Dream a Little Dream of Me: What Your Dreams Really Mean

Drifting off to sleep, your mind wanders away from the stresses of your day, your body relaxes and your mind begins moving toward the deep recesses of REM sleep.  Look out Alice, Wonderland is going bye-bye!

Dreams are one of the ultimate mysteries; if you’re able to remember your dreams you’re one step ahead of many people, though in some cases you might be better off in the dark.  Esoteric fantasies, wet dreams, nightmares, fright-mares, night terrors and just plain weirdness invade your mind when you fall asleep.  It all begs one question…what the hell did that dream mean?  Though, before we can really explore the meaning behind dream imagery, we need to first identify what dreams are.

Psychologists and other doctors and scientists believe that dreams serve several purposes, not the least of which is essentially a decompiling of the information, emotions, stresses and happenings of our conscious world, by our subconscious supercomputer of a brain.  Think of your personal computer’s defragmentation process, moving segmented bits of information around on the hard drive, arranging them in a more logical manner, scanning for errors and bits of missing information, resolving computing conflicts and making things just a little more efficient.  For the most part that’s what’s happening inside your head when you slumber, though, like a young child watching a complicated horror-suspense film, it’s hard to comprehend the flashing images, intense smells (and sometimes sounds) and just plain strange situations we find ourselves in throughout the dreamscape that is our subconscious mind.

While the purpose of dreams can be answered easily through a little well directed research and a whole lot of reading, deciphering the meaning behind the highly variant and subjective symbolism in dreams is a very different story; a story with only one character and many different sub-plots.

The first thing to remember when interpreting dream imagery is that virtually all dreams are representations of some part or several parts of your own personality.  This means that the horrible dream you refuse to admit you’ve had, the one that had you fornicating with a person or persons whom you find completely unattractive or even repulsive in real life, is not what you think it is.

The purpose here is not to provide yet another dictionary of dream imagery; rather, it is to provide some basic interpretive tools that can be used to shine some context or perspective on the dark places of the mind, and ultimately to better understand ourselves in the process.