A very un settling Dream

[PWRL]

The first and last of these dreams don't appear to give much insight into your psyche. They seem to be simple "mash up" type of dreams. Images of travelling along roads, remotely controlled cars, music, buildings, flying, all jumbled up into the psychedelic mess of the dreams that we are all so familiar with. You have dreams like this pretty much every night but forget all about them because you don't wake up at the right time.

The other dreams are more interesting.

This is the point when you would tell me about your second dream ("Another time I was in what I call The City.") and I would ask "How did you feel?"
You would then tell me the emotional context. "I felt scared", or "I felt lost", or "I felt strangely calm" or ...
I would then take that reply as my signpost and reflect the emotion back to you. "Did you feel lost because you didn't know where you were, or because you didn't know where you were going. You didn't know what was on the other side?" (for example).

Without that context, as with some of the other dreams, all I can do is look at the words that you use and take (hopefully) good guesses.

With your second dream, I think the progression goes something like this.

However you imagine The City, at the time of this dream it is very nebulous as a concept. You don't actually know what it looks like on the other side. (detail which is added in later dreams?). In your dream, you want to cross the river, but because you can't imagine exactly what it looks like, you can't cross.* There is no imagined geography to walk into so your mind finds a way out. In this case, you just turn around and walk back to the part of The City that you have created in your mind.

As for the stones turning into possessions? Well, it does seem to be a rather literal interpretation of the phrase "You can't take it with you when you go". Does that phrase have a great meaning to you? Does it sum up how you feel after buying stuff, then looking at all of the stuff you have and feeling that non of it gives your life any meaning? (Note: this is just a different way of asking "How did you feel").

Alternatively, it could just be one of those transitions that happen in dreams. You look at the rocks and your mind wants a bit more meaning so suddenly, they're "things". The fact that they are things that could not be taken across by anyone does seem significant.

I won't go into any detail about the other dreams (look at how much I have written about just one of them!). Looking at the dreams as a whole, I get a sense of disquiet about your existence. "What's it all about", "why are we here", possibly that feeling of "Cosmic loneliness".And yes, once again I am asking "How did you feel". All very human and normal by the way. I don't have any objective evidence for this, but from the conversations I have had, a reasonable percentage of people have these kinds of feelings at some point. For some of us, it never really goes away.

Feel free to tell me that I am writing b@~~£&!t. Without being there, this is a one sided, imagined conversation, which may be very very wrong.

* Not being able to dream things you have not seen or experienced is an old observation. The Marquis d'Hervey tried to jump of a tall building in one of his lucid dreams. Everything was fine until he got to the point of impact when "within a minute, he was back on the ground, unscathed". Having never experienced falling and hitting the ground in such a way, it was impossible for him to dream of the moment of impact. He just fell, then was suddenly on the ground, but no impact.

I hear what you're saying. All valid observations and postulations. I do analyze those which seem more meaningful. I could go on about it, I guess, but I really don't have the energy right now and I don't want to risk a thread hijack. I get what you're saying, though. All very interesting stuff.

 

[BassMan65]

I shall finish off my contributions to this thread by summarising and occasionally expanding on what I have written in in previous replies. I shall also mention in passing that I didn't expect to write so much (most of my other posts have been one line jokes), I just started writing and it all came out.

A few preliminary points.
One possible way of understanding your role when you interpret dreams is to think of yourself as the passenger in a car. The car is being driven by someone who is paying so much attention to the act of driving that she doesn't see the road signs. You are not there to tell the driver where to go. You are there to to point out the relevant signs. "Look, there's a sign. One of the arrows points to Boulevard of Broken Dreams, the other points to Highway to Hell. Which one feels right to you?"

It really is very important to know the person and to use what you know. When I know what is going on in your life, I can frequently see if the detailed image is important, or if the detailed image is just the visual representation of a feeling.

(It's possible to take good guesses from what people write, but they remain just good guesses. Look at the replies I got from Metalbasspro, Hardly a case of "Wow, you read my mind!" More like "Mmm. well, sort of-ish, if you don't look too hard". Hardly a ringing endorsement! So far no-one here has told me that what I have written about their dreams is total crap. Either I got it about right, or they are too polite to say how wrong I was.)

Most dreams don't mean anything. You mostly dream about what you did today, mixed in with less of what you did yesterday, and even less of what you did the day before that and so on. Think about it for a moment. By the time you are 40 you have had 14610 nights of sleep (minus the occasional all night session). Let's say you can remember 20 significant dreams. That's a mighty 0.14% of your dreams. The remaining 99.86% have evaporated like the proverbial morning mist. This is also why remembered dreams are often significant. They are the self selecting group. You are stressed about something and either your dream is bad enough to wake you up, or your sleep is so disturbed that at some point in the night, you wake up during a dream which reflects the stress that you feel.

How I go about interpreting dreams.

E) Use prior knowledge about her.
I know that your partner has just left you. I know that you can't pay the mortgage [literally "grip of death", just a random fact!]. I know that you are ill. (Hopefully, only you experience only one of these at any time, otherwise your life is a country & western song!) Interpret dreams in the light of this knowledge.

A) Always go for the feeling in preference to the image.
The key question is always "How did you feel?"

Yes, sometimes the image will be important. I know you are a single mum, that you have always had problems with your relationship with your mother. Your dream involved several scenarios where you were trying to enjoy yourself at a party or a club, but your little kid kept turning up. And then you had this long stressful conversation with your mum...

Here I know where the images are coming from because I know you (see point 1). So tell me, what is happening in your life? Can you see any connection between coping as a single mum and the images in your dream? (All of this is based upon a real person and real dream by the way).

D) Let her take the lead.
It's her dream, she knows which of your suggestions are right and which are wrong. There may be times when the conversation goes "off topic". That's fine. It's a way of getting away from what may be emotionally intense situation. When she's ready, you will get back to the dream. If you spot emotional avoidance about a topic, don't force it. Perhaps you are bringing up long repressed feelings that she is not ready to deal with yet, or ever. Remember, you are the passenger and she can tell you to get out of the car any time she wants to (you do want to stay friends, don't you?).

G) Don't expect too much.
Most dreams don't mean anything, and the one's that do probably aren't that hard to work out if you know her. It's a dream where she feels stressed. And her kid is having problems at school and she's really stressed about it. Is that it? That's all the dream means? Probably.

A bit about the mechanics of dreams.
You mostly dream about the events of the last few days. Jumbled up to be sure. But most of the images are just things that have happened, films you have seen, books you have read. Want to know where the images come from? Ask what she has been watching, or reading, or doing in the last few days, especially that really great book she's been reading for the last few days.

You don't seem to be able to dream about things that you have never experienced or imagined whilst conscious. Sometimes dreams seem to take odd turns. "Something was on the other side but when I tried to look at it, something got in the way..." Yeh, your mind got in the way. You have a scary event coming up, exam, hospital visit, possible redundancy. The image is of something unknown and scary, but since you don't know what it is, you can't dream it. Result, your mind finds a way out and puts something in the way.

Waking up during a dream can be a way of escaping from the unpleasant images. Not always. Not even often. But when the dream gets too unpleasant, you wake up. Somehow, (and I don't know how), something in your brain knows the ultimate get out. Just wake up and it all the nasty stuff goes away.

External stimuli get incorporated into your dreams.
In one dream, I was walking down a dark wide street at night, lit only by street lights. It wasn't in the least bit unpleasant. It was really quite calm and relaxing. Just me. No stress. No people. Peace.

Then I walked past one house on the other side of the street which had all the lights on, with music blaring out of the windows and doors. Boom boom boom boom. After a several seconds, I had walked past the house and the music faded into the distance and once again I was alone on a dark wide street...

At the time of this dream, my life was (and still is) hectic. I was living in a city, in a house on a dual carriageway (and one of the main routes into the city). Hearing cars at 2 am with music thumping out was not unusual. Can anyone out there possibly interpret this strange and mysterious dream?

Finally ("At last!!" I hear you scream), if anyone tells you that dreaming about snakes means something sexual, they are talking complete crap! Presumably Medusa is the ultimate wet dream. And if you have any books that tell you what your dream images mean, throw them in the bin. They are full of crap too.

IMAGES DO NOT HAVE A FIXED MEANING!!! THEY ARE PERSONAL TO YOU.

If you have got this far without resorting to either injectable drugs or razor blades, thank you for listening and goodnight.

PS In the olden days the way to indicate your sex in a post was either (|) or :- . I always thought it should be (i) or :/

Or is that just me?

Oh, it is just me.

Oops!