No, I’ve tried to analyse the few dreams I have been able to remember after I’ve woken up but have never been able to find any meaning in them.
I’m 58 (can’t believe I’ll be 60 next year) and the other night I had a dream I was pregnant. It’s not the first time I’ve dreamt this dream but I’m buggered if I can work out any meaning in it.
They don’t have meaning. They have origins, and sometimes even play out with solid logic, but they are just random imagery that is assembled in some kind of loosely associated order.
“Oh, I had such an interesting dream! And you were in it! You were you, but you weren’t you. You know what I mean? And you were talking, but your lips weren’t moving. And you were a teenaged girl and an old man at the same time.”
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar but after reading a great book “Jung and his symbols” maybe not?
Look it could be that I am really good at cold reading but whenever I interpret dreams for other people it seems to hit a nerve…
Many people are rather disappointed when they discover that these wild dreams they’re having are really about rather mundane every day shit that their brain is processing and not some life altering epiphany struggling to get out.
They’re not about anything? Sure they are. But most of it is a lot less complicated and less interesting than you imagine.
For years I had a recurring nightmare that was pretty obviously related to some waking life anxieties I was experiencing. One night in the middle of the dream a character gave me a really simple idea for ending these dreams once and for all. I took his advice right then in the dream and I haven’t had it since. So maybe they can’t tell us stuff we don’t already know, but I think they can help us focus on stuff we do know but aren’t paying attention to when we’re awake.
See, this is enough for me to say that they have meaning. It doesn’t mean I can get at the meaning, but it’s there if the dream has an origin or a cause. That’s what it means to find meaning in something.
But thanks for explaining why there are so many votes for not having meaning.
EDIT:
Similarly, this would be enough for me to vote Yes. All you need is one dream you can interpret.
For the past five years or so, I’ve been working on a thesis from personal experience. When I awake and remember a dream, I try to think about why I had each little detail of the dream. Why was the man on the corner Eliot Spitzer and not Enrico Fermi? Why was there a sail boat and not a row boat? Why three women in white and not four? And so on.
What I’ve found is that my dreams are always based on things I did recently, even if it was for a brief moment. Eliot Spitzer was there because I saw a photo of him on the Daily Show. The sail boat is there because I just read something on the Dope about sails. There were three women in white because I heard a joke about three women two days ago and I just folded all my white socks before bedtime. And so on.
So why does my brain use all these seemingly meaningless details? Turns out, it’s because your brain asks your imagination for something to fill a place holder idea and those details are the first thing your brain spits out. Why did I use Eliot Spitzer in this post as an example? Because I literally just saw his picture on the Daily Show five minutes ago. Why Enrico Fermi? Because his name starts with an E, like Eliot, and it’s the first famous “E” I thought of. And so on.
This led me to a further conclusion by accident. You know why you never realize you’re dreaming? Same reason you never realize you’re imagining when you’re awake- you’re already aware of it. Dreaming is just sleep-thinking, and when you’re lost in your thoughts, you never go “Hey, I’m lost in my thoughts!” On the rare occasion that you do realize you’re dreaming/lost in thought, your mind just changes track and starts a new dream/thought train. It doesn’t dwell on the realization that you’ve been imagining things, as that’s mundane and trivial.
So that’s my crazy, rambling interpretation. Try it yourself. The next time you dream, figure out why your imagination “immediately” jumped to the objects in your dream. Try to figure out where each element’s cue came from in your real, everyday life.
That’s not the meaning everyone’s talking about. They’re talking about insight, some kind of obscure inner truth that explains something about who you are. I’m talking about petting a cat on the way home and then dreaming about a tiger.
“If you dream of frogs it means you’ll go to the seaside”, no.
“If you dream of being the toon in a Mario-style arcade where the purpose is to build organic compounds by making the pieces fall into place and you have an Orgo exam and synthetic design is your weak point, the dream is about synthetic design”, yes.
I’ve been waking up dreaming of Excel files and SAP parametrization for the last two weeks: as dreaming materials go, I know better ones.
I think I got my pronouns mixed up. I meant to say:
Isn’t all of this complicated by the fact that it’s hard for many people to really remember details of dreams after they wake up, especially more than a few minutes after the fact?
This was a really cool insight. Thanks Chessic Sense
You’d think, but not necessarily! One of my go-to anxiety dreams is discovering that I didn’t “really” earn my degree because I’d forgotten to attend and take the exam for some general ed required class (usually math of some sort). So I’m back on campus, having to take this class and pass it, and I can’t find the class, and discover that I keep forgetting when the class is, so the semester is almost over (again!) and I still have not made it to class…
Anyway, yes, some dreams have meaning, hidden or obvious, some are just brain vomit. I don’t think “standard” interpretations of dreams or dream symbols are particularly useful, since these symbols are highly personal. If I see a cat in a dream it’s going to have a completely different meaning for me than for someone who dislikes cats. But I do think dream interp can have value, because sometimes we are too damn close to a situation to see it clearly. I’ve helped a couple people that way; their dream made total sense once I pointed it out to them, but they wouldn’t have gotten there on their own. The key is to ask for context – what’s going on in their life right now?
I do not. Put me in the camp that it is just the brain interpreting - making up a story for - random firings.
But like many things that I don’t really buy into, I still sometimes find it fun.
Dreams absolutely have hidden meanings. As a dream researcher I interview a lot of people about their dreams all day long. I generally find that the most common symbols tend to reflect the same kinds of metaphors for different people even if their lives are completely different. For example if I interview 100 people who dreamed about aligators most will have some kind of situation occurring in their waking lives where they are experiencing a sense of danger.
I hope this isn’t considered spamming, but I have a website called dreambible.com where you can see a much of my work. I also have a blog where I post the interview data I get from people and try to use the information about their current lives to figure out what their dreams mean. Hopefully my work will interest a few of you.
-Chase
My late husband kept dream journals. He kept them for about 20 years or so.
I believe dreams have meaning and are not some willy nilly nothings.
If I could invent anything it would be a dream recorder.
In college I read Freud’s “On the Interpretation of Dreams” and used to interpret the dreams of my friends. Generally dreams reflect what you are thinking about during the day but use visual metaphors instead of linear thought. So a dream about going to work naked reflect a fear that people at work will find out you are not competent. They have a meaning but the meaning is not usually profound or hidden. I stopped interpreting other people’s dreams after my roomate’s fiancee told me a dream that revealed she was thinking about breaking up with him.
I believe most dreams are just the subconscious making sense of the day.
I believe some dreams do indeed have meaning, whether it’s psychological, spiritual, etc.
I tend to have tornado dreams. And lately I’ve been dreaming about loved ones dying 
Dreams don’t have any meaning in and of themselves, but through analysis and introspection we can come to conclusions about ourselves via dreams. But one could just as easily make the same leaps by watching clouds or observing the pattern of sand flowing over dents. The what matters less than the why.