Do dreams have meaning?

[rumdude]

I've begun to keep a dream journal. So I'm curious about others' opinions on this subject.

[Separation]

1. I've always felt

That sometimes they, and then sometimes they don't. I know that a pretty piss pore explanation but hear me out. Sometimes when you dream of being chased, or falling. Those could be real life feeling being brought out in dreams. Same with your teeth or hair falling out.

Then sometime dreams can just be really weird, funny mishmash that really don't mean anything.

Unfortunately, I take medication that blocks my dreams due to PTSD. So unless they are really bad, I just don't remember them.

[underahedgerow]

2. Not really, but sort of. They're manifestations of your subconscious thoughts, or bits of

memories reinterpreted by the neurons.

They usually representative of frustration, anxiety, sometimes joy, perhaps an attraction or an incident that bothered you, etc. It's usually very basic... struggling to breath means feeling oppressed. Losing teeth could be a fear of losing something important, usually emotionally, etc.

I continue to be amazed at how a dream that seems to have taken hours and hours, can literally have taken place in my little head in the space of a few seconds.

A dream journal is interesting. So many times I'll come up with absolutely incredible story lines, and can't be bothered to write them down in the moment, and poof, they're gone.

And other times I'll wake to find I've scheduled some very weird tasks on my phone calendar that make NO SENSE. EVER. lol those are my favorites!

[spiderpig]

3. This subject fascinates me.

I don't dream about boogeymen and monsters, but about complete frustration at work.

I've been retired for five years!

But after 40 years in the travel industry, I'll find myself dreaming over and over about not getting to the airport in time, or not being able to issue a ticket, or not finding a gate when I needed to meet a flight, or not meeting uniforms standards because my shoes aren't the right color.

I dream this stuff all the time.

[GreydeeThos]

4. Dreams are the mind cleaning up the brain's memory

A poor but understandable analogy would be a desktop computer running a hard disk defragmentation program.

Each day our brains fill the short term memory with the day's happenings. Each event is 'stored' in different places in the brain depending on if it is short term, long term, or absolutely must never be forgotten events. When the mind is asleep, it sorts these memories and purges the unnecessary ones and moves the 'keepers' to their proper location.

When the sorting process is happening, it is like the event is being replayed, but only specific portions are registered on the mind. That is why the sleeping person can be in impossible situations like walking on tree tops or visiting with people who are now dead. Since it is just a 'replay' the person cannot control or participate in the dream.

If you look closely at what you remember from a dream, it will almost always be related to some event in the recent past.

Remember that everything in the dream is an image. If a number or a word is present, it is not really a number, it is just an image that contains a number. Don't think a number in a dream is the next winning lottery sequence.

[rumdude]

7. What would you say about a dream that occurs at a certain stressful moment of your life

where a lot is on the line.

And the dream is full of symbolic meaning, almost jarringly so.

[Orrex]

5. Only that one in which I realize that I'm not wearing pants at work

The other ones? Nope, no meaning.

[True Dough]

6. There are some great explanations above

Let me add to the emotional side of things. My mom, who I will be grateful to so long as I live, died almost three years ago. I dreamed about her at least once a week for the first year after her death. Always pleasant dreams. I woke up feeling reassured or content. Then those dreams tapered off. A co-worker recently lost her mom to a fatal infection and when my co-worker returned to work, we talked about how traumatic it is to watch your mom die. Sure enough, that night I dreamed about my mother again and have again after that, very similar type dreams to that first year without her. That area of my brain and memory was clearly responding to my delving into the past while chatting with my co-worker.

Now, on the random side of the ledger (at least random as far as I can figure out), I have dreamed about witnessing plane crashes several times in my life -- big jet airliners going down. Rarely is there an explosion or fireball, but I usually point out to someone else in my dream that a jet is about to hit the ground. I haven't been able to tie that to various life events, and I don't have a fear of flying. That recurring dream boggles my mind.

[rumdude]

8. Sorry to hear about your mother

Yes, those dreams are no doubt linked to her. I've had dreams of family members, alive and deceased. I recently had a dream about my paternal grandparents; I wrote it down.

The airplane crashing type dreams, I have those too, where they can't be linked directly to anything in your life. I've had a few that seem to have had great symbolic meaning, sometimes only in retrospect.

[Iggo]

9. Dreams? No. The reasons you have certain kinds of dreams at certain times? I don't know. Maybe?

But as far as I can tell, dreams are just incomplete narratives based on random combinations of memory snippets. Every now and then one gets lucky and delivers what appears to be a semi-coherent story. That's it.

Other people have different views on this subject. Obviously.

[mnhtnbb]

10. My husband is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Do dreams have meaning? Absolutely

and especially to someone with training/experience to interpret them.

[Yavin4]

11. Sometimes, these dreams go on when I close my eyes

Every second of the night, I live another life.

[Wounded Bear]

12. Some of mine have, over the years...

Mostly, I don't remember my dreams. I assume I have them more often than I remember. The few that I remember upon waking have actually stuck with me, and IMHO show me something about how I view the world and relate to it.

I won't share the details, but yeah, I have to say that some of my dreams have had meaning.

[CJohnson_LS]

13. I think it depends on the day

Sometimes my dreams consist of random nonsense without any real substance or meaning. On other days, my dreams serve as a preview of the direction I should take to improve my life. Or not.

[Tobin S.]

14. Read Carl Jung's "Man and His Symbols."

He would say that most people underestimate the significance of dreams.

[Ilsa]

15. Dreams may contain symbolism. I've had dreams that included puns or

Homonyms. I was young and dating someone with a different ethnicity. I was worried about how my family would feel. I had a dream where I gave birth to a baby that he fathered, and it was a deer. It was my deer (dear) baby, my deer child. I realized at that moment when I said the word deer/dear, that I was worrying about nothing.

[mythology]

16. I certainly hope not

Most of mine are bad. I had one last night that I ended up in bed with a woman I particularly dislike. It was very awkward doing everything I could to get as far away from her in bed as possible. I'd really hate to find out that I on some level subconsciously wanted her. I mean yes, she's physically attractive, but she also thought in spite of 5 knee surgeries that I'm faking my knee pain.

[JonLP24]

17. I hope not

I keep having strange, recurring nightmares which wake me up every half hour in the mornings. If they mean anything it can't be anything good.