Poll: Significance of dreams

[Little Woodsman]

I'm certain that some dreams do. The meaning isn't universal, of course-- and there's no universal symbolism-- but they can represent personal issues, fears and guilt or excitement.


Then, a whole lot of other dreams are pretty meaningless: either mindless wish-fulfilment (flying!) or even just dull.

Right in line with this individual. The one thing that I would add is that sometimes dreams are a way for our subconscious to communicate things that it has worked out to our conscious minds. More than once I or someone I know has had a dream that pointed out the solution to a problem we had been struggling with/working on.

 

[CpT_x_Killsteal]

Had a recurring dream when I was little where I walked down a narrow hallway covered in soft carpet, (walls ceiling and floor), and I could either go left or right.

Left was a man standing in front of a light. Couldn't make out his features though, just a shadow because of the birghtness of the light.

Right was team rocket sitting in my lounge room beckoning me to come to then so they could feed me Macorni and Cheese with diced tomato in it.

For a couple for weeks I went left and light blinded me and the dream ended.
The last time I had the dream, I turned right, got a nearby vacuum cleaner and vacuumed up the whole dream until there was just white all around me.

Last time I had it.
And now that I've typed it out I realize a few very important things about it that I never may have before.
Thanks.


Edit: Errr on topic, yes i do believe that dream can sometimes have meaning. And I've had a few deja vu ones aswell.

This past year though, I've actually had alot of dreams about sleeping.
And 2 or 3 where I was dreaming about sleeping and dreaming about sleeping.

I must be the embodiment of Sloth or something.

 

[Elfgore]

It varies for me.

I've had dreams of being chased around my house by a shape-changing Velociraptor with a gigantic eye stalk for a head. I don't believe that has any meaning, scared the shit out of me though.

While in dream another I was a leader of a freedom fighting group against a evil 1984 style American government in the year 2024. Could be a vision of my future. Though this is very unlikely as I am a very lazy and a easy going person so... It could hold meaning.

So you might say it's a mix. But I favor the no meaning side a little more.

 

[Johanthemonster666]

Dreams are nothing more than thoughts/issues that you file back into your sub-conscience. This helps your brain deal with things and not get overloaded with emotional info or have nervous breakdowns every week. They don't necessarily have Freudian/Jungian symbolic meanings like old psychoanalysts believed, but do reflect anxieties, urges, and suppressed thoughts that appear in varying degrees depending on how you deal with them when you're awake. Certain medications (like sleep aids) and food items have been known to consistently cause trippy or terrifying dreams. I'm not sure why this is but it happens a lot.

I've had frequent nightmares and sad dreams recently, it has everything to do with years of stress building up and haunting me in my sleep.

 

[Norithics]

I think a lot of people get hung up on this question because of the way it's phrased. Do dreams have meaning? Yes. Are they always deep meanings? No, certainly not. It can be something as simple as "I'm hurting right now."

 

[LetalisK]

No. They're amalgamations of your brain processing information. They have no power or special insight into your life other than what we decide they should have once we wake have.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

Yes and no. Dreams are simply your brain on random and have about as much meaning as that implies. Sometimes you can glean something from the mish-mash of things in your dreams. Sometimes you can't. I wouldn't really worry about it too much though.

 

[frizzlebyte]

I think a lot of people get hung up on this question because of the way it's phrased. Do dreams have meaning? Yes. Are they always deep meanings? No, certainly not. It can be something as simple as "I'm hurting right now."

I think that's true. Of course dreams have meaning. They are a combination of your experiences and your emotions, wrapped up in a really trippy package that can entertain as well as terrify you.

As someone who's interested in and experiments with lucid dreaming (have had several, and yes, it is really interesting), I can say that I think a more interesting question is whether dreams are important. I tend to think that we can either make them important or make them meaningless for ourselves, but that they have very little intrinsic importance.

For example, I am writing a book whose seed began with a dream I had back in May. For someone else, that dream would have just been weird, but for me, it was the start of the next level in my writing career.

 

[MetalMagpie]

They have meaning in the sense that your emotional state in dreams often reflects your emotional state during the day.

People suffering stress or anxiety often have anxious dreams. Victims of child abuse tend to experience more nightmares than other children. And many people have "urgency dreams" (when you don't have enough time to get something done) before big exams.

The actual content of dreams has no meaning at all. It's just random images that your brain stitches together into little stories as you wake up.

 

[KeyMaster45]

Do dreams have meaning? I don't think so, more often than not I can think about any dreams I remember the next day and determine what from the day before influenced their content. I do think some of my stronger mental hangups tend to manifest themselves as tediously frustrating re-visitations of the worse parts of my childhood.

Do I love that since I've gotten older I have actively started fighting any nightmares I'm having with fireballs, lightning bolts, and a keybalde? You bet your fucking ass I do. Though I guess they're not really nightmares anymore. Sure when I was a kid they'd have scared the living crap out of me, to the point where I'd have trouble falling back asleep, but now I just don my good shit-kickers and fight back with glee.

I'm serious you guys, it's so fucking awesome. I think I am literally on the cusp of that total lucid dreaming thing. I can already shoot fireballs and lightning[footnote]It's kind of crap lightning, but it's still fucking lighting firing from my fingertips.[/footnote] with some concentration[footnote]I tried punching things but the punches would never connect, which was really frustrating, so at some point I just went ranged.[/footnote], and sometimes I'll even bust out the Kingdom Key or Master Sword[footnote]Those are the two most common, I pulled off dual Keyblades once, now and again it will just be a generic sword or a shotgun. Oddly this method of melee fighting actually connects as opposed to my fists.[/footnote]

Of course, like I said, I can dissect most of it in the morning and pick out what influenced it from the day before or what show or game I've maybe been watching/playing a little too much of.[footnote]For the latter it usually means that it's time to stop playing that game for a few days.[/footnote] By far though my favorites are the ones I get during the regular Doctor Who season; means I get to roll with the Doctor and his companions a few times during the run. Occasionally I'll get the rare treat of one during the off-season.

The absolute best part though is that a fair bit of them seem to be running on a single continuity. I'm serious about that, I've got recurring characters and villains; some of them are actually original creations of my sub-conscious. Hell, I've considered keeping a dream journal just to see if it wouldn't make for some of the weirdest fan-fiction out there.

I've been in sort of a rut lately though; the zombie apocalypse seems to be trying to make a comeback as a topic in my mind. I go along with it for as long as I can stand, then I remember I rolled a Shaman in WoW and had the cure disease ability, until Blizzard took it away that is, so I just start casting that en mass until there are no more zombies.

...Sorry, I think this thread was about dreams having meaning. It's hard for me to resist the urge to nerd out about my dreams when the opportunity presents itself. So no, my dreams don't really have meaning so much as they are filled with badassery.[footnote]And the occasional labyrinth of unusable bathrooms[/footnote]

 

[Meatspinner]

With a poll like that how can I NOT go for pootis

Spoiler: pootish...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB9TVBmzyxQ[/youtube]

 

[GundamSentinel]

Personally I think it's just your brain rehashing past experiences (mostly shorttime memory and reflecting current mood) and mixing them together into weirdness. It's not baseless randomness, but it doesn't exactly have a meaning either.

 

[Catfood220]

Usually my dreams are pretty much random nonsense that I usually wake up from and go "hmmmm, that was strange" and have usually forgotten about it by the end of the day.

However, I do have psychic dreams every now and then. I have a friend who I don't see that often due to distance and for about a month I had a dream that she was pregnant. So I actually asked her whether she was pregnant again and it turns out that she actually is. Her second baby is due next month. The dreams stopped after that.

 

[Chairman Miaow]

Yesterday I dreamed I was riding down a motorway on a segway. Pretty sure it means nothing

 

[Beat14]

To an extent, sure. I used to get deja vu when younger quite often. I'm not a believer in that though. I dream most nights and most the time I can link it back to something in my day or week. You could argue that you could find a way to do that with anything on some level, but it seems like a clear enough connection.

It's rare that I get scared in dreams because I know I am dreaming nearly all the time. However a few months ago my dream got me some how. I was getting chased through a misty field by a horseman with a spear, all black attire including the horse. It ended with me getting impaled into the ground, looking up at the sky. The horseman coming around for another pass to execute and then me getting decapitated. Bit too visceral.

The chase was scary, but at some point of being impaled into the ground I realised I was dreaming and thought it's all cool, I bet I wake up now.

 

[GundamSentinel]

Personally I think it's just your brain rehashing past experiences (mostly shorttime memory and reflecting current mood) and mixing them together into weirdness. It's not baseless randomness, but it doesn't exactly have a meaning either.

oh i dunno

think about what you've just said, it sounds pretty good...but actually peoples lives and past experiences are quite personal and so, if dreams do what you say, wouldn't it follow that they would draw from common themes or longings in a persons individual experience ? and if that's true then i think it must potentially "have meaning" sometimes.

dreams quite clearly often show people what the want (hence how we use the word dream in casual language) but on the flip side they can also often be quite ruthless about showing people perhaps what they don't want (often based on past experience).

lemme put it this way...if say you were always going out with the same kind of controlling, overbearing girlfriend/boyfriend who got drunk and hit you and your dreams start basically showing you stuff like that, which is the kind of thing dreams are often apt to do...i think that might "mean something"...because its basically highlighting a bad pattern which consciously you may very well be very good at ignoring...and what's more what do many people do when they have such a disturbing dream ? they often sit and have "a serious think" about the issue...why it's almost like its some kind of defence mechanism ;O

i think perhaps we overestimate "the random"
much of "the random" is probably not so random at all because it all comes from us...or is somehow in all of us...
...except hopefully the crazy stuff

anyway here's something from the "is somehow in all of us" column to lighten the mood...
-snippindor-

With 'meaning' I meant more: having a guiding or even prophetic purpose, and by extension having a biological purpose or even being a necessity. I completely agree that dreams can highlight things you might not have been consciously aware of or have been ignoring, but I do not think that the ability to dream exists because of it. In short: it might have a use, but not a purpose (basically like life itself ).

And random, chaotic activity has always been a sign of a healthy brain (an EEG of a person in coma lacks much of this activity, for example). So yeah, randomness might be a good thing in your brain.

captcha: rain tonight.
Bullshit, captcha.

 

[Angelous Wang]

I only ever lucid dream (I control my dreams and do whatever I want).

So no my dreams have no real deep meaning, as they are just fantasy fulfilment. I spend most of my nights as some variation of immortal superhuman or having sex women I can't in real life.

 

[Zipa]

I don't think there is a meaning, but what is weird is I get deja vu all the time. I mean it is almost like exactly what I dreamt happens, but a little change happens because I noticed the feeling. Except this one time when I was young playing hockey, I realized afterward that I had seen this happen before...

I must be in the twilight zone.

Aaaargh! I used to get that all the time when I was a bit younger. >_<

I still get it, it's just a lot rarer now. It's like you've dreamed an exact situation days or even months before it happens. It's eerie D:

OT: I have a huge dream analysis book, but I usually only use it if the dream has a lasting impact on me. Most of my dreams are random nonsense and fighting monsters and stuff (I watch far too many movies). When it's a weird one, I like to look it up, though.

So yes, I do think dreams can be significant sometimes, but I don't take it super seriously either.

The deja vu thing happens to me rarely to, sometimes I ''dream'' something that then actually happens sometimes months later. Its freaky as shit and there is no explanation for it that I know of.

Mostly though I either don't remember dreams or they are just random crap based off what was on my mind before sleeping.

 

[Me55enger]

Dreams are a way for the mind to resolve issues.

Consciousness requires a narrative to make coherent sense of things in reality. This is not necessarily the most efficient method of the mind dealing with things. It's too... linear.

The subconscious doesn't have to work in terms of a coherent narrative, which allows them to deal with things on your mind in their own particular way. Dreams are this.

This is a rudimentary analysis, I stress.

I dreamt last night about my ex, who I saw 2 days go for the first time in almost 10 months. My dream was a cross between my place of work (farm) a particular sexual act, a tour around London and being a participant of Lord Sugars' The Apprentice. The only common theme was her.