Do Dreams Have Meanings - Your Opinions

Myself I do not belive dreams are messages or have meanings etc. There has also been research done that supports that dreams are not messages.

I am curious to see what other people think. Hit me back with your thought opinions etc.

Absolutely I believe they do.

My dreams have many times over reflected goings on in my life, that otherwise I would not have seen, or showed representations of things to come. I have also had premonitious dreams.

I take my dreams very seriously, because they do not lie to me. When I have a dream I don’t understand, I will usually have another dream that is similar, if not exactly the same, until I figure out what it was trying to tell me.

I realize not everyone has dreams that really have a point, but my dreams at least, do. I usually have very deep dreams, with strong symbolism, so I do my best to always know what my dreams are saying. When I do not find the definitions of my dreams, my head gets foggy and I feel unbalanced.

I’ve heard the theory that dreams are simply the mind taking everything you absorbed during your waking life and filing them in their places while you sleep… sort of like a disk defragmentation.

I think that’s even more reason to pay attention to your dreams because they will help you say “hey, why did I pick that up today? why is that important?” or “why the hell is my boss singing Crazy Little Thing Called Love to a pickle jar?”… It’s finding where you make associations.

That’s why I think lucid dreaming is a huge deal. You are taking an active role in what your brain is absorbing and how it is filing it. You are making the conscious choice to find out what is important to you.

gratuitous smiley: :mrgreen_hat:

I believe that dreams have a meaning.!

I think if you write down your dreams for a while. you start to understand yourself, and and understand what your dreams are telling you.

I think that dreams are your subconcious speaking to you. Like deep mediation.

Listening to my dreams have been really helpfull for my waking life. And also helped with my lucid dreams aswell…

If you start writting down your dreams… and look back on them you wil l start to see a powerfull message from yourself!

so there u go if that makes sense. :tongue:

I don´t really think dreams are messages from your subcounciousness that are meant to tell you something about your life.
I rather stick to the theory explained in EWLD (dreams are made up from your memories by association).
However, they aren´t meaningless, since they can tell you alot about what´s going on inside you.
Also, I like to see them as some kind of other reality

tapir

I stick with the suggestion theory, which says that dreams are simply projections of associations between awareness and suggestion factors (thoughts, emotions, mental structures, expectations, neurological impulses,…). Therefore, IF a dream has meaning, it will only have meaning to yourself, because of your belief in its meaning. Same thing otherwise: if you don’t think a dream has meaning, then you’re probably right too. It’s purely subjective, simply because the dreamscape itself is made up from your very own mental processes, including your belief in its value.

I don’t believe dreams have a meaning on their own, unless you sort of cooperate with them and interpret them to find one. But for some reason, I often can’t ignore the emotions they trigger right after I wake up.

im curious. to know what u guys think lucid dreams are?

Absolutely they do.

I think lucidty is a way to get deep down within yourself and find out anything you want. Also to be in your fantasy land :smile:

I am curious then. If dreams have no meanings or messages what do they mean to you.

This is the best way to explain what dreams are, and tapir’s description was great too.

I like all your views, they all make perfect sense.

So to answer the question, i think its both ways, its up to you to decide what’s important or what has meaning to you. Its self reflection of what happened and what could happen, the dream plays your role. That’s why dying dreams, sex dreams, killing dreams, etc… can have a impact off your personality and how you would perceive it. That’s why i love dreams, i love the idea of just experiencing random scenarios of life and reacting towards the previously choices that made a impact on you and your life. Dreams; there priceless and no one can steal them :wink:

Lucid dreams to me is everything in a dream and what position your involved with; “stops”, and you take control. Its free-will placed in a confusing environment, and ever thing you notice brings you down from choice. Thats lucid to me, and after you get passed all the cluttering charades its just pure fun. Making that accomplishment is hard though, the subconscious is a powerful thing. :cry:

I got a question for you.

How do you know you are only i your mind and not in some other place. My example is shared dreaming. When this is done the people can’t be in only ones mind. I belive there is way more to dreaming than people realize.

So if we aren’t lucid, we don’t take control? Who’s responsible then for the dreamscape itself? I agree with you if you meant that lucidity offers you to gain more conscious control over the dream. In a way we control every dream we have, because they are made up from our own mental structures and patterns of how we perceive the waking world. Thus, the resulting dreams are always controlled by those views.
To me, LDs are dreams in which the level of awareness has moved so far on the lucidity spectrum that it passed a critical line, with the result that self-reflection becomes possible. LDing doesn’t seem to be an out-of-the-ordinary phenomenon, like New Agers tells us. I think they tend to see it that way because most people don’t climb on the lucidity spectrum very much, while the possibilities are truly there. Therefore, when one doés reach the other side of the spectrum and becomes lucid, it may seem as if they’ve entered a whole new world, while this is (imo) not the case. They’ve simply gone to the other side of the spectrum. It’s only because of the critical attitude one has to develop to become lucid that most people don’t manage to cross the lucid line.

I think that dreams do have a meaning. Not that they’re specifically messages, but they are a function of the subconscious for either psychological or neurological reasons, and by examining them it could be possible to extrapolate some truths about our subconscious from what goes on in them. However, this won’t be possible until we know exactly what function it is that dreams perform (and they must perform some function, mustn’t they?), and even then, it may never happen, because of the many layers of asocciations etc. that they use that could only possibly mean anything to the person who they belong to. And I think that any method of interpreting dreams that exists until then is based on the same reason that so many people follow astrology etc. : You can interpret any given dream in a lot of different ways (no matter which method you use) and many of them will give vague or non-specific meaning to you, and you can keep going until you find one that does fit. I suppose in this way interpreting a dream could illustrate something about yourself that you hadn’t noticed until then, but the same could be true of interpretating anything, from tea leaves to runestones.

PS - Sorry if I offended any tea leaf/runestone interpretors, or indeed any astrologers, in the above post.

I think this too. I used to get books on dreams out the library and every one included the dream dictionary. If I dremt of a black cat it would be because our neighbours cat is always in our garden, not because there’s bad luck on the way! I believe dreams are memories, thoughts, worries etc. They can sometimes make you realise things about yourself but it all comes from you. I’ve been thinking of visualization recently and lucid dreams seem very similar except maybe with more control :confused:

but i think if you look hard enough you can find a message… which is the same with ever moment in life.

ANother piont that I would like to raise is something I am unsure about.

There are many people that say dreams are messages from the unconsious, the question I have is that all the uncnsious does is control things like heartbeat or whatever that you can never control

This massage thing sound more like the subconsious than the unconsious

This isn’t true. There have been people that have learned to control such things.

Sometimes they don’t have meanings IMHO.

Sometimes even when they seem absurd, there can be a meaning or subtext…

As with my recent dream about superstition paper and water in bathrooms…

i think some dreams have meanings others do not. The intersting thing is i seem to have the same dreams at the same time every year.

Hell i can’t even remember the last ND i had that was “original” now that’s depressing :sad:

I disagree. The sub-c also processes data in a way that we cannot easily do it contiously. Thus I think that they arise in dreams along with what you have done in the day. It also helps to simulate situations, and I even get recurring dreams where I am stuck until I either become Lucid (nice when I become repeatedly Lucid) or some how satisify the stupid targets of the dream world. It opens your uncontious thoughts and shows you who you are and what you should be careful of. You might have a fear that awakens in a dream. Your natrualy bound to have nightmares on this, is your brain trying to get rid of a fear?!