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ChangingMinds Blog! > Blog Archive > 20-Jun-07

Wednesday 20-June-06 

Strange dreams

It's rather early on a weekend morning and I'm tapping on my PDA whilst my wife sleeps quietly beside me. The curse of early rising during the week is early waking at the weekend. Oh well.

I just had a bizarre dream in which I was a giant. Now what does that mean? Dreaming is a strange facet of sleep that has purpose and meaning that many have guessed at over the ages.

A common dream interpretation is mystical, where dreams show the future, allow spiritual travel or may include direct interaction with deities. Shamans travel to dream worlds and saints talk to Mary. The mystical dream can be a pathway to revelation.

Psychoanalysts such as Freud and Jung used a more mundane interpretation: that dreams are simply the subconscious sorting things out. When trauma occurs we often cannot deal with it at the time, so we repress it, and then use dreaming to try and sort things out.

Dreams are often believed to be metaphorical, using symbolism that requires informed interpretation (or perhaps blind guessing). This is a gift to the mystics who can customize the meaning to the context and extends the expensive sessions on the analyst's couch. It also lets me choose between comforting and challenging reasons why I was recently a giant.

Animals dream too, which kind of complicates the picture. I watch the muscular twitches of my sleeping dog as she runs, barks and eats in her primitive internal world. Is she self-aware in her dreams? Does she wake up and know that she was dreaming?

Dreams change the mind of the sleeping person and may be used to change minds again in interpretation. Yet although some claim to know the secret of unlocking their deep meaning, sometimes I just wonder.

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