Where do Dream Meanings Come From?

Blog Post by TellMeMyDream.com

Some people have supernatural powers to interpret dreams. The ancient Mesopotamians considered dreams a form of communication with God and kept detailed records of symbols and themes. Dreams were considered prophetic omens of special significance.

These cultures used a method called incubation, in which they slept in sacred places and waited in their dreams for the divinely inspired messages. Many cultures built practices around their belief that dreams meant something when they came, and that they told people about the connection between the world and themselves.

Jean-Marie Husser, professor of the history of religion at the University of Strasbourg, notes that people in the Old Testament world saw dreams as a means of access to divine wisdom, citing the stories of Samuel and Daniel and Biaam as examples. In the course of the history of the interpretation of dreams, many cultures, from ancient currents, have relied on dreams as a form of communication and attached importance and content to our nocturnal processing. We use and analyze our dreams symbolically to reflect personal experiences, but dreams are not seen as internal processing.

The interpretation of dreams was first taken up by the participants in psychoanalysis at the end of the 19th century who believed that the manifest content of a dream could be analysed to reveal its latent meaning in the psyche of the dreamer. While Freud suggested that certain symbols represented certain unconscious thoughts, Jung believed that dreams were personal, and that their interpretation required a great deal of knowledge about the individual dreamers. Dream analysis, also called dream interpretation, is based on the idea that one is emotionally bound to the meaning of one's dreams.

While there is no definitive evidence of what dreams are made of, it is generally accepted that dreams are a collection of thoughts, problems, emotions, events, people, places and symbols which are relevant in any way for the dreamer. Some dream subjects that have been studied have been shown to be more common than others.

One study found that 81.5% of participants had a dream in which they hunt someone, 76.6% had a dream of a sexual experience, and 73.8% had dreams of falling.

Other typical dreams, such as teeth loss, can be traced to experiences in our early childhood, says Nielsen. Nielsen adds that insights into this area are speculative because limited information exists. Most dreams have a kind of feeling in them that comes from the real emotions you've experienced, says Lisa Medalie, a sleep medicine specialist at the University of Chicago.

However, certain dreams have a meaning that is attributed to them for a reason, and others are important to many people. Here is a short list of dreams that many people have experienced and how they have been interpreted in popular culture. In this article we will explore modern possibilities of dream interpretation and discuss the nine most common dream remedies.

Scientists have yet to find out exactly how the brain stimulates the memory and dreaming process, but there are various hypotheses. It seems that some people support Freudian dream theory, because dreams under this theory reveal hidden emotions and desires. Other theories say that dreams help us solve problems, that memory formation in dreams occurs through random brain activation.

Modern psychologists and neurologists equipped with imaging devices such as PET scans and MRIs have taken things to a deeper, more technical level, speculating that dreams are the brains way of disposing of excess data, consolidating important information, beware of dangers and much more. The least glamorous explanation for dreaming is that it serves as a kind of data dump, a purge of days of useless memory caching for more valuable ones.

When data flows from the computer screen into the dormant mind, it is ripped away and stitched together into a crazy patchwork of dreams that resembles the literal content of information. There are many theories to explain why we dream but no one understands its purpose, let alone how to interpret the meaning of dreams. People, according to these theories, construct dream stories when they wake up in a natural attempt to give meaning to the whole.

Others, such as Cartwright and Kaszniak, have suggested that the interpretation of dreams says more about the interpreter of the interpretation than the meaning of the dream itself. Jungian dream analysis is based on Jung's conviction that it is not helpful if the interpretation resonates with the dreamer. Dreams are seen as an attempt to express something created in an effort to suppress or obscure something else, as in Freud's psychoanalysis.

The majority of people seem to interpret dream contents in the United States, India and South Korea according to Freudian psychoanalysis as studies in these countries show. This seems to lead people to attach more importance to dream content than similar thought content that occurs when they are awake.

From their perspective, neurocognitive dream models indicate that dreams are tied to neurological memory consolidation processes, but that does not mean that they are random. Scientific hypotheses have tried to explain dreams to explain everything from the lack of critical thinking to the poor decisions people make when they don't get the right amount of sleep.

According to this theory, the most important function of what dream researchers call "anxiety dreams" is to help us process and calm down our stressful experiences to avoid feeling overwhelmed in our waking lives with negative emotions. Tore Nielsen and Ross Levin believe that the story our brains weave from random dream images is at least partly driven by our emotional state. The self-organization theory of dreams assumes that dreams are a by-product of the physical and mental state of dreamers during sleep, which distinguishes between manifest and latent dreams, and that the point at which dreams function is the result of information processing and self-organization in the sleeping brain as Freud suggested.

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