When I was a teenager,
I bought my first books on lucid dreaming and the meanings of dreams.
I was fascinated by dreams and desperately sought knowledge on the meaning of my recurring dreams.
I kept a dream journal and regularly analyzed my dreams.
As I considered college,
I realized that to study dreams at the academic level,
I had to go into a science field,
Perhaps sleep medicine,
Which didn't resonate with me.
I was drawn to literature and poetry because of its rich metaphoric world.
People often misconstrued my interest and intent by thinking I must want to teach English or I must love grammar,
Punctuation,
And sentence structure.
That couldn't be further from the truth.
What I loved about it was analysis.
I loved reading a story and interpreting its meaning,
Analyzing how the symbols,
Characters,
And storylines were a parable for life.
That is what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing.
As often happens,
The world had different ideas for me.
I ended up discovering the internet at its very beginnings and taught myself programming language while I was still in college.
Before long,
It was my career.
Days turned into decades,
All the while,
Each day,
Analyzing code.
I enjoyed this work and found it stimulating enough,
Especially when I did this work for organizations whose missions resonated with me.
That made me feel like my analysis was making a difference,
But it wasn't enough.
Each night I would dream,
But I had stopped analyzing them long ago,
Relegating that task to scientists or psychologists who were stamped by society as authorized to do so.
I felt dream work was not culturally condoned for anyone else and left it in the past.
Then I became very,
Very sick.
I had let my life get so far away from my own calling and internalized so much that I developed multiple chronic illnesses.
I didn't even know how sick I was for many years,
But I was just going through the paces of life.
When my healing journey began,
So did my spiritual journey back to my roots.
I remembered that my dreams had been trying to help me all this time.
They were my inner guidance I had stopped listening to.
I began to listen.
One day I woke up early and without even considering my usual extensive rumination,
Decided unequivocally that I was going to do dream interpretation.
I felt emphatically that it was my calling all along I had denied.
I wasted so much time worrying about societal pressures or internal conceptions about what I felt I had to be or couldn't be that I didn't see the reality of what I already was,
A dream analyst.
I then discovered that I had missed decades of research that promoted the practice of interpretation,
Lauding its benefits to society at large,
And strongly encouraging those who were not psychoanalysts or scientists by trade to engage in this practice and teach others.
I knew it was time.
It was then that I started my journey that has brought me here today.
I am passionate about helping other women on their journey to self-discovery by analyzing the inner guidance in their dreams.
If I can help even one woman understand her dreams,
I will have made a remarkable and meaningful difference.
