Are dreams significant or just the unraveling of your thoughts?

Question

Do dreams have meanings? Or is ir just our sub- concious wading through all of the iformation and turning it inot a wierd succession of images?

Answer 1

dreams are your mind running thru the small things you have seen and done all day. but because you are asleep your mind cant make any sence of this

Answer 2

If I had the answer to that question I'd have lots of money in the bank for certain.

Ever since man could think and talk about those strange night visions we all have, theories have been proposed about what they are and what they mean.

The answer is probably a little of both, and then some.

Have you ever gone to sleep with someone on your mind and wake up remembering a vivid dream about him or her? Have you ever wrestled with issues only to find resolution the next morning -- just sitting there in your mind -- like a "aha" moment?

I like to think of our brains as if they were computers.

I think our brains absorb so much information during the day that they use the regenerative REM sleep to "defragment" our minds' "hard drives". What you remember are small snapshots of activities that your brain kept in RAM while all the heavy lifting is going on in the background.

Some dreams come back time and time again....as if they are viruses that never quite get eradicated. Others seem to disappear once we have a solution in our waking lives.

I don't think we'll ever understand it all....but by being open to what you feel and think about upon awakening can give you a better sense of who you are and what challenges you are facing in your life.

Answer 3

Most people dream, some people chase and realize their dreams. Understanding dreams however is the key. A dream can be defined as experience of voices, events etc in our imagination or in mind. Oneirology is the study of dreams in humans. Human history is riddled with instances where dreams have been studied scientifically or have been a source of inspiration for artists as well. What is lesser known fact is that even animals dream.

Answer 4

Dreams are very important and there's an increasing amount of research about them. The famous psychologist Carl Jung spent most of his life studying and cataloguing metaphors and symbols in human experience - i.e. mother, father, home, country, love, hate, etc. and discovered that we all have an internal symbolism which our psyche uses to speak to our conscous selves, but the exact symbolic language varies between individuals based on their nationality, community and associations. He was one of the originators of dream-research, because he maintained that this was where our inner metaphors/symbols express themselves unrestricted by conscious interpretation. Since then, much more research has been done which has revealed that dreams are a way of our hidden selves "conversing" with our conscious selves. It was long held that dreaming was the result of synapses firing in the brain as it shuffled and catalogued stored information into long-term memory, however researchers now increasingly believe that dreams perform a more mysterious purpose. As a Christian, I subscribe to the view that we each have a spirit - the part of us that was breathed by God - as well as emotions, mind and a body; the spirit is timeless and never sleeps and highly intelligent and aware, and I believe dreaming is the process of where the spirit reveals its concerns, joys, wants or feelings to our conscious mind. This may occur at a time as the brain is reorganising stored information, but not as a result of it. Because the brain and the spirit are so entirely different, the brain interprets the movements and impressions of our spirits as metaphorical or symbolic images with basic or primitive emotions - fear, love, lust, happiness, uncertainty, desire, etc... Many psychologists and spiritual advisors believe that we should record and contemplate our dreams and try to "decode" them in order to work out what our hidden - and often more perceptive - part of ourselves is trying to say to our conscious part. In support of this, it is known that the brain sifts out all but the most relevant information that it receives and either discards or stockpiles the rest to avoid sensory overload. When we grow tired, our brain is less efficient at this, and we start to perceive things that we wouldn't at the beginning of the day, such as a grumbling pain like a low-throbbing tooth.

Answer 5

I believ a bit of both. I learnt in psychology about different theories, being random cells firing in your brain, or problem solving. I find when I have vivid dreams (that you cn remember) that I can piece them together as being thing I have seen during the day, almost like you brain is sorting through its thoughts, like when you are stressed your dreams are likely to be more vivd and maybe scary as these are the thoughts in your mind.

Answer 6

I hope its just me unwinding from the day because if they meant anything else, I would be very afraid for society and myself. I have VERY weird dreams.

Answer 7

Spirita Explains Your Dreams
Visit http://spirita.blogspot.com/ and post your question as a comment.

Answer 8

its our brains way of putting the information we gained in the day into an entertainting distraction

Answer 9

I must dream but I never recall my dreams when I wake up , never !

Answer 10

i hope they don't have any meaning, as twice i have dreamt of an aeroplane crashing and i'm going away in two weeks time.