A hawk means robbers, says Artemidorus in his ancient dream dictionary. Does it?

Dreams are like gifts on offer every night in wrapping which often remains unopened. Many of us are fascinated, curious, sometimes frightened by them. We want to know: can we find out what our dreams mean?

We can turn to dream dictionaries for on-the-spot translations of dream symbols; consult the advice of magazine and TV pundits; seek out the pronouncements of gurus; go to a psychotherapist; or read Freud, Jung, and other dream theorists for moulds of meaning into which our dreams can fit.

Any of these may be useful, but we also need to remember that our dreams are our own. There is a danger that by defering to outside authorities we may be robbed of our own insights into these nightly 'gifts' which can throw light on every aspect of our lives - relationships with friends, lovers and family; sex; work; politics; life skills; illness; decisions; how we feel about the dead; and what we see as the purpose of life.

I have worked with my own dreams for over twenty years, run dream workshops for sixteen years, and taken part in a self-help dream group for nine years. This experience has convinced me that dreams are too rich and idiosyncratic to be decoded by set 'dictionary' translations, too diverse and complex to wholly comply with any of the general theories which have been put forward. A hawk or wolf means robbers, says Artemidorus. A dream is a distorted message from the unconscious, says Freud. Dreams are shaped by eternal archetypes, says Jung. Leave dreams in the underworld, says the post-Jungian James Hiliman. Everything in the dream is you, says Fritz Pens. Such theories try to account for all dreams, and would like to appropriate the dream experience of all cultures, all sexes, all races. Practitioners working with dreams are often drawn into 'brand loyalties' and favour one theory, one master or one institution.

This is rash. The study of the human bodymind is in its very early stages. Like beginners in any field, we do not fully understand its processes and I believe that no single theory or therapeutic approach can claim to have a definitive answer.

It can be particularly difficult for women that most of these theories have been created by male 'experts'. Freud states that our dreams carry repressed desires, for example for a penis. Jung, that the female 'archetypes' shaping women's dreams are intuitive, 'negative', earthy, receptive. Such arguments suggest that all women are the same and do not portray us very positively. To be given a key to understanding ourselves can be reassuring. But we pay a price for believing that others know more about our experience than we do.

This book approaches dreams from a woman's perspective. Since men's and women's experiences are different - biologically, psychologically, and socially - I would argue that male theorists cannot do justice to women's dreams. The dreams raise issues which they perhaps cannot hope to understand, such as the experience of child-bearing and child-rearing; women's relationships with our mothers; friendships and sexual love between women; envy; and feelings about the shape, size and appearance of our bodies in a misogynist society. Some dreams are concerned with problems which men - however well-intentioned - cannot by their nature hope to solve, since women's solutions may be at odds with prevailing male norms. Women's needs may differ from those of men - in work, in relationships, in spiritual matters. They alone can embark on the process of defining what it means to be female: not the search for a pre - existent female 'essence', but the opening up of possibilities previously denied. Given the differences in power and the conflicts of interest between women and men, some topics are perhaps too threatening for men to acknowledge, such as the contradictory feelings - ranging from delight to anger and terror - arising from our relationships with men. It is hard to imagine how any male practitioner, however sensitive and impartial, could really pick up the signals or resonate with these issues in women's accounts of their dreams.

My aim in this book is not to substitute my own theory for those others. Partial theories, in themselves useful and applicable to many dreams, have too often been presented as all-encompassing. My contribution is to question the notion that day and night are totally separate rather than a continuum. When sleep and wakefulness are polarised, as is 'normal' in our culture, all sleep experience is lumped together, and one uniform explanation is sought for it. This blinkers us from seeing our experience clearly, and the full scope and variety of dreams goes unappreciated.

Writing this book has impressed on me that thought and imagination cover the same range of activities by night as by day, albeit there is a difference in form. Women describe some dreams as physical in origin, some as emotional, some spiritual or even divine; and our dreams' perceptions range from the ridiculous to the sublime just as in waking life. As by day, it seems that by night our imagination explores possibilities; indulges in silly fantasies; becomes preoccupied by fears and anxieties; pictures its wishes fulfilled; gets hooked into paranoias; re-runs and digests events that have happened; makes plans; solves practical questions; has insights about human relationships; tackles intellectual problems; tunes in to the experience of other people; has intuitions and occasional flashes of great wisdom; experiences deeply impressive visions; communes with the world around us; and witnesses revelations about the nature of li& and death. Each dream needs to be approached differently: some interpreted, some ignored, some meditated upon, some acted out, some applied to daily life, some left to soak in whatever world created them. Each approach is useful at different times.

This remarkable diversity shines out from the dream accounts which are the backbone of this book. They were all written by women and sent in response to an open letter I circulated. The book is not a survey, but the women who have contributed are of different ages, races and sexual orientations. Their homelands range from the Middle East to the Caribbean, from Europe to the USA, as well as Australia. Some women have asked for their dreams to be anonymous, and in some cases I have changed names and details to preserve that anonymity. I hope readers are as inspired as I have been by the variety of resourceful and creative approaches these women use to reap the gifts of their dreams.

Some readers may not have the same access to their dreams as these contributors, and this book also includes many practical suggestions about how to remember dreams and work with them to discover their meaning. It provides tools, shows possibilities, and encourages you on your own explorations, individually or with friends.

I do not offer a system, but try to show the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, and suggest a framework within which the various theories can co-exist rather than conflict. While existing theories have tended to compartmentalise, emphasising the emotional, the intellectual, the physical or the spiritual, this book suggests that all of these have a place within the broad canvas of a whole person and a whole life, and a dream may be concerned with all or any of them. My aim is to ask questions, challenge assumptions, and present material from women's lives so as to create a space in which women's dreams can breathe. The consistent thread is the spirit of enquiry, and the reaching beyond received theories and fundamentalisms to trust our own experience.