I usually have very vivid dreams, in color, of course! I don’t like to think they are the result of blood pressure medication, but rather of an active imagination and a rich inner life.
My youngest sister records her dreams and has a lot of theories about dreams. I often ask her what my dreams mean and her answers are always very unsatisfactory. She usually says that my dream is always about me . . . here I was hoping for some life altering message or something. She says that water is good, whereas I am always afraid that it means something else, like having to go to the bathroom.
The internet gives massive amounts of information about dreams, some of really quirky. One article said:
THOSE on the physiology side of the “why we dream” argument see dreams as only nonsense that the brain creates from fragments of images and memory. However, for centuries, people have looked at their dreams as both omens and insights into their own psyches.
Many think dreams are full of symbolic messages that may not be clear to them on the surface but if dug deeper and thought about, can actually mean something significant. In fact, dream experts have similar interpretations of some common dreams such as being naked in public, losing teeth or falling.
For instance, if one dreams being naked in public, or say at school, work or social event, and then suddenly realizes that they had forgot to put on clothes, experts say this could mean trying to hide something. They say without clothes, it means you had a tough time trying to hide. But if you are naked and no one notices, then the interpretation is that whatever you are afraid of is unfounded. And if you do not care that you are naked, then the interpretation is that one is comfortable with who they are.
Further, if you dream falling, falling, falling... and you all of a sudden wake-up, it symbolizes insecurity and anxiety.
This means that something in your life is essentially out of control and there is nothing you can do to stop it. The other interpretation though is that you have a sense of failure about something. Maybe you are not doing well in school or at work and are afraid you are going to be fired or expelled.
And for the ever-popular chase dream, which can be extremely frightening, it usually symbolizes that one is running away from problems. What that problem is however, depends on who is chasing you. It may be a problem at work, or it may be something about yourself that you know is destructive. For example, you may be drinking too much, and your dream may be telling you that your drinking is becoming a real problem.
But how about those people that have the same or a similar dream many times, over either a short period of time or their lifetime? According to HowStuffWorks.Com, recurring dreams usually mean there is something in your life you have not acknowledged that is causing stress of some sort. “The dream repeats because you have not corrected the problem. Another theory is that people who experience recurring dreams have some sort of trauma in their past that they are trying to deal with. In this case, the dreams tend to lessen with time,” the article on the site reads in part.
However, if dreams have that much meaning, who is it said that five minutes after the end of a dream, many people usually forget 50 per cent of the dream’s content, and 10 minutes later, others would have forgotten 90 per cent of the content.
The writer of the article closes by saying:
But after looking at these sites, and many others, this writer did not think any wiser than he did before reading them. What he discovered though is that there is no consensus about the meaning of dreams and, in fact, there is a lot of mutually exclusive information. One person believes a dream is inspiration from the divine. Another believes it is random neurons firing. Still another believes it is an emotional safety valve. Either way, there is not a lot of commonality in the dream dictionaries. In fact, it is not unusual for them to tell you that they are right and the others are wrong. This definitely leads to a serious lack of authority on the matter.
But the question is why do people dream? Perhaps it is just something mammals do. And if that is the case, then you may just want to ignore them and get on with living your life. In any case, if the experts cannot agree, how can the rest of us?
So, in summary, my dream last night of being robbed could be the result of taking drugs: Taztia XT, Hydrochlorothiazide, Diovan, Terazosin HCL, baby aspirin, Glucosamine, fish oil, multivitamin, Vitamin E, Feverfew or calcium or it could be my mind reminding me that Mmmm had cautioned me about my summer bag with an open top, or it could just be a dream.
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