Do dreams have meaning?

[Nero]

Do dreams have meaning?



Note: Agenda pushers less than welcome!

[Shana A]

I don't always understand my dreams, but I think they sometimes have very profound meanings. At other times though they're just a weird garble of reality and subconscious rambling 

y2g

[SusanK]

Do dreams have meaning?

A psychologist or psychiatrist may say yes or mabye and a neurobiologist will say no. Dreams, from what I've read, are the phases during your sleep to reprocess the day's memories and to refresh the short-term memory for the new day. We actually record far more information during the day we're normally conscious of because we're thinking of other things. In processing the information during our dreams, our mind randomly recalls memories from medium, longterm and permanent memory and process these with the new memories from the day to rewrite new medium and longterm memory, which are the dreams. Many neurobiologist often say you're not really supposed to remember your dreams if you had a complete set of sleep cycles, but some dreams are remembered because they're important to you in or for the next day, and thus are written back into short term memory for you to remember, like schedules, events, etc., or you wake up with new ideas, solutions to problems, and some memories you thought you had forgotten.

As I've read, or maybe it came in a dream?

--Susan--

[lisagurl]

Plus you are not conscience of the details and whole dream so what ever you remember is flawed.

[Lisbeth]

Dreams are the scratch paper your brain uses when it's trying to figure things out.  Interpretting them is alike pulling scratch paper out of the waste basket and recontructing the meeting that generated it.

[Suzie]

Do dreams have meaning?

If you say so.

[Nero]

Do dreams have meaning?

If you say so.

Come again? could you elaborate on that, please?

[Suzie]

Do dreams have meaning?

If you say so.

Come again? could you elaborate on that, please?

If you say that they have meaning they do.  What is meaning?  It is your concept of what is meaningful, right? 

Maybe you need to define what is meaningful in order to properly answer the question you posed, because you could get 6 billion definitions of what is meaningful if you surveyed the world.  Or maybe you need to narrow down your concept of dream.  Are we talking dreams while sleeping?  How about half-awake dreams?  How about irrational random thoughts we have during the day when we are fully awake?

What is meaningful?  Major in philosophy is this is what floats your boat.

[katia]

this is from the inside liner from the book "realities of the dreaming mind":

in Realities of the dreaming mind, Swami Radha presents an effective
technique for working with dreams - a way that is valuable both for
beginners and for experienced practitioners.  she demonstrates the
many types of dreams possible - ranging from decision-making to
prophetic - and shows us how to use dreams to learn our own personal
symbolic language.

I highly recommend this book.  even if you just read parts of
the book and use it as reference I think you will get a lot out of it.

[OtokoSuki]

Mine always does, they give me a mix of events that usually happens to me.

[RebeccaFog]

Only if you learn from them.   

[Attis]

Dreams are part of our biology in that we're animals of perception first and animals of conception second. Our memory systems are so complex that often we can get lost in memories, dreams are just one example of this. Especially, when the day's worth of experiences trigger very old memories. Oddly enough, I can sometimes use dreams to do work on programs or my other work (theory of mind/ai), which is useful, or to even learn something new (going over what I've learned in a class or a book). There may be no inherent meaning to dreams, but this utility to them make them very useful and valuable in my opinion.

[Pica Pica]

I think dreams are sort of mind doodles.

I agree with what as Attis says, they may not inherently mean something, but can be put to use, and can often show parts of the mind or memories that may be lost. I reckon their rough shape and pattern can also give an inkling to your general mental state.

I like to make myself half concious as I find the pictures and sometimes the word combinations that drift together useful in my concious creation

I like 'em.