jane Teresa Anderson

The Dream Handbook, The Ultimate Guide to Interpreting Your Dreams by Jane Teresa Anderson (Hachette Australia, $20)