Dream Along
When you are sleeping, you are entering the mysterious and fascinating world of dreams, where the rules of reality do not apply.
Your dreams are unique; no other individual can have your personal circumstances, your emotions or your experiences. Thus, your own dreams can only be connected to your own “reality”.
By learning to understand dreams, you will gain a clearer view of personal relationships, an uncensored view of your real feelings and a better perspective on life-issues.
The majority of our dreaming is undertaken during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. Adults dream every night for a total of 1½ – 3 hours. For reasons that are unknown, males dream of males more often than females dream of males. This sexual asymmetry is universal.
The images we see in our dreams are actually symbols, personal to the individual, meaning that their uniqueness is only relevant to the dreamer. Dream symbols are the images that are featured in a dream, such as a building, a relative, an animal, etc. Although dreams can be interpreted in a literal sense, most are metaphorical. It is a general consensus that the structure of dreams is comprised of four phases rather like the structure of a play
The word metaphor comes from a Greek word meaning to “transfer” or “carry across.” Metaphors “carry” meaning from one word, image, or idea to another. A metaphor is a figure of speech in which an implied comparison is made between two unlike things that actually have something important in common. For example, a person may dream of their office building on fire and the fire being put out. Metaphorically, the office could represent the dreamer’s career. The fire being put out may represent a dousing of the dreamer’s passion. Thus, the dreamer is subconsciously coming to the realization that there is dissatisfaction with his or her job.
I frequently dream of being in the workplace. My colleagues and bosses are a mix of those from three former employers, now all working for one company. Each dream may have a different combination of people I had worked with but my specific role is always as it was.
Dream meaning: The people who appear in dreams are the characters with which we write the ‘play’ of our lives. Their importance means that their appearance in our dreams will either be comforting or distressing, depending on the circumstances in the dream.
My dreams are nearly always distressing; usually late in getting a task finished on time or sometimes one of the three bosses (different employers) giving me a reprimand.
One dream I had, I cannot forget: I met a woman while walking down the street who invited me into her house for a coffee. Once there, she enticed me to an upstairs bedroom and then without notice locked me in the room and left. Rather than wait to see what would happen when she returned, I escaped out the window by tying sheets together and lowering myself down them. I even made it home in time for dinner without needing an explanation for what happened.
Dream Meaning: Experiencing being kidnapped in a dream is our unconscious making us aware that we are being held captive by our own “demons”.
Rather than worrying about my demons, I keep wondering what would have transpired if I had stayed in that bedroom until she did return!
Many of my dreams take place when I was a youth and usually involve my mother or father or both. The don’t represent what actually took place but are an exaggeration of something that could have occurred.
To dream of the deceased: If they were close to us, it denotes strong emotive connections to them. It acknowledges that we may have unresolved issues with the person or persons in the dream.
Maybe it was because in the case of my parents I always thought I was smarter than them but didn’t realize that I wasn’t until years later. That would have made many issues never to be resolved.
A lucid dream is any dream during which the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. During lucid dreaming, the dreamer may be able to exert some degree of control over the dream characters, narrative, and environment. I have been practicing this by repeating before I fall asleep, “I am in control of dream tonight.” If able to master this technique, it provides a chance to play around with the extraordinary abilities buried in unused parts of your brain. Regardless of who you are in real life, lucid dreaming is a way for you to put the deepest areas of your brain to good use while you’re sleeping. All the obstacles of reality can be set aside, as you make trips to the sun or the interior of the earth or test your craziest science experiments on your worst enemies. Someone who has become lucid has much higher levels of awareness. I have had some success such as altering an uncomfortable situation into ones that were pleasing.
We can’t talk about dreams without bringing Sigmund Freud into the picture. He was the founder of Freudian dream analysis and believed that dreams are an expression of a repressed wish, mostly an erotic one, that we would rather not admit to. An unfulfilled dream being an unfulfilled wish is indicative of conflict within the psyche. In deciphering dreams, Freud believed this conflict could be resolved via the use of a technique called free association. But at the end of the day, psychology is a “soft science”. It cannot provide hard core evidence similar to DNA testing. The best it can offer is to suggest that in such-and-such a situation, a certain percentage of people, are likely to do such-and-such. Consequently, most of Freud’s work is considered to be outdated. It does seem a bit hypocritical considering how obsessed many people are with sex?
Most of us have had typical dreams of running down a busy street stark naked, falling from a high building or flirting with someone other than your partner (keep it on the down low).
Dreams are informative. Paul McCartney had a simple dream that inspired the song ‘Yesterday”, the most covered song of all time. Poor Abe Lincoln had one that predicted his own death. Be careful what you wish for.
Since everyone dreams, wouldn’t it make sense to learn how to remember more of your dreams and direct them to a more favourable outcome and rewarding you with a blueprint of what the future will be. I have some plans I am dreaming of!
