Interpreting dreams

[Rhinox]

I often dream of being the John Connor of the future of a Zombie Apocalypse.

[BerenTebogo]

Ok kinda freaky cause this happened today and now i come across this thread. My aunt calls me this morning saying that she had a dream of my mother that took place in a picture i have (My mom in a white dress walking down stairs). In the dream my mother is walking down the stairs while my aunt is being bullied, so my mom says that she has to man up and stop letting people run over her, and that she is so happy that I started talking to my step father. Freaky thing about this last week i finally got in contact with my step father who i haven't spoken to in the 11 years,also weird because my aunt hasn't dreamt about my mother since she died which is 11 years ago. I asked my super christian step mom who says that the dead is dead they can't do anything, and my father said that it could be my aunt's sub conscious but i don't believe these at all !

Gonna be nice and just pose a series of questions instead of just saying what is on my mind.

We vividly remember what % of our dreams beyond 10 minutes after we wake up? Less than 1%?

Your aunt has documented all dreams she remembers for the last 11 years so she can really say she hasn't had a dream about your mother in 11 years with certainty instead of, you know, made-up shit?

If your aunt's "sub-conscious" could contact you in any way, any way at all, about any one thing in the entire world that she would think would make your life better, would it be to talk to your step dad again?

Does there exist any person related to either you, your step dad, or your aunt, who may have found this apparently long-existing schism between you and your step dad interesting enough to discuss with another family member once the bond was restored? Isn't it more likely that information spread throughout your family effortlessly, like it always does, and informed your aunt (even if she may not have been paying direct attention!) that your relationship was rekindled than the counter, being that your aunt psychically knew about you and your step dad via dreams, but has never made any such correct assumptions previously?


I mean, I get it, dreams are as miraculous as magnets and giraffes and the world is full of rainbows. Sometimes shit just seems too coincidental to be true when you look at it without all the facts. No harm, no foul. But you say in your post that you don't believe it, after writing up a detailed summary of it, I think you know what is what and have your head on straight and that's good. It's much better to look at it skeptically and then ask yourself questions to test the validity of the story than it is to walk in thinking "MY DREAMS ARE MAGIC AND IT IS UP TO YOU TO PROVE ME WRONG!"

Just trust yourself a bit more. If it sounds too fucking weird to be true, it probably is.

[Max™]

But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves--of
having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something
that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that
I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are
the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about
that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other
scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after
that.

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science,
but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool
the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to
tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your
girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be
a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll
leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about
a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending
over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to
have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as
scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

As a fun bonus, an unrelated, but fantastic quote of his!

One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beautiful girl
sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began
thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this
beautiful nude babe?"

I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her,
"I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?"

"Sure," she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a
massage table nearby.

I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of
anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel
it, "he says. "I feel a kind of dent--is that the pituitary?"

I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!"

They looked at me, horrified--I had blown my cover--and said, "It's
reflexology!"

I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.

[miokomioko]

If you're stating factually what dreams really are, you're just stating a theory as, to this day, they are not fully understood. There are 3 main schools of thought regarding the reasons/causes/etc for dreams. It ranges from just your short-term memory being shuffled into long-term memory and shit getting mixed up there, to the walls of your subconscious breaking down as you fall asleep to reveal your most basic urges and fears. Also a mix of the two.

P.S. I fucking wish I could have lucid dreams. I rarely wake up with a memory of dreaming at all. I just lay my head on a pillow, blink, and wake up to a dog whining to go out and take a dump. Sucks. I think I wake up with the knowledge that I just dreamed about once every 2 weeks.

[Max™]

You can train yourself to increase the likelihood of lucid dreaming, just google it, you'll find a billion pages with tips.

Look down at your hands, right now, and ask yourself if this is a dream, are you awake?

Toss those sorts of self-referential questions into your thinking day by day, you should cycle them in during REM sleep now and then, and with luck realize you're actually asleep.

I had one the other night, was in a crowd milling around, saw Sarah Palin standing there, realized immediately that I was dreaming so I reached out and squeezed her tits, then woke up.

[BerenTebogo]

If you're stating factually what dreams really are, you're just stating a theory as, to this day, they are not fully understood. There are 3 main schools of thought regarding the reasons/causes/etc for dreams. It ranges from just your short-term memory being shuffled into long-term memory and shit getting mixed up there, to the walls of your subconscious breaking down as you fall asleep to reveal your most basic urges and fears. Also a mix of the two.

P.S. I fucking wish I could have lucid dreams. I rarely wake up with a memory of dreaming at all. I just lay my head on a pillow, blink, and wake up to a dog whining to go out and take a dump. Sucks. I think I wake up with the knowledge that I just dreamed about once every 2 weeks.

Would kill for this. Takes me forever to fall asleep even on sleep meds and I remember almost every dream I have right before waking up. Shit is fucking so god damn stupid half the time that I wake up and go, "what the fuck is wrong with me".

[Max™]

Sath, dude, you're dreaming right now, what the fuck is wrong with you?

[BerenTebogo]

We don't take kindly to people who liked "Vanilla Sky" around here, boy.

[Max™]

I've never seen Vanilla Sky, and you're not man enough to call me boy, kiddo.

[Krandor]

Come on now, Vanilla Sky wasn't that bad. Tom Cruise wasn't even crazy then (well he was still a scientologist, but not jumping on the couch crazy).

[kuronosan]

Would kill for this. Takes me forever to fall asleep even on sleep meds and I remember almost every dream I have right before waking up. Shit is fucking so god damn stupid half the time that I wake up and go, "what the fuck is wrong with me".

Lucid dreaming is an easy practice. Most people insert some sort of symbolic meaning to themselves as a means of their subconscious recognizing that it is asleep and not awake.

A dorky example of this is Chakotay in Star Trek: Voyager. He used a full moon to know when he was dreaming and it was a key plot point to an episode (but I digress) and whenever it showed up he knew he was asleep and could wake up or control what happens next.

For me, I almost always know when I'm dreaming because of the amount of practice I've had recognizing signs that I'm dreaming. Lucid dreaming occurs pretty frequently (not 9/10, but you get the point) for me and it's fun when you're just breaking a weird point in the dream and start trying to screw around with it.

It's pretty much as Max said and I said earlier. Your brain is trying to reconcile everything that's been happening and since you are not conscious and your subconscious is active, your brain has complete access to your senses without your conscious control. This is mostly why sleepwalking occurs.

[Nirokun!]

I was reading the thread about the guy who got out of jail and was detailing his experiences while incarcerated. If you read it, remember the part about him doing drugs and being so afraid of HIV/AIDS that he used the same needle until he gave himself tetanus? Well, the same night, I had a dream that I was in prison, and for whatever reason I was laying on my back, and a guy was shooting me up (on the outside of my thigh of all places) and I vividly relived my experience with laughing gas. It was great. Then I was freaking out that I would get HIV/AIDS, condemning myself for being an idiot. Then I woke up because it was time for work.

Seconding that dreams are just moving information around, and if you dream a whole lot, you're probably getting woken up at a bad time.

I'd tell you all about the first and only time I had a wet dream, but it was just so odd. It involved rows and rows of men, all facing one direction, wearing their "Sunday Best", and no, not suits. Dresses and floppy hats. Try to make sense of that shit.

[Grey Jorildyn]

I'm in the counseling field and I really don't "do" dream interpretation, but I am trained in it. Over the past 120 years of the pursuit of psychology from a 'scientific' point of view, theorists have all had different views on it . Some felt it was integral to the therapy process (psychoanalysis, Jungian analysis, Adlerian therapy), some throw it out completely (reality therapy, postmodern theories). So it all depends on what camp you are looking at the dream from and then interpreting it from. Hardly any psychologists subscribe to a single theory these days--99% of them have an eclectic style.

From my point of view, some dreams have a meaning, usually very easy to interpret, while others are just your unbridled Id doing what it feels like doing. The kids play when the parents aren't home, y'know?

Besides, you can't just post a dream and ask people to interpret it. There are a lot of questions you must answer to find meaning in a dream if indeed there is a meaning, or multiple meanings, at all. It takes quite a dialogue and therapy as a field has moved away from it because it becomes very time-consuming and usually only focuses on fears and anxieties, whereas new theories are more about solution-based talk than problem-talk. This is mainly due to economic concerns as insurance companies only approve 6-8 sessions tops and older therapies are much more drawn-out (although just about all of them have brief-therapy modules now), albeit far more person-centered, than recent movements.

If you want my interpretation though, PM me and we can have a chat.

[Darlantan]

You can train yourself to increase the likelihood of lucid dreaming, just google it, you'll find a billion pages with tips...

I probably should start using some of the tips and do the general practices, for some reason I always wanted to keep it "natural" and not force it, which as this point seems stupid. I dream at least every other day, and definitely prefer how I feel when I wake up after having a lucid dream or not dreaming at all, than when I get really involved in some weird/obscure/violent/stupid/real as fuck dream I cant control. Sometimes takes me a couple minutes to get my mind cool after one of those.

I also hate when I dream stuff closely related to what goes on in real life, lol. There has been quite a few occasions where I think something happened and then friends/family tell me it really didnt or wasnt that way, or times where I swear I have talked about something with X person and turns out I didnt, stuff like that.

So yeah, training to have more chances to realise its a dream and make it lucid would probably be better for me, usually have only 1 out of 5 I would say, and the main reason I wake up is usually because of being fighting for my life in dreams since then its easier for me to remember "this shit isnt happening, its a fucking dream". Obviously, training would also be great to be able to do a lot more stuff when I have lucid dreams, still have a tough time controlling some things.

Would kill for this. Takes me forever to fall asleep even on sleep meds and I remember almost every dream I have right before waking up. Shit is fucking so god damn stupid half the time that I wake up and go, "what the fuck is wrong with me".

This. As I said, either not dreaming at all or dreaming lucid dreams would be perfect for me. Waking up to regular dreams is also often a bad experience to me, although I must say I dont need much help to fall sleep, at all.

Do you dream every night? I've always heard that you do, but it's incredibly rare that you remember it, which is tied to the next question.

Are nearly all dreams in black and white? I've also heard that the dreams you tend to remember are the ones that are in color because it's so rare. That nearly all dreams are in black and white.

I am not 100% sure about the first one. I know it has been demonstrated you can dream in any of the sleep stages, and that it is more likely to remember and have more elaborated dreams during the REM one. In my experience, as I have said, I remember about every other dream, sometimes more than one in a night or even siesta, so I would say chances are I almost have dreams 95% of the time I sleep, remember it or not. But who knows about people in general, as you said most people rarely remember them so it is harder to know...

Its very easy to differentiate between REM and non-REM sleep, using polygraph machines and some other ways, I just dont know if there is any way to scientistically know if someone is actually dreaming or not. Anyway, while I dont know if we dream everytime we sleep or not, I am pretty sure we at least dream regularly.

About your second question, not really. I have a hard time recalling any dream where all was in black and white, and I have read only a minority of people say they only dream in those colors. Although if what you said is true, then it could be (the thing about you remember color dreams easier than black and white ones), but I dont think it is not likely since remembering dreams has very little to do with how rare, cool, strange or incredible they are.

My dreams almost never have "real" colors in them. Like, it definitely isnt all black and white, but it isnt real world colors, either. Some colors can feel even more intense and solid than real life ones, while most of the others are usually darker or lighter than they should be, and often they belong to a "theme". For example in some of my dreams most colors are of a variety range from mostly yellows to orange, while some other times most stuff is just obscure colors with the random intense red, green or blue in some spots. I dont know, definitely not just black and white, definitely not as varied and real in general as in real life, definitely more intense than in real life in some instances.

P.S. I fucking wish I could have lucid dreams. I rarely wake up with a memory of dreaming at all. I just lay my head on a pillow, blink, and wake up to a dog whining to go out and take a dump. Sucks. I think I wake up with the knowledge that I just dreamed about once every 2 weeks.

I like when I dont remember dreaming anything, usually wake up with more energy and feel I have rested better. On the other hand, lucid dreaming is awesome for obvious reasons, at least when you can control a lot of stuff and not just some cheap tricks that barely make the dream worth enjoying.

[Edgie]

While reading the OP all I could think about was SUPERBAD, maybe you enjoyed that movie so much, your mind asked itself what would happen if you had been in it.

[Tempest02]

Most dreams are manifestations of real life anxiety.

[miokomioko]

I think most dreams are manifestations of real life anxiety.

fixed for accuracy

[Draggy]

I dont remember my dreams very often, but when I do, they are usually awesome. Last one involved driving a submarine down the motorway with Dr House because we were in trouble with the german cats for painting the sky pink, so we had to go hide out in the minivan parked under my sister's bed but for some reason i could only communicate with my family by singing elvis songs.

[Hyan]

Dreams are awesome.

That's a fact.

I once had this dream where world was ending because of a nuclear war, it was really cool in a way. It felt so final.

So as the bomb hit the nearby city I started running away because that always helps when a nuclear bomb explodes 5 miles from you.. then suddenly I get this sensation of burning and glare in my eyes, like it really HURT. I thought this is it.

Then I woke up realizing I had somehow turned on my lamp and put my face against it. Took me a while to realize what the fuck.

In another dream I was racing against a (singing) whale to run from Estonia to Finland across the Baltic sea (it was winter obviously).

As soon as I saw land and was thinking I'd win the whale came through the ice little ahead of me and threw me back to Estonia. Over and over again.

It was a really frustrating dream.

[Despain]

http://moviecultists.com/wp-content/...op-575x264.jpg

You'll find some kind of meaning if you look hard enough, like people who believe in horoscopes. A dream is a dream, sometimes they are pretty interesting, most of the time they're not but I don't think they're actually telling you anything. I wouldn't worry about it.

This is gonna sound retarded as fuck to some people, but I met my girlfriend in a dream a year prior to actually meeting her in reality.

To some people they have meanings, some way, some how.