Posts Tagged ‘non-rational mind’

Are Dreams Meaningless?

The opinion that dreams are meaningless was frequently encountered while researching this book. People with this belief usually prescribe to the theory that dreams are flotsam of the mind, random wanderings of thought and feelings while the body and personality sleep. This approach to dreams arose from the rationalist view of human life and mind, from a lack of acquaintance with dreams, or from some areas of recent scientific research.. This view is not new. Shakespeare says “True, I talk of dreams, Which are the children of an idle brain, Begot of nothing but vain fantasy.”

The old concept of our dreaming mind tumbling through random bits of memory and imagination without any function or point was more recently enhanced or qualified by the theory arising from neurological research, that the sleeping brain uses dreaming as a sort of refuse disposal function. This is of course only one of many different scientific theories about dreams. Unfortunately it is one that has been grasped by people skeptical of the range of dream phenomena. When doing a computer search in the Bodleian Library in Oxford for recent papers on dream research that appeared in scientific journals, over three thousand papers were listed. In looking through abstracts of these, the spectrum of viewpoints is enormous. Certainly they do not as a whole point to refuse/flotsam theory.

I can see that any person who has not really explored a dream by getting into the unconscious would see the dream made up of different images and see it as all disconnected. But similarly words on paper are made up of disconnected images or ideas, and it takes an overall view of the words to see that they make up a whole sentence which when put together has meaning. And all the disconnected images in dreams also needs a mind which understands the meaning behind all the separated images – it needs understanding of our tendency to associated feelings and thoughts to everything we see.

As an example I was recently asked by a man who had given no thought to dreams how on earth you could extract any meaning from them. He was wearing a fairly old T-shirt, so I said, “OK, lets imagine you dreamt of your T-shirt, what would you make of that?”

After a while he said, “I don’t know that I would make anything of it.”

My response was to say, “Right, but now tell me where you bought the T-shirt, and what memories it has for you.” Whereupon he told me, with some hesitation his memories of being in the USA, and that the shirt was part of memories that he didn’t want to talk about. Not only did he realise he had very powerful associations with the T-Shirt, but he wanted to hide them. See Associations Working With

One of the most carefully researched of recent scientific statements is that of Allan Hobson in his various papers and his book The Dreaming Brain.(5) Hobson rejects the idea of dreams being flotsam of the brain, but he does say they are constructed from random bits of memory and feeling responses. Like some other investigators, Dement for instance, who examined the fact that while dreaming the brain is shut off from external sensory stimuli. During this shutdown from external stimuli, and while dreaming, the brain is said to fire randomly, producing imagery and experience. Hobson says that because of the innate tendency of the brain to interpret and give meaning to sensory input, while dreaming, which appears to be real sensory input, we create some sort of order. The order, or theme of the dream, depends upon personal fears, hopes, predispositions and preoccupations. So although dreaming is said to originate in a random way, Hobson and Dement say the outcome can be examined to give clear information about the person who dreamt it because it was shaped by the dreamer’s predispositions. Hobson goes so far as to disagree with Freud that dreams have hidden and censored meaning. He believes that dreams are in fact transparently obvious in what they show of the dreamer’s feelings and motivations.

This approach to the possible meaning of dreams is not unlike the modern way medicine deals with things like urine, blood and tissue samples. These parts of the body and its products are not in themselves meaningful, but through examining them in particular ways we can gain immense amounts of information about the person. Researchers like Hall particularly looked at dreams in this way, searching a series of dreams for insight into the dreamer. But Jung had also mentioned this approach. This dream sampling is one of the easiest ways to discover insights, and will be dealt with more fully later.

The theories underlying quantum mechanics are very similar. Some of the latest thinking in connection with physics states that a careful examination of the phenomena underlying the physical world suggests that we can never finally know what reality is. All we do is give a name or definition to an observable aspect of the phenomena, and in observing and naming it, in some way we create what we call reality. So the argument which surrounds dreams – do they have an innate meaning – may be relevant to every aspect of our daily life.

But if we truly investigate dreams we find something quite different. See Answer to Critics – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams

Here are examples:

Examples: Just before his title fight in 1947, Sugar Ray Robinson dreamt he was in the ring with Doyle. ‘I hit him a few good punches and he was on his back, his blank eyes staring up at me.’ Doyle never moved and the crowd were shouting ‘He’s dead! He’s dead!’ He was so upset by the dream Robinson asked Adkins, his trainer and promoter, to call off the fight. Adkins told him, ‘Dreams don’t come true. If they did I’d be a millionaire.’ In the eighth round Doyle went down from a left hook to the jaw. He never got up, and died the next day.

Example: When my wife and I were trying to sell our house and advertised nationally without success, my wife told me that she dreamt that if I put a notice in the window the fist people passing would buy the house. I put the notice in the window and that evening a young couple knocked on our door and told us they had seen the notice in the morning and were interested. They went ahead and bought the house.

Dream Meanings

Albert Einstein admitted that the earliest intimations of his Theory of Relativity occurred to him in a dream he experienced during adolescence. In his dream he was riding on a sledge. As the sledge accelerated faster and faster it approached the speed of light and the stars began to distort. They changed their pattern and colours, dazzling him with the beauty and power of their transformation. He said that in many ways his entire scientific career was an extended meditation on that dream.

The meaning Einstein extracted from his dream has helped shape the quality of our life today. But Einstein is not alone in having meaningful dreams. Each dream you have enshrines some facet of yourself or life. But if you fail to ‘meditate’ upon its truth, the creative impulse of your dream-genius may be lost. See – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams

True, some dreams hardly need much thought to be understood. Mary, who suffered a chronic vaginal yeast infection following the use of antibiotics, had been advised to try folic acid (one of the B vitamins). As the prescribed medical treatment had not helped she followed the advice. After a few days she experienced unusual cramping and dreamt she was in her kitchen wondering what to do with bowls and bowls of acid. A raggedy kitten came to her and she fed it brown bread with yeast and strawberries. The kitten gobbled it up.

She looked to her dreams

She habitually looked to her dreams for helpful information and considered the bowls as referring to the folic acid. Because the kitten (her pussy) looked a bit poorly, she felt it represented her physical health. So she stopped taking the folic acid and added yeast tablets and more vitamin C (the strawberries) to her diet. The cramps disappeared and within a few days the infection was on its way out too.

In most cases, however, our dreams are more obscure. We might unwrap them from their enigma if we ignore the symbols for a while and consider what feelings are experienced. Neal, for instance, was in his early forties and worked as a builder/decorator, a job he disliked. His real love was writing, but he had never made enough money from this to support himself and family, and felt depressed as he saw his fifties approaching. He was- considering moving to where he might find less demanding work, and dreamt he was in a bicycle rally. Each participant started from their home. In the dream Neal lived near the bottom of a huge hill. It took him till midday to cycle to the top. Then the way was flat, and he realised he would cover much more ground in the afternoon and evening.

Stripping away the symbols, the first feeling is of a long uphill struggle. This was exactly how Neal felt about his life. It had been a long struggle, and even though he hadn’t given up, he didn’t feel he was getting anywhere. The second half of the dream felt satisfying though, and this led Neal to see the dream as saying the first half of his life – the morning – had been an up hill struggle, but he would cover a lot more ground in the ‘afternoon’. He gave up his plans to move, and within three months was offered work with a newspaper.

The Theme Is …

When the connections between the feelings experienced or suggested in the dream, and our everyday life are found, it can help understand the dream further if we consider its theme, or setting. Neal’s cycle rally, for example, has the theme of trying to get somewhere in relationship with other people. It is interesting that Neal is not in a race but a rally. This shows he does not feel in competition with the rest of the world.

This technique helps us understand the dream of a woman whose thirteen year old son was sneaking out when he thought his parents were asleep, to meet the girl next door. “I dreamt my son is assembling a new bike in his bedroom. His dad is very proud of his workmanship, but I unintentionally carry the handlebars downstairs. His older brother carries them back though.”

The overall theme is about how the family relates to the younger son’s independent creativity. The bedroom suggests his private sexuality, and the mother realised she was not helping him guide – the handlebars – his new sexual drive.

These two techniques – finding the underlying feeling, and defining the theme – will help understand most dreams. We must not forget, however, that some of our dreams express a sense of humour and a love of playing with words. Dr. Hadfield tells the story of an amorous young woman who had spent all day serving ice cream at a fete. That night while dreaming, she talked in her sleep, ‘No, I have no more cornets,’ she said, ‘but I can let you have a trombone!’ The in and out movement of the instrument suggests what may have been on her mind.

One woman on holiday dreamt a baby pig in a dress ran to her as she sat at a table. She recognised it as her pet, and wanted to take it home. But she realised it would grow into a big fat pig if kept. Her comment on the dream was that while one can safely be a ‘little piggy’ on holiday, if continued at home it could develop into a big fat problem.

10,000 Dreams Defined