Ever since I was a kid my dreams have been crazy as hell. Last night, I had a dream where I was dropping my kid off at school, but there were people on both sides of the road standing waiting for a wedding. I see the couple and nope right out. Turning around a curb, suddenly I was in a fucking baseball stadium and rows of seats cut me off. I had to get home so I got out of my car? I’m walking down the stairs when I hear “oh, there it is!” I look up where the person was pointing to the sky. I see some rocket like thing, and assumed it was fireworks. It stopped, I hear three dreaded bomb falling noise, and then it slams into a seat a few rows down from the wedding. I hit the deck because I don’t want to die. But instead of exploding it sprays enough glitter throughout the stadium I ended up with a mouth full. Then I get out of there, call my mom, explained what happened, head to their house which is now a bunker in new York City and they refuse to believe what I went through. Then I woke up.
dreams are a great deal more than disconnected memories stitched together in a random assortment. if you pay attention to the symbolism in the dream instead of the face value, you can get a glimpse into what you’re currently processing behind the scenes.
Natalie Portman, who does have an education in neuroscience, thinks dreams are just your mind getting rid of debris. That was in response to a question on her Hot Ones interview, and she didn’t seem to think it was a strong conclusion backed by broad scientific consensus or anything. Still, I found it an interesting pushback against the common idea that dreams have some deep meaning.
Your mind getting rid of debris… interesting.
I don’t know that its common, I encounter about 50/50 people thinking they’re nonsense and others getting insight from their dreams.
People, including Natalie Portman during her interview on the chicken wing youtube show Hot Ones, can have layers of motivation to dismiss their dreams as nonsense. Paying attention to the symbolism in dreams can reveal some dark and anxiety provoking truths. Or not :)
Totally feel that. Constant stress and anxiety manifesting in mine
This for me becomes really obvious when you’re learning a new (movement) skill. For example after driving lessons or my first time skiing I spent the nights going through all the scenario’s. They also show that mice learning their way through a maze activate the same “direction” neurons in sequence of going through the maze while they dream and they think it will help in learning.
yes, its one part of it. you integrate what youve learned in the day into long term memory during REM, which is also when you dream
I don’t read into dreams that deeply. I do know that emotions and personal struggles can present themes in dreams. IE seeing a catastrophe in the dream is related to a person having anxiety about something (or similar)
possibly. my favorite lens to analyze dreams is the Jungian frame: he postulated that every figure in your dream is not an other person but a part of yourself.
I had a friend who told me she had a dream that she had a baby, and she couldn’t work out how to breast feed it and she was crying and was humiliated that she couldn’t feed the baby.
She said she thought it meant she was going to be a bad mother.
So she and I had an “almost couple” before I moved very far away and she was pretty bummed about it. she began going out to party a lot, like to these kinda gross clubs, and she’d get attention from rando guys. She’d go by herself and make out with several dudes in one outing, and there’d be more than that here and there, like getting fingered on the dance floor for example, then these guys’d disappear etc.
So I put it to her that a Jungian analysis of the baby dream is that the baby is a part of her best represented by an infant, innocent and in great need of attention and care. In the dream she was trying to care for/nourish this part of herself but was failing to actually feed the baby despite the desperate, tearful effort. She was trying to give that part of herself what it needed but was going about it wrong.
She said “yeah, I don’t know”, I think it means I think it means I’ll be a bad mother", so I said okie doke. She kept going out like that and hit a DUI checkpoint on Halloween before she quit that whole scene.
If you’re up for it, next time you have an interesting dream, try thinking in the frame that each figure is a part of yourself that would be best represented by that person. For example, if I dream about a friend who does a ton of drugs and I’m hanging out with that person a lot in the dream, I’d likely take that to mean I’m processing my recent relationship to substance use.