How important are dreams?

How To Interpret Your dreams - Based on Edgar Cayce Readings
by Mark A. Thurston, Ph.D

This book is a roadmap to greater self-knowledge through dream interpretation. Dr. Mark Thurston has combined insights from the hundreds of Edgar Cayce readings on dreams with his own background in dream interpretation to give us a clearly written, easy to understand spiritual handbook. The author explains:

• How to find and use the most important ideas presented in your dream.
• The part feelings play in overall dream interpretation.
• How to work with and break down the symbols in dreams.
• The keys to knowing if your dream is telepathic.
• How to get specific answers to problems.

Properly used this book can be a window inward to enrich your life through dream interpretation.

The Fabric of Dreams - Dream Lore and Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern
by Katherine Taylor Craig

This volume is written for the perusal of the unprejudiced. It is an appeal to those who neither affirm the infallibility of dreams nor yet deny their significance as symbols, also to those persons who have given the subject no thought whatsoever, but who are never the less willing to listen impartially to the arguments of the old-fashioned dream interpreters and to the hypotheses of modem psycho-analysts. At first glance a vast distance seems to stretch between the desert of sterile scientific facts and the teeming jungle of riotous dreams, yet between these extremes winds many a temperate, pleasant path which the normal mind may follow if it will. The writer does not advocate any especial theory over another; the purpose is merely to untangle the truth, if truth there be. At times this quest has led to the oracular springs of old Egypt, or to the temples of Greece, or through the sickly vaporings of medievalism and again through the bleak materialism of modem physiology, for each cult that has withstood the blight of time must perforce have held its strength, and that strength must have been born of truth, otherwise the teachings would have been forgotten. The writer has merely gathered the facts the reader is left to judge them.

Dreams - What They Are and How They are Caused
by C.W. Leadbeater

1903. The Mechanism-Physical, Etheric, and Astral; The Ego; The Condition of Sleep; Dream Visions; Symbolic, Prophetic, True, Vivid, and Confused Dreams; Experiments.

Excerpt from book:

Sleepers may be observed at all stages, from this condition of all but blank oblivion, up to full and perfect consciousness on the astral plane, though this latter is naturally comparatively rare. Even a man who is sufficiently awake to meet not infrequently with important experiences in this higher life, may yet be (and often is) unable so far to dominate his brain as to check its current of inconsequent thought-pictures and impress upon it instead what he wishes it to recollect; and thus when his physical body awakes he may have only the most confused memory, or no memory at all, of what has really happened to him. And this is a pity, for he may meet with much that is of the greatest interest and importance to him.
Not only may he visit distant scenes of surpassing beauty, but he may meet and exchange ideas with friends, either living or departed, who happen to be equally awake on the astral plane. He may be fortunate enough to encounter those who know far more than he does, and may receive warning or instruction from them, he may, on the other hand, be privileged to help and comfort some who know less than himself. He may come into contact with non-human entities of various kinds — with nature-spirits, artificial elementals, or even, though very rarely, with Devas; he will be subject to all kinds of influences, good or evil, strengthening or terrifying.

But whether he remembers anything when physically awake or not, the ego who is fully or even partially conscious of his surroundings on the astral plane is beginning to enter into his heritage of powers which far transcend those he possesses down here; for his consciousness when thus liberated from the physical body has very remarkable possibilities. His measure of time and space is so entirely different from that which we use in waking life, that from our view it seems as though neither time nor space existed for him.