Do you think dreams have meaning?
Asking because I have been having such vivid dreams lately and sometimes they touch me so much to the point that half a day, sometimes even the entire day, will be negatively affected - although that might also be my poor mental health (decided against posting this in ~health.mental as I wasn't sure it had that much to do with it).
I definitely have more bad dreams when I'm in a bad place or going through things, like if I feel lonely I will dream about relationships. If I've been really into something, like a game or watching a lot of the same genre of tv or film, I will dream about things towards that genre. If I'm having interpersonal issues, I will dream about those and even have conflicts and fights in my dreams very much related to that person - I have so many nightmares about my father for example.
I'm not into astrology, tarot cards, witchy stuff, etc., beyond it being just for fun. And I feel like dreams are more along those lines although I don't know. I just know they can really affect me.
What's your take?
A therapist once told me: you don't analyze dreams, you analyze what the patient has to say about their dreams. She was paraphrasing Lacan. I think it makes a lot of sense.
Translating, what you remember and feel about your dreams is the very material from which you learn something about yourself. Your first sentiments, intuitions, or associative meanings. The dream serves as material for subjective mapping -- not as a truth in itself, mystical or otherwise.
Although not scientific, Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams is a powerful book to help think about dreams.
I think this is spot on. Trying to interpret your own dreams is simply an avenue for expressing your concerns. No one I’ve ever seen thinks their dreams are about some issue they’re not worried about and haven’t spent any time on. I think this is also why it’s a cliche that listening to other people recounting their dreams at length is boring: Dreams aren’t usually all that interesting or insightful outside of the framework of the brain that generates them. I’d listen to a significant other talk about their dreams as a way to talk about their worries, but I couldn’t care to hear a coworker’s or a random stranger’s.
I think it's interesting that people share dreams. Like dreaming of showing up to school in your underwear, or forgetting to attend a class all semester. We're all so anxious about embarrassing ourselves or failing, and we've got this shared experience of schooling, so people are having the exact same dream. Often recurring, as I've had the "oh no I forgot to attend a class all semester and it's the last day of school" dream more times than I can count.
I get not caring what a stranger dreams, but yeah I find it super interesting too! I have one friend in particular and we always write each other if we dreamed something weird or seemingly meaningful. Her sharing dreams with me is such a great way to bond I think
Do you really think Freudian anything has actual, practical merit? I’ve always viewed it as a quaint historical footnote along the lines of miasma before the advent of germ theory.
Generally, almost 100% of Freud has been debunked or replaced by something else. The idea that psychoanalysis is helpful is still valid, but most of his beliefs are now considered antiquated and incorrect. So, the dream book is interesting, and definitely provokes thought, and it's helpful in that way. He used what he called free association, and just let people talk about the dream and what it made them think and feel. If they dreamed of a house and it was scary, it wouldn't mean the same thing as a different person dreaming of a scary house, it is very personal and specific to that individual, and comes from inside them. But by talking about the scary house they would also talk about other things in their life, and then discover what scary thing is on their mind. Free association is a cool exercise. Where he loses me (and where he loses relevance) is the claim that dreams are the result of repressed desires from early childhood or even infancy. He believed dreams were the minds way of fulfilling wishes about things we wanted in childhood but could not have. He was completely obsessed with the "Oedipus complex" to a point here it's really hard for me to take him seriously. Almost everything he claims to have discovered about human behavior is somehow related to children wanting to possess their parents and seeing one parent as a sexual rival. He saw little kids as being obsessed with genitalia. It's bonkers if you ask me. The book is interesting though.
I still gave him a vote but I refrained from replying to him because of that 🙈
I had a psychology teacher who had quite the impact on me! He would always go on rants whenever he had to talk about psychoanalysis. It was part of the curriculum but he couldn't keep himself from always reminding the class that none of it has been proven, it is faulty at best, no methodology, etc. He even showed us a clip of a working psychoanalyst who refused to read or acknowledge any new research because she was so stuck in her ways, like she was in complete denial that her entire career was a lie
You should read Freud to understand culture and the intuitions that were prevalent at that time, which remain influential to this day.
It is an enlightening approach that makes sense because you're essentially following a smart dude trying very hard to understand something with the little data that was available to him.
It is not a scientific treatise about dreams, but rather a documented intellectual speculation that informs us about the subjective meanings dreams can have in our culture and ourselves.
Because it is not scientific, his writing can be relatable. You can see why he would think everything he says, and the whole thing is oddly comforting.
And he barely ever writes about Oedipus complex or kids' genitalia lol. Certainly not on The Interpretation of Dreams. I read a bunch of Freud and never got to that part. I'm sure it's awful, but his complete works (which I have in print) are like 30 volumes. A large part of it is masterful cultural commentary. There's room for a lot of stuff.
Freud is worth reading for the same reason you would read Goethe or Dickens. Not to learn concrete facts about reality, but rather to appreciate the thoughts it will allow you to entertain.
Nope you had it right to begin with! Really interesting point about it being a way to process things, that makes a lot of sense to me as well
I am by no means in any way qualified to sound even remotely authoritative in this field, but I am interested in the topic. As I understand it, scientists these days generally agree that the brain does some kind of memory processing while we sleep. But there is less agreement on what the purpose of that activity is and whether dreams are an integral part of this process, or just a by-product of it.
Our brains are interpretation machines. When awake, they take sensory and other inputs and do their best to make sense of the chaos around us by looking for connections, patterns and meaning. This process may well continue also when we sleep, even if there is no physical reality as such to which we are responding. Instead, as one part of the brain does whatever processing it does when we sleep, the interpretive part of the brain sees these neural signals firing and tries its best to interpret what is happening and create meaning from it. Hence, dreams.
However, a lot of the current research seems to be leaning towards the idea that dreams are not an accidental by-product, but have some purpose in themselves.
Our brains seem to operate in slightly different modes when sleeping than when awake. When awake, neural connections are more focused and limited, whereas when our brains are in a dream state, these connections are much looser. It's a bit like the difference between Google search in the early 2000s and Google search now. Back in the day, the search results actually contained the search terms that you typed into the search box. These days, Google very loosely interprets what you may have meant by your search terms. The old Google is your brain awake, returning a narrow set of focused and specific results, while the current Google is your brain when dreaming, giving you a much wider range of loose and unpredictable results.
It is not a binary state though, as there are clear differences between sleep stages themselves: the REM state in particular seems to create looser connections than non-REM states of sleep. Dreams during the REM state also tend to be more vivid and memorable.
When it comes to the question of whether dreams have meaning, there may also be a neurochemical angle to consider. Now, I must repeat that I am just a random guy online parroting what he has read and (mis?)understood, so don't take this as any sort of truth and certainly not as any kind of advice, but only as a starting point for your own reading. Anyway, as I (mis?)understand it, when in a dream state, our brains alter their serotonin release, and this may be related to our tendency to find meaning, and sometimes even very profound meaning, in our dreams. A similar process happens with many drugs, like marijuana and psilocybin to some extent, and with LSD to a greater one. When in this type of a serotonin-affected state, more value is assigned to the connections that our brain finds than would normally be the case. This may at least partially explain the life changing effects that dreams, as well as some drugs, can have on us, especially when combined with the earlier mentioned change in the brain's operational mode, where connections are made between nodes that do not usually get activated in a standard awake state.
As for why our brains are doing this, I don't think anyone really knows for sure. But there are multiple theories.
One strand of inquiry that I have found particularly interesting, led by Robert Stickgold, the Director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at the Harvard Medical School, argues that the cognitive purpose of sleep is to explore the memories of recent events and to draw out new meaning and learning from them. Lighter levels of sleep focus on more awake-like processing of neural connections, whereas REM sleep throws the net wider, effectively checking if some more unexpected connections could provide useful insights into what has happened to us and what we could learn from it. In order to allow this process to happen without the brain blocking these looser connections, as they would normally be blocked, serotonin levels need to be adjusted, making dreams in REM sleep more vivid and their interpretation more impactful.
By doing this, the brain effectively simulates hypothetical ideas and scenarios, and then observes what our emotional and physical reactions to them would be, taking notes and learning about itself throughout the process.
If you are interested in reading more about this approach to dream research, the book When Brains Dream by Robert Stickgold and Antonio Zadra is a solid pop-science introduction, and to be honest, probably my main source for everything that I have written here. I read it a couple of years ago, and it's stuck with me and influenced my further reading into the subject.
And yes, let me stress once again that pop-science books are the level on which I operate here. I am by no means an expert in any of this.
Not until you give them meaning
I use dreammoods.com (a bit janky nowadays, but I like their dictionary) to interpret dreams that catch my attention.
I remember one dream, I was walking up and down a staircase, always staying to the left. On each step was a letter, and the letters read out "transformation". Lo and behold, dreammoods said staircases are a symbol of a change or transformation. That solidified my belief that dreams are meaningful and able to be interpreted (at least within your culture).
Another dream, I ended up lucid dreaming for the first time (I got scared as I was flying higher into the sky, so I deliberately woke myself up) and after interpreting one of the symbols (the airplane that was trying to hit me before I left the ground), dreammoods said the dream was telling me that I might enter into a higher state of consciousness.
Those 2 dreams and their interpretations were suspiciously coincidental, but I still give most of the interpretations a grain of salt, as if they might have this generally applicable description to everyone/every situation the way a horoscope would.
Most of the time, I don't learn anything new. So in the end, it doesn't really matter, I guess.
I generally follow what some others have mentioned, that dreams are the brain processing info and experiences for you. A recent experience kind of freaked me out a little. I had surgery a few weeks ago and was in quite a bit of pain for a couple of days after, my sleep was obviously quite disrupted but on top of that I kept having really violent dreams to the point I'd wake up and feel really upset about them. Upon reflection I assume that my brain was desperately trying to attribute this new intrusive pain to anything, definitely one of my strangest experiences with dreaming.
That sounds pretty awful, did they at least vanish with time? My dreams, or at least the dreams I remember or think about, often are direct literal manifestations of my stress or anxiety. I have some dental issues which I worry about, so sometimes I dream about my teeth falling out. I worry about my academic career, so I sometimes dream about getting bad grades. That kind of thing.
I don't know if dreams have meaning, but here is a personal experience of mine.
When I was 12 I was working on a problem I ran into on my brand new computer. This was before Google was a thing and researching for answer wasn't quite as easy. So I had this problem on my mind for several days, until one night I had a dream. In the dream I was on my computer working on the problem, except I didn't have any problem at all, and instead went straight for the solution. Next morning I woke up a bit perplexed. I had remembered most of that dream, which was rare for me since I almost never remembered my dreams. And when I tried out the solution on my computer, wouldn't you know it, it actually worked.
No.