The Gravity Scale: A Dream Interpretation Tool
In my old dream journals there’s a little number circled in the top corner of each entry. It doesn’t have anything to do with pagination or the time I recorded the dream, instead, it serves a much greater purpose: defining the soul factor of my dreams. I call it the gravity scale.
A solid dream practice is built upon a foundation of dream journaling but when reviewing dreams for interpretation it can be difficult to catch the differences between psychological content and the deep, spiritual messages trying to surface. This is where the gravity scale comes in handy.
In this article we’ll talk about what, exactly, the gravity scale is, how to identify the gravity of a dream, and how a gravity scale can better your dream practice over time—a wealth of self-knowledge, personal dream trends, and unique identifiers can be uncovered with the simple use of the gravity scale.
What is the Gravity Scale?
In my experience as a frequent, vivid dreamer and dream interpreter, I’ve learned that most of our dreams are blandly psychological in nature which serves several evolutionary purposes. But there are many other types of dreams to be had: transformational psychological dreams, prophetic and precognitive dreams, visitation dreams, spiritual messaging dreams, and even dreamtime phenomena such as out-of-body experiences. Each dream type has its own unique feeling and learning how to differentiate them from your run-of-the-mill psychological dreams can help you more accurately and efficiently interpret their meaning, which is where the gravity scale comes in.
The gravity scale measures the “weight and intention of significance,” or gravity, of any given dream. It is a single number from 1-10 (1 being the lowest and 10 the highest) that you add to your dream journal entry after determining the dream’s weight and intention of significance. This number not only helps you identify high-impact dreams, but can show you personal dream trends, common pieces of imagery that frequent particular types of dreams, and other information.
In the past, I recorded my dreams in physical journals and wrote my gravity scale numbers at the beginning of each entry. Today, I have moved on to typing entries into an app on my phone and then editing the entry at the end with an identified gravity scale number. Any approach works well. (As a side note, I’ve found an electronic dream journal exceptionally useful for the “search” feature, enabling me to search a massive amount of entries for key phrases over time.)
How to Identify the Gravity of a Dream
Your gravity scale is completely unique to you. It’s shaped by your personal dream language which is built from the distinct combination of life experience, beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and concept exposure that you alone have accumulated throughout your life. What is true for you may not be true for another but there are some general identifiers that most people can agree on.
The gravity of a dream may be determined by:
How you wake. If you wake startled or energized (as opposed to a routine calm) you may assume that there is additional gravity to the dream.
Your personal feeling of spiritual connection or weight. Some individuals may wake from a dream and feel, without a doubt, that it was spiritually significant.
It contains people or beings of significance such as passed loved ones, religious figures, non-human beings, etc.
The imagery of a physical location in the dream reflects a place of personal significance in the waking world or in your history.
It contains an object, phrase, or other unique piece of personal significance.
You have the sense of knowing that the dream has a greater gravity.
Anything of great personal significance communicated through imagery, language, or sense of knowing.
Any of the points listed above in combination with another may increase the feeling of gravity.
As an example, a dream in which I’m searching for a bathroom would typically have a gravity of 1-2 for me whereas a dream in which my deceased grandma sits me down for a detailed chat about existence would most likely ring between an 8-10 on my gravity scale.
If I woke with a start from a dream about an overwhelming project at work I might mark it as a 4-5 on my gravity scale. And a dream about extraterrestrials would be an automatic 10 for me (though in your personal dream language you might count that much lower if you view it as a psychological or nonsense dream). However you determine the weight and intention of significance in a dream is unique to you and your gravity scale.
At the end of the day this is all information from you, about you, and for you! The more you utilize the gravity scale, the more you can learn about yourself and what recurring or consistent themes hold significance not only in the dream space but in your waking life as well.
Using the Gravity Scale Over Time
Beyond easily identifying dreams of psychological, spiritual, and personal significance for a more in-depth analysis, the gravity scale has a myriad of other uses.
In my personal experience, the gravity scale has been most useful in identifying prophetic or precognitive dreams. In these dreams I almost always have a deep sense-of-knowing that I’m exploring a potential future timeline which is paired with the thought or imagery of an individual I know in my waking life. Over time, many of these dreams came to fruition and I was able to easily search my 8-10 gravity dreams to review them. I also learned that no matter how insignificant the content of the dream seemed, the feeling of gravity paired with the imagery or thought of someone I knew in waking life, is a key indicator of a prophetic dream for me. Today, I don’t judge my prophetic dreams on their content but rather the experience with my personal gravity scale identifiers.
As an example, I had a dream a couple of years ago that took place in my good friend’s house. In the dream, I was on the second level in a bedroom and saw a giant hole in the floor. My friend had tried to cover it up as if to hide it from me but I couldn’t ignore the gaping hole. There were mice droppings everywhere on the floor as well and when I confronted my friend about fixing the hole in the dream she said it was useless to patch it up because the mice would just keep coming back. A deep sense of knowing that this was significant rang through the dream.
I woke with a start and immediately identified the dream as prophetic through consistent use of my gravity scale which identified my two markers for a prophetic dream: sense-of-knowing and the imagery of my friend.
When I saw her a few days later I shared my dream and she immediately started laughing in acknowledgement! They had just found out that they were pregnant again and weren’t sure how they would make it financially—she felt like their foundation (the floor) was falling out from underneath them. The rest of the imagery clicked for me and I explained that the imagery of mice in dreams can represent pregnancy or gestation based on their prolific reproductive rate. I had a mouse problem in the past where they were constantly reproducing which made it near impossible to get rid of them. The dream was using my own experience with mice to communicate the concept of pregnancy in relation to my friend’s situation!
By using a gravity scale, you can begin to amass a list of your own personal tells, signs, symbols, and feelings to better help you identify psycho-spiritual messages relevant to your life. The more you try out and work with the gravity scale the more you may:
Identify specific imagery pointing to messages from passed loved ones, deities, or spirit guides
Understand more about yourself through the study of recurring pieces of imagery.
Notice trends in dream content after certain days of the week or month, in relation to specific situations in your waking life, and even following interactions with particular individuals.
Identify particular pieces of imagery asking you to dive deeper into psychological exploration (personally I sit down to meditate on what’s going on with my emotions whenever I dream about water).
Better organize your digital dream journal or easily find and review past significant dreams by quickly thumbing through your physical journal and focusing on the numbers at the top of each entry.
The Weight of a Dream
The gravity scale is, at its heart, a practice of self-exploration. The more consistently you engage with it, the more fluent you become in your unique dream language. Over time, what begins as a single number scrawled in the corner of your journal entries becomes a map, detailing the emotional and spiritual terrain of your inner mind.
Whether you're just beginning your dream journaling practice or you've been recording dreams for years, it's never too late to start assigning gravity. Your dreams have always been trying to tell you something. The gravity scale simply helps you listen more carefully.
