Emily Parker interviews Liz Evans about Love Has A Voice and how you can learn about your life from your dreams.

Liz Evans

Emily: So, first of all, Liz, tell me about yourself and how you came to found Love Has A Voice.

Liz: Right, when we realised that a lot of people are wondering what's going on with their own lives and how they can make those lives better, we had a passion to help people do that in certain ways. One of the ways we realised that people can get a lot of information about their lives, and how they live them in a more fruitful way, is by listening to their dreams.

Emily: How did you begin to find out more about dreams in the first place?

Liz: Well, in fact, I didn't really enjoy my dreams very much; I had a lot of nightmares. So for me it wasn't an area that I thought would be something I wanted to pay attention to, until I met some friends who had been studying it. They were talking about the effect it had on people's lives. I think that started me off on a journey, and the first thing I learned was how to stop nightmares, which was really good, especially if you're dealing with people who have been through a tough time or children who are going through a lot of nightmares. Once we stopped those I began to notice that I was more interested and more peaceful about my dreams. I began to look at what they meant and what my heart was saying through them.

Emily: So, from your own experience, since you started to spend time looking into and interpreting those dreams, what impact has that had on your life?

Liz: Oh, it impacts everything. It impacts how you do your work, how you deal with your emotions. It impacts the decisions you make. Obviously, you need to make sure that you know what you're doing, because otherwise you could misunderstand it. But when you begin to get an idea of the language of dreams and visions and how they work, it really is just like opening a manual to your life.

Emily: Some people feel a bit sceptical about the idea of listening to dreams, in particular when it comes to interpreting them, what are your thoughts on this?

Liz: I think science has proven that what we do when we're asleep, is we process our lives; our subconscious is processing what we've been through in the day. As we do that, what happens is that our own soul provides certain answers and different perspectives on what we're doing. But one thing we've noticed is that sometimes there are messages coming out in dreams that you couldn't possibly have known - something that's going to happen in three days time, or just a more optimistic perspective about something you were perhaps worried about. And that's very interesting, because either way the dream is talking about something; it's talking to someone and it has a message. Those messages are very symbolic; they're in stories. Those stories can seem very bizarre until you start to realise that they have a language and a symbolism. When you begin to spot that, these stories have a tale to tell, a little bit like Aesop's Fables, they have a story and they have a meaning that speaks into somebody's life, it really begins to make a lot of sense.

Emily: Let's talk for a moment about the biblical perspective when it comes to dreams and visions. In the book you mention people, like Joseph for example, who had their own dreams and visions which they interpreted. Why do you think that dreams and visions are important biblically?

Liz: The biblical perspective is very much that as well as our souls processing our lives, there is this other level of something happening in the dream, where a compassionate God would reach down and say, I think we need a little bit of information about that, or perhaps you need a hand with this, and if you thought about it this way, this could happen; like any loving father. The biblical worldview would be of God as a loving father, just reaching down to help those people in the situations they found themselves in, some of which were really difficult.

Emily: How did you begin to look at dreams that you had experienced? You mentioned symbolism and representations of what can come up in dreams, what were the first steps for you?

Liz: For me, I began to realise that they are like a letter. They contain a message and in order to understand the message you have to understand the world of metaphor and symbols. There are some simple questions that you can ask: who is the dream about? You can tell if the dream is about your life because you are the star of the show. You can tell if it's about something you're involved in because you're a small part of the story. Or you can tell if you're having a dream about somebody or something else because you would be observing it like a DVD; you're not actually in it, you're looking at it. So, immediately you begin to ask who this is about and then you would ask where is this from? Is this my own soul talking, or is there another perspective that actually doesn't reflect my feelings, it brings an answer to my feelings. That is when you begin to look at what is the source of the dream and that's where your own personal worldview will come in with interpretation. If you do believe in a 'higher power' then it's very easy to look at that as a higher power is speaking to help me. If you didn't believe in a higher power you would probably think your subconscious was providing an answer. From our perspective we sometimes see each of those happening.

Emily: You've written this book and it is incredibly practical. You set it out with lots of different exercises and ways to gradually build up an understanding of what the different symbolisms mean. Why did you decide to write the book in the way that you have?

Liz: I wrote it the way I learned. A lot of people gave me a lot of theory and a lot of interesting stories, and convinced me that this is a valuable help for us in our lives, but they couldn't really teach me how to do it. So what I asked them for was a number of real dreams and proven meanings, because of the life context. I asked for their answers as well as their dreams. And as I looked at the dreams and began to investigate why does this mean that, how do they know that says that, and I began to see patterns of how the dreams work. When you begin to understand the patterns, you can begin to apply them to different dreams and visions.

Emily: Some people don't have dreams. Is there a reason for that?

Liz: Some people just sleep incredibly deeply. They might be taking some form of aid to sleep, or anti-depressants, and some drugs do affect dreams, and some drugs make people dream in black and white. Some drugs do give people very vivid dreams, which can be quite disturbing. So all of those things affect our dreams. If we are doing a two-day interpretation event, we often do find people will come and say I never dream. We say if you go home and see what happens tonight and come back tomorrow, we do notice that they come back and they are aware of their dreams, and they did have one.

Emily: So, if anybody wants to find out more about this and use the guide you have put together, to understand this more, how can they do that and also find out about the courses that you do?

Liz: We have a website called lovehasavoice.org and our courses are on there. They are always a really fun day, but we make sure that they are very practical; we have mentors on each table. I think that people learn best when they're laughing, so we have a lot of fun. We work with each individual person, starting wherever you are on your journey.