What do dreams mean?
I don't mean this in the sense of "if I have a sex dream that involves my mother, does that mean I am attracted to my mother?", I know that dreams aren't a literal representation of our desires in that sense.
What I mean more is, is there any study or anything that has been done to see if a dream's content indicates anything about what problem the brain is trying to work out?
Like does a dream about sex indicate that a certain lobe in the brain is particularly active at that moment?
Or like I have had negative dreams that cause me to feel anxiety when I wake up that involve my family or where I was in the middle of an ICE raid recently, does that indicate anything in particular about what my brain was doing while I was asleep that caused me to feel anxiety and that happened to manifest as ICE raids?
not sure if this was the right sub for this question.
I started having nightmares in 2010. I was struggling with grad school, and then my dad found out he had cancer by having emergency surgery to remove a grapefruit sized tumor. I started having nightmares, and my depression really started a downward spiral after that.
At the time the nightmares started, I had never taken any medication for depression. It took about a year for me to get a diagnosis and find an effective antidepressant. I ended up on an SNRI (that I have been taking ever since). That makes a big difference to the depression, but has only made my dreams more vivid (this is common from my understanding) .
I've tried a few medications (mostly things used to treat PTSD) to help with the nightmares, but nothing has worked. They seem to be here to stay. They do wax and wane with stress and worry, but at best, I'm still getting them at least once in two weeks. When they are bad it can be five nights out of seven. The aversion then tips me over into insomnia. Which is not good when you're dealing with depression.
Most of my dreams are what I classify as "futility nightmares". There's something important I'm trying to do, but I can't do it, and things that should work don't. In a particularly memorable one, I was in the jungle with my family in the fuselage of a crashed airplane that had been made into a house. But for some reason the doors didn't have locks or latches, so I kept running back and forth trying to keep a bunch of tigers out.
For the worst ones, I wake up screaming, or my wife will wake me up because I'm screaming. The only one of those I remember involved me crushing my infant daughter, so I figure the fewer I remember, the better.
My mental health is in a pretty good place these days. I'm pretty vigilant about my mood, but sometimes the nightmares can be a signal that things are not going well in a way that I haven't flagged (not the content so much as increased frequency).
All of which is to say, if I could stop remembering my dreams without negatively impacting my health, I'd be first in line.
I’ve been learning about CBT-N (cognitive behavior therapy for nightmares). Wanted to share in case this was something you ended up finding useful to pursue. Hope things improve!
Thanks, I will look into it!
I doubt there is much correlation. The mind is mostly compressing information and re-organizing. Dreams are a byproduct of sleep but not a reason for it. I doubt there is much of a relationship between what we experience as dreams and what the brain is actively doing at a physical level.
I feel like dreams are either ideation separate from the purpose of sleep that we've somehow evolved into doing with the excess of nighttime processing capacity OR dreams are an emergent property of what is happening during sleep.
I found these:
And here are a few that possibly contradict my view:
It will be exciting to see if we'll ever get concrete answers here--via neuralink, etc.
lol
edit:
Nightmares are probably learned rather than something physical or uncontrollable, like how different cultures have different experiences with mental health disorders. eg. feedback loops rather than chemical imbalances:
Certain types of dreams are clearly correlated with stress.
oh god this reminds me how often I'd have vivid falling dreams as a kid. I don't even remember what I had to be stressed about back then.
Not that kids can't be stressed, because they totally can, but falling dreams are also very common as you are falling asleep. This is not because of stress, but because the way REM "locks" your muscles to prevent you from moving can feel like falling, and a brain that isn't quite asleep enough yet can register this and experience a falling sensation, which affects your dream. I think this is maybe even more common when you're very tired, as this will lead to dropping straight into REM from wakefulness, rather than doing a short cycle first. Also younger kids can have different sleep cycles than adults, not sure exactly if or how that impacts things!
I would always wake up in the middle of the night as I hit the ground with my various falling dreams as a child, so I don't think they were likely "as you're falling asleep" dreams in my case. I haven't gotten one since I was a kid -- and even post-puberty they became less common iirc.
My stress dreams as an adult tend to be arguing with a loved one-adjacent.
When i was a kid, my bed was a mattress on a large wooden box. The way I experienced this sensation was that the bed was standing on one end (so that I was actually vertical but I didn't fall out), and it fell over flat so that it was sitting normally.
I had that same feeling! Sometimes like a weird version of vertigo as I was falling asleep, but sometimes it would incorporate the feeling into my dreams. And the dream version would often be me in a mundane situation but then I lean back against a wall and suddenly the wall would give way and fall over with me kind-of stuck flat to the surface. Not always a nightmare, sometimes the feeling was really peaceful and relaxing.
Related story: I recently graduated from university and decided to stop my studies there as I was burning out pretty hard after five years of higher education while dealing with some mental health problems. A result of that is that I've been living at an irregular pace and been less active and more lonely, and I've had moments where I thought to myself I made a mistake by not continuing.
At least two or three times now, on days where I had these thoughts, I had a dream of something that I've had happen incredibly frequently in my student life, where a professor would get on my arse about some minor mistake or other inane crap and I couldn't say anything back. Each time, it was just awful and infuriating and I woke up still mad about it. And then I didn't regret leaving uni anymore. I also had a few accounts of the "forgot about a big exam" one.
In short, I feel like this is incredibly verifiable. My nightmares are often things like this that have made me strongly stressed while awake. I like to think it was my subconscious' way of telling me "trust me, bro, you don't wanna go back there".
I actually had the "forgot about the big exam" one happen to me in real life. I thought the test was a week away, so I had only sort of started studying. Fortunately, I had already updated my formula sheet, so at least I had that ready.
I'm not sure how to reply to that because you're making it sound like some crazy unusual situation when it happened to me almost bi-weekly T-T
Still glad I'm done, godsdamn.
I'm glad you got out, and hope you are happy doing whatever you're doing now.
I was in grad school for 9 years. It was Not Good for my mental health at all. I stayed in toward the end due to the difficulty of explaining the resume gap if I didn't finish. But also, my advisor had a great deal of empathy, even setting up 2 semesters of medical leave so I could deal with the depression stuff. Without that, I might not have finished anyway.
It's hard to say I wish I had done it differently because it had such a profound effect on my life and career that I can barely imagine my life otherwise. I met my wife here, and I would not have had the connections / qualifications for what I did for the first 15 years of my career.
But I definitely try to paint a realistic picture of the true cost of a phd program for people who ask.
I think dreams have a lot to do with symbolism. And to everyone, symbols mean similar stuff but not exactly the same. An interesting book to read on dreams and symbolism is definitly Man and his Symbols from Carl G. Jung.
In the end we never know but if you get to know a person (also yourself) you can try to make educated guesses. Because even though we are all humans we all grew up differently and we all have lived differently through our lives (with traumas, experiences and so on). So it's really difficult to pick one dream and analyze it and point exactly to one definition of the dream.
All the examples from the book Carl Jung always makes clear that he doesn't know and is only trying to guess and also explains why now a horse means a specific thing in one case. But these patients he analyzes there are always multiple dreams he looks at and attempts to explain what this person feels and, by extension, what the dream could mean.
I find this topic really fascinating, and I originally read up on it due to me having just horrible dreams. I must also say Carl Jung's books are really challenging to read, for me at least, since I haven't studied psychology and I am "only" interested in the topic.
I would caution anyone reading Jung to understand that he holds a similar position within psychology to Freud -- his ideas are foundational to the field and it can be valuable to learn about them, but he also said a lot of shit without a ton to back it up. Both Jung and Freud cared a lot about dreams! Take what you can from his work, but take it with a grain of salt rather than as gospel.
I'm going to have to add this to my very long to-read list! Thank you :)
@faye-luna I actually remember reading books that contained collections of Jung’s writings way back when I was in high school and was still trying to understand my general miserable life. Jung is old enough that I don’t really think you need to know much about psychology: he was contemporary with Freud, so they were basically just creating the field at the time.
I think that Jung is more of a mystic than a psychologist, especially when we consider what we have learned about psychology in the decades since he died. Regardless, I don’t think his work is entirely without value, and I think he came up with frameworks and ideas that are very useful to help figure yourself out, even if they are not strictly accurate.
10/10 on that last paragraph.
Even if he is considered old or outdated. He never claims that his work is the absolute truth. He never claims that he is correct. These are clear speculations about the symbols of what they meant to a greater society and what the differences in how we grew up and how we perceive the world.
And if you look at the text that way especially also the symbolism in art it is quite modern and I wouldn't call it outdated.
Also I don't know but Psychology isn't like math. It's not a straight forward science where 2+2 always equals 4. We still don't know so much stuff about our brain and how it operates.
I recently got diagnosed for adhd and they tested my brainwaves. Like yes they can assume what it means but they will never be a 100% sure.
Whether Jung himself claims his work is absolute truth or not, his work has hugely influenced other people who do believe his work is absolute truth, often including when it goes outside of/beyond psychology. A lot of straight-up pseudoscience traces its lineage back to Jungians, and that's without looking at the more esotericist stuff that takes a lot from Jung. That doesn't make him worthless to read by any measure, and I agree with the person you replied to that many of the frameworks and ideas he came up with are useful for self-discovery regardless of how strictly accurate they are, but it is important imo to be aware that his perspective is not always right or well founded when you approach his work.
Memories Dreams and Reflections is another good book where Jung describes his life and work.
Some of the most interesting evidence is of mice and cats.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/25/us/rats-may-dream-it-seems-of-their-days-at-the-mazes.html
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/animals-dream-too-heres-what-we-know
There are lots of studies about this. You teach a mouse a maze and in its dreams the same pathways get worked that were going when it was doing the maze. Cats plan out hunts that have not yet happened. Some of what we are doing is probably consolidating memories, some of it seems to be like running a simulator where we generate synthetic memories to learn while we sleep.
This makes a lot of sense to me, based on my own experiences with dreams. I frequently dream about problems I'm working through, and if I'm bashing my head against a particularly tricky one, taking a break for a quick 15-minute nap often leads to a big breakthrough.
Unfortunately, I also dream about stressful situations I'm not actively trying to work through (e.g., stress dreams about being late for high school classes, nightmares about traumatic experiences that haven't been relevant for decades, etc.). My conscious brain and my unconscious brain seem to have different ideas about what's important.
However, most of my dreams seem totally disconnected from reality — just really bizarre, surreal situations like nothing I've seen in my life or in media, and it's hard to imagine what purpose these could serve (if any). I've sometimes wondered if these dreams might be side effects of processing more "low level" information, if that makes sense. As a less abstract example, maybe dreams about flying serve a function in understanding the 3-dimensionality of objects we rarely get to see from that angle.
I really do think that a lot of what we perceive in dreams is spurious connections that are getting activated in our audiovisual systems more or less accidentally while our brain is doing janitorial stuff. I’m skeptical that there is a lot we can directly interpret with any kind of accuracy.
I think it’s kind of related to how when we sleep we have REM sleep atonia where our brain turns down our spinal motor output so we don’t accidentally move during sleep, but our audiovisual system a) is above our spine so it is hard to turn off, and b) isn’t very dangerous to leave connected while we dream anyway.
One interesting thing that, as far as I know, hasn't really been subject to in-depth study: multiple people have discovered they had cancer and other health issues due to dreams. Mark Ruffalo is probably the most famous person to have that experience, with a dream telling him he had a brain tumor. So, our brains can use dreams to communicate vital information about our physical health, which I find pretty neat!
*grabs tinfoil hat*
My mom apparently saved my life twice when I was a baby, just because she saw a dream that warned her about it, waking up instantly and giving me first aid. What was happening to me both times was not something that makes a sound. Similarly, a couple times in my life I've somehow seen a dream where I foresaw a situation that would actually happen that day & proceeded to actually save someone else's life
For some weird fucking reason, a lot (if not all) of the women I'm related to from my mom's side have such stories too. Go figure...
Not exactly a dream, but I had a vivid experience of my grandmother's presence, a few hundred miles away and learned later that day that she had just passed away.
This is a less dramatic example, but when I was a kid, I definitely had dreams that warned me that I was peeing my bed! Unfortunately, always just a couple seconds too late.
If I remember correctly there's a couple of important things to know about dreams :
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dreaming-in-the-digital-age/202105/aggression-in-dreams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream#Theories_on_function
I have no idea if theres evidence to supoort this, but I always thought dreams were like Google's DeepDream program. It uses neural nets to try and change one picture into another by working backwards from a trained model.
So like, if you train a model to produce human faces, and then feed a picture of a landscape through the model backwards, it will start changing the picture to try and make eyes and noses and stuff out of shapes in the landscape. In other words its trying to force the picture to look like a face, even when its not.
So I imagine that your brain is doing something like this. Your subconsicous mind is doing some sort of maintenence stuff with your brain, and that causes a bunch of random neural activations which come across as a bunch of random disjointed sensations or memories. Then your conscious mind tries to make sense of those random inputs by stitching them together into a somewhat coherent experience.
You may be interested in listening to/watching the podcast Inner Cosmos. The host is a neuroscientist and covers a wide range of topics, including dreaming. He did a 3 part series on just that, starting with Why do we spend 1/3 of our lives asleep? (Sleeping & Dreaming Part 1).
I don't remember if all your questions are answered there specifically, but it should at least give you some foundational knowledge to ask more specific questions.
I am a total layman, with no background in the field, but there is a recent theory of dreaming called NEXTUP (Network Exploration To Understand Possibilities), which I find interesting. It was originally developed by the Harvard Medical School professor of psychiatry and sleep researcher Robert Stickgold.
In a nutshell, and as far as I understand the theory, it proposes that dreaming is a form of memory processing that uses memories to extract new knowledge. According to the theory, when in sleep state, the brain processes recent emotionally salient memories by combining them into narratives that explore how they could potentially connect with other memories, concepts and outcomes. The brain basically takes something that has happened recently, mixes things up, and asks “what if this happened?”, then observes its own emotional and cognitive response, and tries to learn from it. By running through different hypothetical scenarios and variations, it tries to see how they could change its understanding of the world.
According to the theory, one major difference between a dreaming brain and a waking one is that when in sleep state, the brain is particularly interested in weak associations, ones that under normal waking circumstances it would not consider. This is to seek out previously missed information, and also why dreams are so often so wild.
The theory has laid quite a bit of groundwork to suggest how this all might work in terms of our biomechanical system, why dreaming requires a level of consciousness, as well as how the different stages of sleep (non-REM stages, REM stages) differ in terms of the type of memories that the brain selects to work with. I have no way of evaluating how plausible NEXTUP is as a theory, or how well it is backed by hard research. It’s just something that I find an interesting idea, albeit not necessarily more convincing that something like the Activation-synthesis hypothesis, the Reverse Learning theory, the Threat Simulation theory, or other major theories of dreaming.
If you are interested, this Nautilus article is an ok starting point, and I can also recommend the 2021 pop science book When Brain Dreams: Exploring the Science & Mystery of Sleep that Stickgold authored with Antonio Zadra. It reads well.