ShadowMeTeresa

… and sometimes not. Dreams have a lot of different functions, and seem to come in several basic types. Here are my observations over many years of experiencing and remembering my own dreams, on what kinds of dreams there are and generally what they mean. I’ll treat some of these in greater depth in later posts. The categories below move generally from the least significant to the most significant.

Random Noise – There’s a lot going on in our heads at night, and I think some of it is just “clearing the decks.” This is house-keeping of the brain, sweeping out the debris, resetting our neuronal states, replenishing neurotransmitters, what have you. In the course of all this, there may be some random excitation of this and that spot in the brain, which our minds try to link together in a dream. These dreams are pretty meaningless and mostly make no sense, no matter how we try to slice them. My guess is, there’s a lot of this that happens that we don’t bother to remember, because there’s nothing real in there to remember.

Daily Processing – Different from the former but sometimes hard to distinguish, these dreams consist of the brain sorting out the events of the day and deciding where to put them. We receive a lot of stimuli of various kinds during the day varying in significance from snippets we read in the newspaper, to new things we’ve learned, to important life events or relationship shifts. Studies have shown that a lot of our memories are formed at night, and that sleep plays an important role in that. Many of our dreams, especially those that seem to key off of something that happened during the day, are probably related to this activity of processing daily information and events into the larger framework of our minds – short-term memory, long-term memory, building relationships and networks to other information. These dreams are experienced as being somewhat more coherent than those above, but in and of themselves don’t contain any special significance.

Anxiety Dreams – Sometimes we live through events or periods of our lives that elicit such a strong emotional response that some of it gets buried deep within our psyche. Long after that period is over, we have dreams about the events. A very common one is dreams about school – not being prepared, not knowing where your classes are, failing all your exams, not graduating. It may be about a job environment, a bad marriage, or an addiction from which you’re in recovery. What these dreams have in common is that they occur after the event or period is over, and slowly they help you work through the residual fear, anxiety, and negative connection you still have to that time period. When the dreams end, you can feel confident that that issue is released.

Messages from the Inner Mind – These are key to understanding what is going on in our lives. Our subconscious knows so much more than we do. It sees body language, takes in all kinds of information that our conscious mind filters out. I have often found myself having dreams that felt real and true about other people I am in a relationship with or a current situation on which I need guidance. I find that I can count on this information like a direct message from my intuitive self saying, “see what you have missed; know what you really know.” This can clue us in to people’s true motivations, the actual states of our relationships, our own fears or desires, and what we need that we aren’t taking care of. I have had several life-altering insights from dreams of this nature, and to me, this is probably the single most important reason to be able to remember your dreams.

“Real” Dreams – Dreams that are more than messages from our inner selves. These are dreams that are real in the sense that they connect with something or someone outside of ourselves. I have rarely had these, but can think of several clear instances where the person I was dreaming with also had the dream, or remembered the conversation, or felt my presence. I don’t pretend to be able to explain these, rather, I am observing them. I believe in my own reality, especially when it is corroborated by others.

More to come – specific examples and discussion welcome!

I would like to write a little bit about dreams – specifically, what various kinds of dreams there are, and what they mean, and what you can do with them. This may be a series of posts, depending on how long-winded I end up being :) This is something I’ve been working with most of my life, and I’d love to hear others’ experiences.

How did it come about that I became interested in dreaming? In my childhood, I often had nightmares, particularly about spiders. These were not little spiders. They were great big hobbit-eating-size, Hogwarts-forest-size spiders. In my dream, I would be running through a forest, and I would get to a place with four trees in a perfect square. Giant spiders would drop down and begin making webs on all four sides, to trap me. I always had to try to run out under one of them, or through a web (and get stuck)… and the shock of that part and what could happen would wake me.

I didn’t like this much, and at some point decided I should be able to figure out that I was in one of these nightmares and wake myself up. This proved to be easier said than done. Eventually, I was able to recognize when I was in a dream, starting with the recurring ones. Those are the easiest ones to identify because they fit a particular pattern. Thinking about that pattern during the day and just saying to yourself, “when I see this, I’ll know I’m in that dream again” eventually does work.

Then, I had to wake myself up – in time for the spiders not to get me. This was a struggle. I’d try and try, but just waking up wasn’t happening, no matter how much I would yell “wake up!!” in my head. Then I got the bright idea of trying to open my eyes, really hard, physically open my eyes. Sometimes I could do that, but still not wake up right away. Eventually the light streaming into my eyes (if it was morning) would wake me up, for real. After a lot of practice with this, it has somehow become reflexive and I can now wake myself up if I need or want to.

After I had mastered this, at some point in my teens I got interested in whether I could make myself dream about something I wanted to dream about – like flying, or seeing my father. It turns out there are several parts to this one too. First, you have to remember what you dream about to know whether you’re succeeding. That takes quite a bit of practice all by itself. Then, you might try thinking about what you want to dream about right before you go to bed. Sometimes this works, but I have never found it to be all that reliable.

Third, if you should get lucky enough to find the object or action of your dreams, being able to direct the course of your dream is nice. And then of course, that requires knowing that you’re in the dream of your choice. I never did get really good at this. Sometimes I could dream about something I wanted to, like flying, but as soon as I realized I was flying in a dream and couldn’t fly in real life, I would tend to crash ;D

Probably the most important skill I learned out of all this was how to remember my dreams. This turns out to be the key to a lot of useful insights later on, which we’ll discuss more in future posts. The best way to do this is to start with those dreams we have right before waking, or right before we wake up in the middle of the night. Always keep pen and paper next to the bed, and no matter how sleepy you are, write down what you can remember the minute you wake up.

Since I always hated writing journals (odd that), I actually did it another way, by lying in bed and going over and over any details I could remember until they were fixed in my mind. Then later I might tell someone about it to further cement it in my mind. In general, if we don’t do something with our dreams in the first minute or so after waking, we tend to lose them altogether – with the exception of the few most powerful and memorable dreams. It’s good practice to do this every day, and eventually it will become second nature.

Next time we’ll talk about classifications of dreams and what they represent.