Dreams may seem strange and irrational. They may carry so much meaning that we often need to describe our dreams to others at length. The question is: What are dreams for? Some perceive them as images created by the mind in sleep; some try to find deeper, hidden meanings. There is also a theory that dreams have an evolutionary function to test us in scenarios essential for survival. Some attest to the power of dreaming as a creative function; apparently, Paul McCartney dreamt the melody of ‘Yesterday’, and Dimitri Mendeleev dreamt up the structure of the periodic table of elements. To understand the meaning of dreams, people often use a dream dictionary. Some keep dream diaries so as not to forget.
Dreams have been used for self-knowledge for centuries. The earliest dream interpretation evidence was found in ancient Egypt. Dream records were saved in official inscriptions and played an essential role in governing the country, religion, and daily life. For ancient Egyptians, dreams had a fixed meaning. For example, if people dreamt about drinking a warm beer, they expected something unfortunate to happen to them. Ancient Egyptians believed that dreams were messages from gods sent to guide people. On the contrary, Aristotle did not believe that dreams were messages from gods. He observed that everyone has dreams; not only the chosen individuals but even animals also have dreams. He believed that dreams tune into what is happening with the body and can predict illnesses.
Freud popularised dream interpretation as an important source of self-knowledge. He believed dreams are unconscious wish fulfilment and comprised of manifest and latent parts. Manifest is what is happening in a dream (car crash), latent is the meaning that is symbolised by the manifest part of the dream (car crash, meaning that you may be experiencing a lack of control in your life, depending on the context and your own associations to the dream). Jung on the other hand believed that dreams are the window to our unconscious and true nature. For example, if we stray too much from our true purpose in life, our psyche may try to tell us something through our dreams. Unlike Freud, who believed that dreams show us repressed things, Jung believed that dream analysis could create a new meaning for us if we work on them in-depth. The dream's meaning could be objective or subjective, as well as on the archetypal level of primitive symbols. Jung also encouraged analysing dreams with as few preconceptions as possible so that new meanings could emerge.
Lastly, neuroscience research shows that most vivid dreams take place in the deep REM phase of sleep, where primitive parts of the brain fire. Nightmares often occur near morning, as the REM phase tends to extend as we sleep.
Mark Solms who is a neuropsychoanalyst discovered that there were three ways in which we dream:
- When we fall asleep - often those dreams are somatically led. A person may wake up with a sudden twitch in their body.
- REM sleep: People who were woken up in REM described dreams of a bizarre nature and could recall them well.
- Non-REM—People who were woken up in non-REM described bizarre dreams but of emotional quality. They described feelings associated with dreams rather than recalling dreams in detail.
When we dream, our brain processes perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. We cannot process them whilst we are awake as there is too much information, and we need to process them all the time to function. Nightmares may be linked to unmet needs, frustrations, and anxieties. Those representations are mostly metaphoric rather than literal and can present layers of meaning. Although nightmares can also appear, for example, after having food late at night, when the metabolism increases, and our brain receives signals to be more active. Some medications, for example, for blood pressure, can cause nightmares. Nightmares can cause sleep deprivation, which in turn can affect our physical or mental health, causing heart disease, obesity, or depression.
The common acceptance of what dreams mean may come from the desire to understand or even control our lives better. Finding answers that often take time and patience. As human beings, we can communicate with universal symbols (although some are culture-specific) to overcome language barriers and unify rather than divide. That ability may come from our preverbal development stage when we communicate with our primary carer nonverbally.
When analysing your own dream, it is important to think about why the dream may have occurred now and your own associations with the symbols in the dream relating to your external and internal life. The meaning will usually vary from person to person depending on the associations about the dream, the context in which the dream took place, and the dreamscape itself, meaning that we should consider what took place in the dream itself.