Interpreting Dreams

[lenguy]

Dreams​

Before I begin to divulge into this subject. I want to make this clear that I'm not talking about dreams as in goals or achieving something that you longed for. But rather this is about dreams as in the kind you experience while you sleep. So, with that out of the way I will begin. Be prepared though, this will more or less be a long one. Lets get started then.

Before I get into the realm of the actual dream, I quickly want to run through the types of sleep in order to get the topic started.

There are two types of sleep. REM sleep and non-REM Sleep. Non-REM( Rapid Eye movement) sleep is where the person is in the deepest of sleep and its also the time of sleep where the body is at the lowest levels of functioning. REM sleep is the state of sleep which the eyes are moving rapidly under the eyelids and the brain activity is almost the same as it would be if you were awake and this is the state of sleep when the most vivid,longer and detailed dreaming actually occurs. Just a bit of information to bite into.

Dreams have been the topic of curiosity for people for thousands of years. Peoples of ancient civilizations saw them as messages, prophecies or as some sort of communication from god.

Sigmund Freud was a psychologist(1856-1939) and he published a book called The interpretation of Dreams. He believed that dreams stemmed from conflicts are events that had been buried deep within the unconscious mind since childhood. He believed that these events would reflect and be represented in dreams as symbolic forms. Now to throw some terminology at you.

Manifest Content: The manifest content is the actual dream itself.
Chad had a dream. He had a dream in which he is trying to climb out of a bathtub. The manifest content of the dream would be that Chad is trying to climb out of the bathtub.

Latent Content: The true hidden or latent meaning of the dream which would be expressed in some kind of symbolic nature. The tub in Chads dream might symbolize the waters of birth, the tub itself is his mothers womb. In Freudian terms, Chad may be dreaming about being born.

There are professionals who aren't as fond as Freud's dream analysts today as they once were. In the Activation-Synthesis Theory all a dream is really(to sum up all the hard terminology) just another kind of thinking that occurs when people sleep. The dreams are less realistic because they come from the outside world, they come from peoples memories and experiences throughout life.

Then there is the AIM(Activation-Information Mode). Which describes the dreams as a result of the brain trying to explain its own activation by "making up" a dream from the influences of the waking hours. The brain uses bits and pieces of the persons experience from the previous day or from the past few days to form a dream relating to these experiences.

As it stands right now, psychologists have a difficult time trying to understand dreams or even why we dream at all. There is still a lot of research that needs to be done in order to fully understand this phenomenon. I believe that dreaming is really just another form of thinking, its the brain acting in a random fashion and putting things together in a random order to manifest a dream. We are not conscious of this and therefore we are not even aware of this. W tend to have no effect or influence on what we dream about. Have you ever went to bed, started to dream about something while your trying to fall asleep. Then once you actually fall asleep your dream is virtually non-related to the previous incarnation of what you were just dreaming about? Its just a random mess.

So if you actually took the time to read all this what do you think?Do you think dreams have so sort of deep meaning? Are they symbolic and relative to some past experience? Or just a complete random occurrence made possible by the brain.

I hand the floor over to you for interpretation.

 

[Zigglerfan227]

It is difficult to interpret dreams, but one thing is for sure, dreams are amazing. I seem to feel that most dreams of mine are a mix of of all things that happened to me or what I had been thinking about during the day, all mixed together into one "story". Does that make sense? In other words, most of my dreams are alot of my thoughts from the day all blended together to create a crazy story. Sometimes I have scary dreams, sometimes I have funny dreams, sometimes I have dumb dreams, and sometimes I have sexual dreams (or wet dreams to just be honest). My only problem with dreams is that I do not always remember everything that happened in them. I wish that we could record them and watch them again.

So I don't know the meaning of everyone's or even my dreams, but most of mine are a mix of alot of thoughts or events from the day. I sometimes get the feeling that my dreams have a deep meaning but I cannot figure out the meaning.

 

[gd]

Yes, I firmly believe in the importance of dreams. For instance, the other night I dreamt that I was riding on a cloud, a green cloud at that. Obviously this symbolized envy. But envy of what? As I continued on my cloud' I saw there was another group of people on a bunch of purple clouds, purple for comfort.

I was envious of the comfort these people felt as they sat on the cloud and fed each other grapes and other various fruits. I began sobbing, angry I wasn't loved (by my parents as a child???) and began to fall rapidly, towards the ground. Falling and falling and falling for hours.

Finalls I landed ever so gently on the grounds of a graveyard, obviously symbolizing my comfort and acceptance of the inevibility that is death that befalls us all. Finally gaining my comfort, I walked to the nearest apartment building, which happened to be my own, and proceeded to watch Season 3 of The Wire. Then I woke up.

So, yeah, I believe dreams are incredibly meaningful in each and every way.

 

[Hollywood Naitch]

It is difficult to interpret dreams, but one thing is for sure, dreams are amazing. I seem to feel that most dreams of mine are a mix of of all things that happened to me or what I had been thinking about during the day, all mixed together into one "story". Does that make sense? In other words, most of my dreams are alot of my thoughts from the day all blended together to create a crazy story. Sometimes I have scary dreams, sometimes I have funny dreams, sometimes I have dumb dreams, and sometimes I have sexual dreams (or wet dreams to just be honest). My only problem with dreams is that I do not always remember everything that happened in them. I wish that we could record them and watch them again.

So I don't know the meaning of everyone's or even my dreams, but most of mine are a mix of alot of thoughts or events from the day. I sometimes get the feeling that my dreams have a deep meaning but I cannot figure out the meaning.

I think that this is exactly right. I am the same (except I don't have wet dreams, not even over Tara lmao). I do sometimes remember snippets of them, which tend to be linked to things I have seen, heard or talked about during the day, all blended together into some crwzy-ass mismatch of weirdness.

I would love to go back and watch my dream and see what the hell I was thinking about. Hopefully one day we will be able to do this. Personally, I do not believe my dreams have deep meanings but I could be wrong, I would love to know

 

[DeadAssState]

For Freud, dreams consisted of a manifest content as stated in the OP, what the manifest content consisted of freud proposed to be either images, words, voices or people that had been relevant to you recently. For example, if you dreamt of a particular person, or of, say, an apple, it is because the person or apple was a common factor of multiple different thoughts you had, or experiences you had recently.

As the OP said, the manifest content is linked to a latent content in the unconscious, the manifest images mean something significant to you unconsciously. obviously this is where the interpretation comes in as depending on the experiences prompting your dream you can uncover unconscious thoughts and feelings that we otherwise are unaware of. Of course for freud this usually linked to sexuality and namely penises for no apparent or intelligible reason, often Freud's analyses were difficult to understand if not completely ludicrous. Most psychoanalysts these days would laugh at the idea of freudian analysis being useful, preferring instead to use other methods.

However, with that said, Freud's work is useful for seeing how dreams are symptoms of an unconscious. The idea that we are not in total control of our actions can be unsettling, that there are always unknown motives for anything and everything we do or think linked to basic drives an impulses in a fragmentary mental structure can be quite uncomfortable. Dreams can be seen as one way of trying to establish or understand what these unconscious and deeply hidden desires are as they are one of the few ways our unconscious is manifested.

So in answer to the OP, yes dreams can show some deep meanings or be relative to a deep set psychological state, but trying to look for a literal meaning behind the images we see in dreams is next to useless. What we dream about can reflect something completely and utterly unrelated to what actually happens in the dream, but can be equally likely to not link to any deep set meaning, and simply be an unconscious reflection of our waking lives or the translation of waking experience into unconscious reflection.

 

[Zigglerfan227]

I think that this is exactly right. I am the same (except I don't have wet dreams, not even over Tara lmao). I do sometimes remember snippets of them, which tend to be linked to things I have seen, heard or talked about during the day, all blended together into some crwzy-ass mismatch of weirdness.

I would love to go back and watch my dream and see what the hell I was thinking about. Hopefully one day we will be able to do this. Personally, I do not believe my dreams have deep meanings but I could be wrong, I would love to know

haha! Yeah Perhaps if we could go back and watch our dreams we could study them and try to find out what they mean if they even have a meaning. And like you I remember snippets of my dreams; only rarely do I remember an entire dream.

 

[Dagger Dias]

Dreams are very interesting. I think that they have a deeper meaning, but not all the time. Dreaming is like thinking or even day-dreaming, except you are asleep. They are reflections of whatever is on your mind. For example you might see something in a dream similar to something you saw in a movie or video game that day. Dreams can also be a way for a higher being to communicate with you. (Depends on your religious beliefs on that last one.) It's a lot of fun to wake up from a strange dream and sit down to interpret what it meant or where some of the weirder parts came from. Nearly all dreams can be traced back to something you have thought about or experienced before. Others that remain could potentially be signs of the future, or just plain unexplainable. I think it will be a while before we fully understand dreams. In the end though, dreams are just your brain creating thought patterns as you sleep because even though you aren't conscious your body is still at work, including your thought processes.

 

[Mighty NorCal]

What I know about this is


I see a lot of the future in ones that arent fucking horrible. Not important things, but things that occur to the side when important things are taking place. Oddly, a lot of experiences I have with women always feel like situations I have seen before. In dreams.

second, I wish I didnt fucking have them. As the future is professed, also, much of the past haunts. Nothing like a good ol PTSD dream to entirely fuck a night of sleep. Happens with less frequency than it used to, but still quite often enough.

Dreams suck. Fuck them, I wish I didnt have them.

 

[Ultra Awesome]

I've always believed that dreams symbolize one of four things:

1) Things that you want to happen.

2) Things that you don't want to happen.

3) Reflections on current situations in life.

4) Memories.

Based on the dreams that I can remember and things that I've heard from the people around me, these four reasons I stated above seem to be the common pattern. Of course, some dreams may be beyond crazy and beyond the realm of believability; but regardless of how out of the ordinary they may be, I do believe that dreams have a deep meaning. Or rather, a message in them that your subconscious mind is trying to tell you. But as to what it may be, that's for the dreamer to decide.