Dreams What are They and What Do they Mean?

reply to post by Darkphoenix77


In my opinion, the perpetual flow of thought is a chaotic torrent of memories. When we're awake, we can utilize this torrent, in combination with the senses and experience, to make sense and conceptualize the goings on around us.

When we're asleep, and without the senses to grab ahold of this fire-hose of imagination, there is no way to connect our thought to the reality happening around us, and as a result, we float in the lake of our imagination.

Originally posted by XsweetNspiceyX
reply to post by Darkphoenix77

 

I think dreams allow us to tap into our fantasies,sub consciousness, and on a spiritual level other dimensions and parallel universes. It's amazing the wide variety of things you can dream about. I know I like to dream it's a nice little vacation from the harsh reality of this universe.

Indeed! I cannot even count the amounts of times I have dreamt about being able to fly "Superman" style above the trees local to where I lived as a child, and the amount of times I flew to locales that resembled something out of a post apocalyptic nightmare with people living outside burnt out hovels of industrial buildings that have been destroyed, usually with the dreams setting being night time but not always.

I normally love dreaming as an escape from the pressures of daily life and think that it is necessary function. Is it any wonder that those that don't dream suffer from a psychological disorder? Thanks for the post, and great point

I have lot's of dream's that were very vivid and I will never forget...but there is one I had 20 year's ago that I have never been able to forget! Somehow I have always believed this dream had some meaning...not sure I will ever find it though. Although an event in my life 4 year's ago, whilst didn't exactly mirror the dream had similarities that haunted me!

On two other occasion's I have dreamt something so vivid that I have woken up very startled and so affected by it that it as made me get out of bed right then and there in the early hours and go check on something.

Once I dreamt that one of my toddler twins had hung herself from the pull cord on the blind's in her bedroom...it was so real that I had to go get up and go in her room.When I got there the safety device that stored the pull cord had worked itself off and the cord was exposed and hanging down!

The other time I dreamt again that my same twin daughter had woken and gone in the bathroom and drowned in a full bath tub while I slept. I abruptly got up and checked the bathroom and the bath was full of water...I'm usually very careful and never leave the used bath water in the tub but for whatever reason that night I obviously had!

I'm not saying that if i hadn't acted on those dream's they actually would have come to pass...but they sure as hell alerted me to a potentially dangerous situation I hadn't been aware of on a conscious level. Infact I'm sure I've had more dream's like that that I have felt compelled to act on the moment I awoke but i can't for the life of me remember more than the two I mentioned.

Originally posted by NiNjABackflip
reply to post by Darkphoenix77

 

In my opinion, the perpetual flow of thought is a chaotic torrent of memories. When we're awake, we can utilize this torrent, in combination with the senses and experience, to make sense and conceptualize the goings on around us.

When we're asleep, and without the senses to grab ahold of this fire-hose of imagination, there is no way to connect our thought to the reality happening around us, and as a result, we float in the lake of our imagination.

Part of what makes dreaming so magical an experience in my opinion. Thanks for posting!

Originally posted by Logos23
I have lot's of dream's that were very vivid and I will never forget...but there is one I had 20 year's ago that I have never been able to forget! Somehow I have always believed this dream had some meaning...not sure I will ever find it though. Although an event in my life 4 year's ago, whilst didn't exactly mirror the dream had similarities that haunted me!

On two other occasion's I have dreamt something so vivid that I have woken up very startled and so affected by it that it as made me get out of bed right then and there in the early hours and go check on something.

Once I dreamt that one of my toddler twins had hung herself from the pull cord on the blind's in her bedroom...it was so real that I had to go get up and go in her room.When I got there the safety device that stored the pull cord had worked itself off and the cord was exposed and hanging down!

The other time I dreamt again that my same twin daughter had woken and gone in the bathroom and drowned in a full bath tub while I slept. I abruptly got up and checked the bathroom and the bath was full of water...I'm usually very careful and never leave the used bath water in the tub but for whatever reason that night I obviously had!

I'm not saying that if i hadn't acted on those dream's they actually would have come to pass...but they sure as hell alerted me to a potentially dangerous situation I hadn't been aware of on a conscious level. Infact I'm sure I've had more dream's like that that I have felt compelled to act on the moment I awoke but i can't for the life of me remember more than the two I mentioned.

Dreams that involve people that we have a connection to are in my experience alot more vivid and memorable. Though not precognitive in the strictest sense of the term, those you had are indicitive of your subconscious alerting you to a danger that you didn't realize at the time. I am game to the possibilty that they had the "potential" to be precognitive dreams.

Originally posted by csuldm
reply to post by The Cusp

 

You said that dreams are a direct reflection of what you have your attention focused on, but then you said they have no meaning. I personally feel that is a contradictory statement.

If you have things in your life that are making their way into your dreams, then you must be preoccupied with them while in an awake state. Therefore dreams do have at least a little bit of a meaning, as you can use the topics of your dreams to self-diagnose things that are making your waking life that much more complicated or stressful.

In other words, maybe dreams are a way for your brain to heal itself, in a way?

edit on 24-1-2013 by csuldm because: (no reason given)

They do have meaning, an internal logic, but those meanings are so blatantly obvious once you understand what's happening as to be completely useless. They are not the mystical revelations some people make them out to be.

Everything in a dream is an archetype. A nexus point where associations converge. Like the game show Family Fued where the topic is "things you find in a hospital". The hospital archetype has association to doctors, nurses, needles, operations. By focusing on the hospital archetype, it will begin to manifest it's varied associations until once of those manifested associations become the new dominant focal point and in turn manifests it's associations. I call this "archetypal chaining".

You may uncover associations you didn't know you had made, so you could find meaning in that. But I've never seen a dream interpretation take that into consideration. And rarely are those association shocking, for the most part they are blatantly obvious.

I'm not saying there is nothing to be learned from dreams. I've spent the majority of my life studying them, and have come to the conclusion that dreams are an expression of duality. The waveform counterpart to our waking particle reality. Dream control works at the quantum level, and everything you learn about dream control is directly applicable to the waking world. All so called magical systems are based on this. In my opinion at least.

I daresay I've helped thousands of people with dream control issues. I'm not asking anyone to believe what I'm saying. There is no such thing as belief, only archetypal structures or paradigms. In fact I implore people to explore this for themselves.

Check my epic thread on dream control
www.dreamviews.com...

reply to post by Darkphoenix77


Yeah that's how I felt about them to be honest...that maybe they were things I had missed on a conscious level but sub consciously maybe it influenced my dream's.....

I also dreamt that my daughter was pregnant and it was very vivid indeed....when I told her about it she started to cry and confessed she had found out that morning that she was pregnant and hadn't told me because she was struggling with how to react herself even.

Again...although in my mind I hadn't had a clue she was pregnant....sub consciously I believe I had "picked up" on it with maybe very subtle changes in behaviour or hormones etc. I find it amazing that dream's may be a catalyst for all those sub conscious thought's we aren't even aware of.

Originally posted by Logos23
reply to post by Darkphoenix77

 

Yeah that's how I felt about them to be honest...that maybe they were things I had missed on a conscious level but sub consciously maybe it influenced my dream's.....

I also dreamt that my daughter was pregnant and it was very vivid indeed....when I told her about it she started to cry and confessed she had found out that morning that she was pregnant and hadn't told me because she was struggling with how to react herself even.

Again...although in my mind I hadn't had a clue she was pregnant....sub consciously I believe I had "picked up" on it with maybe very subtle changes in behaviour or hormones etc. I find it amazing that dream's may be a catalyst for all those sub conscious thought's we aren't even aware of.

Quite possible, we as a species have not even scratched the surface of what our minds are capable of and that is something that I think anyone can find facinating. Even excluding the belief that dreams can have outside influences in our lives the possibilities of internal influences in thoughts and behavior is astounding.

reply to post by The Cusp


I had a very quick glimpse at the thread you posted.....It's silly o'clock here , but I will return to it tomorrow when I will be in a better state to digest it and give it the consideration it deserves

I've entertained the thought that our dreams mirror death, as we escape into a transcendental world.
As for number 3 in your list of dream facts...how can anyone really be for sure that we don't ever dream up a new face? Impossible to know!

reply to post by The Cusp


That was a great response! Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

You definitely brought up many interesting points for which I will research further.

You mentioned that you've spent the majority of your life studying them. Do you mind if I ask what sparked your interest?

Thanks again!

Originally posted by elrem48
I've entertained the thought that our dreams mirror death, as we escape into a transcendental world.
As for number 3 in your list of dream facts...how can anyone really be for sure that we don't ever dream up a new face? Impossible to know!

I personally can't prove it, but if you consider the amount of people a person even by the age of 2 is able to at the very least get a glance of it does make sense. I am just going by what I have found online.

reply to post by Darkphoenix77


Sorry, I don't mean to pick apart what you stated, however it reminds me of how researchers say animals don't think, see colors, etc. I have always wondered with my small mind...how can they truly know? BTW, thank you for a very well-detailed thread on this subject, which stirs so many people to consider what dreaming really is.

Originally posted by elrem48
reply to post by Darkphoenix77

 

Sorry, I don't mean to pick apart what you stated, however it reminds me of how researchers say animals don't think, see colors, etc. I have always wondered with my small mind...how can they truly know? BTW, thank you for a very well-detailed thread on this subject, which stirs so many people to consider what dreaming really is.

Heh, no problem, you're welcome it is just something I have been thinking to write about for a while and finally got off my butt to actually do it. I don't mind if it gets picked apart, or if people offer up alternate opinions, that is why i wrote about it. Like you said, who can actually know for sure unless you have actually experienced life as an "animal" in question. I think it is safe to assume that most if not all mammals do dream just based on watching the sleeping habits from them. As far as the seeing color vs. seeing black and white thing I can think of no way to prove it one way or another. I am of the opinion that animals do think, maybe not in the way we think, and maybe not with our level of intelligence, but they are capable of thought. If they weren't how would it even be possible to train them?

Originally posted by csuldm
reply to post by The Cusp

 

That was a great response! Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

You definitely brought up many interesting points for which I will research further.

You mentioned that you've spent the majority of your life studying them. Do you mind if I ask what sparked your interest?

Thanks again!

Partly the night terrors I had as a child which had the platonic solids in them. Why would my 5 year old self even know what the platonic solids are? I've recently concluded that childhood night terrors are cognitive dissonance in the part of the brain that deals with spatial relations.

You can see that the majority of the night terror descriptions in this thread have to do with spatial relations in one form or another (geometric shapes, size discrepancies, feelings of motion, sound)
www.dreamviews.com...

The other was the the works of Carlos Castaneda. When my friends were getting into drugs in high school, I hit the library to do some research and came across his books which led me to have my first lucid dreams before I even knew what they were called.

Originally posted by elrem48
As for number 3 in your list of dream facts...how can anyone really be for sure that we don't ever dream up a new face? Impossible to know!

Think of every facial feature and characteristic you've ever seen as an individual lego piece. Every time you see something new, you acquire a new piece. The dream uses these pieces to create the dream world. The dream can create new combinations out of existing pieces. This is why strange dream characters often seem familiar, they are built out of familiar parts.

Now consider you encounter some sort of entity in a dream that is completely alien to you. The dream still has to represent this unknown using familiar parts, like trying to build a lego space ship out of a medieval lego set, using castle spires for nose cones and flag poles for laser cannons.

Like that story how when the first native americans saw the pilgrim ships arriving, they didn't see actual boats, but instead saw things that were relevant to their paradigms. No way to know if that's true or not, but that's the basic idea.

Dreaming is so fascinating to me! I love to hear and analyze other people dreams as well as my own. From my own experiences in life I do believe that they hold some type of significance whether it be psychological, spiritual, metaphysical, or just some way our brain process memories and events. Since I was a child I have had very vivid dreams. I dream of people I haven't seen or heard from that suddenly pop up in my life. Sometimes I will be going about my day when something happens that suddenly helps me to remember my dream in extreme detail. I have tried writing them down but they are so elaborate I simply cannot spend the first hour of my day writing down my dreams. I have become aware that I am dreaming many times but usually become to excited or the dream then becomes hazy or unrecognizable. There has been more then one occasion in my life where I have had reoccurring dreams or reoccurring circumstances in dreams that promote the same feelings of things that actually did occur later on in life. How is it possible to feel you have obtained knowledge of something happening in a dream before it actually happens in real life? To me that is enough evidence to KNOW my dreams are more then just random neurons firing in my brain creating random images. I don't buy it! I love going to sleep and feel gifted to have to experiences I get to have in my dreams and always feel sad for those who say "I never remember my dreams."

Also I have heard about this a few times and I think it would be really cool and beneficial to one day actually be able to record our unconscious mind! GO SCIENCE!

www.gizmodo.com.au...

reply to post by The Cusp


I have never experienced night terrors, but from what little I have read they sound terrifying and the wiki page only alluded to the fact that they are nothing like nightmares.

Originally posted by misoginger
Dreaming is so fascinating to me! I love to hear and analyze other people dreams as well as my own. From my own experiences in life I do believe that they hold some type of significance whether it be psychological, spiritual, metaphysical, or just some way our brain process memories and events. Since I was a child I have had very vivid dreams. I dream of people I haven't seen or heard from that suddenly pop up in my life. Sometimes I will be going about my day when something happens that suddenly helps me to remember my dream in extreme detail. I have tried writing them down but they are so elaborate I simply cannot spend the first hour of my day writing down my dreams. I have become aware that I am dreaming many times but usually become to excited or the dream then becomes hazy or unrecognizable. There has been more then one occasion in my life where I have had reoccurring dreams or reoccurring circumstances in dreams that promote the same feelings of things that actually did occur later on in life. How is it possible to feel you have obtained knowledge of something happening in a dream before it actually happens in real life? To me that is enough evidence to KNOW my dreams are more then just random neurons firing in my brain creating random images. I don't buy it! I love going to sleep and feel gifted to have to experiences I get to have in my dreams and always feel sad for those who say "I never remember my dreams."

Also I have heard about this a few times and I think it would be really cool and beneficial to one day actually be able to record our unconscious mind! GO SCIENCE!

www.gizmodo.com.au...

Instead of writing them down, keep a recorder near your bed on a nightstand or something. When you wake up record everything from your dream as you can talk alot faster than you can write. When you have finished recording then go back and write/type your dream in a journal, it makes it easier to remember details this way if you are interested in remembering what you dreamt about or want to explore and analyze your dream.

Originally posted by Darkphoenix77

Originally posted by misoginger
Dreaming is so fascinating to me! I love to hear and analyze other people dreams as well as my own. From my own experiences in life I do believe that they hold some type of significance whether it be psychological, spiritual, metaphysical, or just some way our brain process memories and events. Since I was a child I have had very vivid dreams. I dream of people I haven't seen or heard from that suddenly pop up in my life. Sometimes I will be going about my day when something happens that suddenly helps me to remember my dream in extreme detail. I have tried writing them down but they are so elaborate I simply cannot spend the first hour of my day writing down my dreams. I have become aware that I am dreaming many times but usually become to excited or the dream then becomes hazy or unrecognizable. There has been more then one occasion in my life where I have had reoccurring dreams or reoccurring circumstances in dreams that promote the same feelings of things that actually did occur later on in life. How is it possible to feel you have obtained knowledge of something happening in a dream before it actually happens in real life? To me that is enough evidence to KNOW my dreams are more then just random neurons firing in my brain creating random images. I don't buy it! I love going to sleep and feel gifted to have to experiences I get to have in my dreams and always feel sad for those who say "I never remember my dreams."

Also I have heard about this a few times and I think it would be really cool and beneficial to one day actually be able to record our unconscious mind! GO SCIENCE!

www.gizmodo.com.au...

Instead of writing them down, keep a recorder near your bed on a nightstand or something. When you wake up record everything from your dream as you can talk alot faster than you can write. When you have finished recording then go back and write/type your dream in a journal, it makes it easier to remember details this way if you are interested in remembering what you dreamt about or want to explore and analyze your dream.

This is the first time I have posted on ATS! I have been a frequent visitor of the site for a while now. Glad I got some good insight right off the bat! That is a great idea. I am sure my phone has some type of application I can download to use to record myself. Thank you for the tip! I will try it in the morning.

Originally posted by misoginger

Originally posted by Darkphoenix77

Originally posted by misoginger
Dreaming is so fascinating to me! I love to hear and analyze other people dreams as well as my own. From my own experiences in life I do believe that they hold some type of significance whether it be psychological, spiritual, metaphysical, or just some way our brain process memories and events. Since I was a child I have had very vivid dreams. I dream of people I haven't seen or heard from that suddenly pop up in my life. Sometimes I will be going about my day when something happens that suddenly helps me to remember my dream in extreme detail. I have tried writing them down but they are so elaborate I simply cannot spend the first hour of my day writing down my dreams. I have become aware that I am dreaming many times but usually become to excited or the dream then becomes hazy or unrecognizable. There has been more then one occasion in my life where I have had reoccurring dreams or reoccurring circumstances in dreams that promote the same feelings of things that actually did occur later on in life. How is it possible to feel you have obtained knowledge of something happening in a dream before it actually happens in real life? To me that is enough evidence to KNOW my dreams are more then just random neurons firing in my brain creating random images. I don't buy it! I love going to sleep and feel gifted to have to experiences I get to have in my dreams and always feel sad for those who say "I never remember my dreams."

Also I have heard about this a few times and I think it would be really cool and beneficial to one day actually be able to record our unconscious mind! GO SCIENCE!

www.gizmodo.com.au...

Instead of writing them down, keep a recorder near your bed on a nightstand or something. When you wake up record everything from your dream as you can talk alot faster than you can write. When you have finished recording then go back and write/type your dream in a journal, it makes it easier to remember details this way if you are interested in remembering what you dreamt about or want to explore and analyze your dream.

This is the first time I have posted on ATS! I have been a frequent visitor of the site for a while now. Glad I got some good insight right off the bat! That is a great idea. I am sure my phone has some type of application I can download to use to record myself. Thank you for the tip! I will try it in the morning.

Welcome to ATS and you're welcome, glad I could offer some advice, it was something I read earlier and makes a lot of sense over just using a journal and pen/pencil.