The Meaning Of Dreams

Many people think of dreams as their personal movie theater. Most people have a dream and wake up the next morning and think nothing of it. There are even some people who can’t remember their dreams or do not think that they dream at all. The study of dreams has been recorded dating back to the ancient days in Mesopotamia 3000 BC. Dreams are much more than, a simple personal short movie that we have exclusive access to in our brains. Dreams can have elements from our subconscious mind, unconscious mind, suppressed emotions, and unprocessed thoughts. Many people think that dreams are just meaningless nonsense. However, there has been much research done by neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals that prove that dreams are more than just our brain’s personal movie.

Dreaming occurs during the REM stage of sleep. More than likely dreams are transmitted through the hippocampus region of the brain. This particular area helps generate in or transmit dreams. The hippocampus is also associated with visual processing, emotion, and visual memory. Dreams help us to process emotions by encoding and contributing the memories of them. The frontal cortex also helps with recollection of episodic memories, which are events that have occurred in the dreamer’s life. If there is an emotional event that is unresolved in the dreamer’s life it may come to the surface to be processed in a dream. Dreams help process current situations that may trigger unresolved mental and emotional disturbances. The dream may provide a term called compensation by attempting to reverse the mental or emotional disturbance of the client.  

Dreams have been proven to be a way to access the two hardest versions of our mind to evaluate, which is the subconscious and unconscious minds. Dreams can bring the most important challenges that a person is dealing with on a subconscious level to the surface of the person’s consciousness. Each dream can reveal untapped information about the dreamer’s psychological and physical dynamics. Dreams can also help us understand where the person is on their spiritual journey and the challenges they are dealing with in their waking life that are hindering them.

Dreamwork is a key part of analytical therapy. Dreamwork has also been used for centuries in many spiritual practices as well. Dreams play a role in clinical practices by helping better understand the client’s mental or emotional disturbances. Dreamwork is done by asking the client to either write down their dream in a book called a dream journal as soon as they wake up, or they are asked to recall it out loud to the mental health or spiritual practitioner. The dreams are then interpreted. Dream interpretations are a therapeutic technique for uncovering the hidden meaning of dreams. Everything in the dream can mean something. Colors, shapes, people, places, emotions, objects, and sensations all play a role in putting together the underlying meaning of the dream.

Late 19th-century psychiatrist Sigmund Freud stated a theory that dreams are an opportunity to explore the unconscious. Freud thought that people could increase self-awareness and gain insight that is valuable to help people deal with daily life problems. Freud did not believe that dreams could be interpreted by manifest context or the outward context of a dream or its storyline. He felt the only way to understand dreams was to understand the latent context or hidden meaning of the dream. Freud believed that dreams were wish fulfillments of the unconscious mind and that they were composed of day residue. Carl Jung a 20th century psychiatrist believed that dreams allowed us to tap into the unconscious collective. Jung believed that through the unconscious collective people dreams reflected universal archetypes that are similar for people regardless of where they live or what culture they are a part of. The problem with this theory is that people can dream about the same object or situation but they can have different meanings for different individuals. Rosalind Cartwright a sleep and dreaming researcher, believes dreams reflect day residue. She supported this theory by doing a study on women who were going through a divorce. Over a course of five months, she asked the women several times how often they thought of their former spouses. Many of these women had dreams about their former spouses over the course of this five-month study which does support Cartwright’s theory that dreams can be a reflection of our waking lives also known as day residue. Alan Hobson a neuroscientist, is credited for developing the activation-synthesis theory of dreaming. This theory states that dreams are electrical brain impulses that pull random thoughts and imagery from our memory. This also is parallel to day residue. The Threat Stimulation Theory states that dreaming should be seen as an ancient biological defense. The reasoning is because dreams provide evolutionary advantages providing a way to repeatedly stimulate potential threats. According to evolutionary psychologists because of this theory dreaming does serve a purpose to help alert the dreamer so that they may activate avoidance. Lucid dreams are a state of dreaming when the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming and are able to maintain a certain state of wakefulness and awareness during the dream.

Whether we realize it or not every human and mammal dreams. Dreamiwork has proven that dreams not only mean something but they can reflect our unconscious mind, subconscious mind, and our suppressed emotions. Although there is much work to do in this field, dreamwork has been able to help lots of clients around the world to be able to understand their inner-self. The meaning of dreams is much deeper than a private movie they can help redirect a person’s way of thinking and how they feel about themselves and their lives. Personalities can be revealed that may have been hidden from the person’s self-awareness. This proves that even an extrovert still has something on their mind that they might not be expressing. Dreams do in fact have meanings and they have been able to help us better understand our implicit thought and can even help us heal and become more self-aware.