Is dream interpretation real, or is it considered woo by trained professionals? Can a psychologist or psychiatrist make sense out of a dream and provide you with a true understanding of its meaning?
I always thought it was nonsense, but I have known people who buy books and swear by it. My dreams just seem like crazy nonsense most of the time, but perhaps there is meaning there that I can somehow use.
There are people who buy books and believe all kinds of things. Those kinds of books aren’t written by any -ologists or -iatrists. Talking about dreams gives you something to talk about, which might give a counselor some understanding of the way that you think.
Old style Freudians and Jungians had methods of interpreting dreams. I heard one person claim that if you saw a Freudian your dreams would become more Freudian and if you saw a Jungian your dreams would become more Jungian. I don’t know if there are many strict Freudians or Jungians around any more.
I once had a dream that a small airplane cashed into water near a bridge and when I saw the news the next day a small airplane did trash into the water near a bridge. I also dreamt about someone meeting a woman from New Mexico and she had blond hair and was not able to be out in the sun too long . I told the guy about my dream and he told me that he met the woman yesterday and he was blown away that I got all the detail right. I know there will people that think this is BS but I don’t care !
I think with just random dreams every night, all of us have had dreams that seemed to relate to our waking life. Enough of the random insights will work out that we could easily convince ourselves they were prophetic or whatever.
A good Interpreter of Dreams will be able to discern what you want your dreams to mean, thus gaining your business. Otherwise if dreams are just random impulses then interpreting belongs with tarot cards and palm-reading.
Dream interpretation as practised by (some) psychotherapists has nothing to do with predicting the future, or detecting your psychic knowledge of events that you did not observe or hear about. It has to do with detecting what’s going on in your subconscious.
Whether it’s any use for that purpose is another matter. But there is no suggestion that anything supernatural or paranormal is going on.
It’s unreasonable for anyone to say, “Oh, you dreamed about fish in a pond; that means you are having issues with anger, but also fear.”
What is reasonable is for the doctor to ask you, “What do you think this might mean?” If you say, “I dunno,” cool. But if you say, “It makes me feel…uncomfortable. I’m not really sure why,” then that might be a promising avenue for further questions. Or maybe not.
When I was young, and very depressed, and pretty fucked up, really, I would dream about a big bad wolf, which was a symbol for my father and how afraid of him I was. It was a personal dream symbol. It can’t be generalized, but it is something that my doctor understood and interpreted correctly.
Well, I have sleep apnea, and every once in a while I wake up, feeling suffocated and gasping for air.
And every time that happens, just before I wake up, I have a nightmarish dream of suffocating or drowning. Once, I dreamed that I was literally a frog, and I jumped into a pond to snap up some bug or something, and then I wasn’t able to get back to the surface to breathe.
From an earlier thread on a similar subject:
And do you all remember Yusuf’s dream in the movie Inception ? The cast finds themselves in an urban city in a drenching downpour. One of the characters remarks that Yusuf didn’t have a chance to take a pee before starting the dream.
(ETA: The city, btw, was urban Los Angeles. I caught a brief glimpse of a street sign that said Wilshire Blvd.)
Is that a way of saying God only knows?
Back when I was a psych student I read Freud’s On the Interpretation of Dreams and found it very insightful. I used to interpret my friends dreams until it got a little too real and I understood that people were telling me secrets without meaning too. Specifically a friends fiance told me about a dream that meant she was having doubts about the relationship.
What Freud says was that dreams are influenced by what is going on around you. For instance being in a cold room could trigger a dream about snow. Likewise having a strong emotion going on such as fear could trigger a dream about danger. The implication is that if someone is having dreams that they are in danger there is something going on in their life causing fear and that finding out what that is could help the person deal with it.
AFAIK, no modern psychotherapy school really delves into client’s dreams as they prefer to use diagnostic surveys and more direct ways of finding out what a client is feeling and why. I assume the remaining psychoanalysts still use dreams but that is just a guess.
It sounds like dream interpretation is a real thing, as opposed to just woo, but that it is mainly used as a way to get at what may be bothering you versus a tool to dig into someone’s mind and draw conclusions from. I had a therapist once that used hypnosis the same way… just to get me to talk which lead to specific areas of discussion afterward.
I had a dream last night of going from doctor to doctor trying procedure after procedure to relieve pain. I’m a chronic pain patient, so no real mystery there in my dream.
The following post is serious-
I sometimes interpret friends’ dreams. I don’t use any book to do so as I feel that they’re all crap. If I dream of bats, it means something specific to me. If somebody else dreams of bats, it means something else to them. Any book, IMO, that says “Dreaming of bats means this . . .” is crap. Working together ( a distinction I feel is massively important) we can work out the meaning of some dreams. IMO, not every dream has a deeper meaning. Oh, I should also note, I do this with friends. I don’t ask strangers to tell me their dreams and then interpret them as a party trick. There has to be a level of trust on the part of the dreamer, and I have to be somewhat familiar with their personal symbols.
People are idiots. That’s not a dream, but a nightmare.
I have a couple of recurring dreams that I later found out were quite common. Expecting that they could be interpreted in anything meaningful way is like believing that any given horoscope listing can apply to 1/12 of the population based on what time of year they were born.
We still don’t know for sure why we sleep.
Let alone why we dream and the specifics of how dream content is generated.
I don’t mean that in a “what the bleep do we know” way; there are plenty of things we know about sleep and our understanding is advancing all the time. But it’s stretching things way too far to say we can map content X to Y life situation, except for a small minority of cases (e.g. recurring dreams following PTSD).
When I was in my teens I dreamed intensely and frequently, and I recorded my dreams, about 800 in all. I also recorded events happening in my life at the time, and subsequently events that happened after the dream (yes, I was checking if they were precognitive :o)
I only saw one predictable relationship; if I went to bed extremely tired – asleep as soon as head hits the pillow type thing – I was much more likely to experience a paralysis dream. I subsequently saw this same observation made elsewhere.
That’s it. Nothing useful from the content of the dreams.
Quite a waste of time as a hobby…
Oh, and I did try looking up some dreams in a dream interpretation book. What I found was it was hard even to decide what the most salient thing about the dream was. Dreams jump about, feature quickly-changing events, locations and feelings. How do you even say what a dream was about?
I remember reading a book on gestalt therapy, which involved dream interpretation. It was years ago, so I can’t cite author or title, but the book really did resonate and make sense.
The author conducted some kind of retreat, where he organized group pastimes and activities because he wanted the participants to get used to being around each other. After a few days of this, he would call one of them to a hot seat and have them describe a dream they had. His theory is that everything you dream is an extension of you. Other people in your dream embody certain characteristics of you. This even applies to inanimate objects.
As the participant was talking about their dream, he’d have them roleplay a person or thing in the dream and explain why they were in the dream. For instance, one girl dreamed of a policeman who pulled her over, took her to the station, and had sex with her. Through roleplaying, they determined that the girl was a little reluctant of sex, having been raised by religious parents who told her it was immoral before marriage. Since the policeman identifies as an authority figure, it makes sex OK.
So, try roleplaying a feature of your dream, have it explain why it’s there, and see where that goes.