独家优惠奖金 100% 高达 1 BTC + 180 免费旋转

Why your dreams are meaningful.

Dreams have been here as long as we have. Literally! They are an integral part of our human experience. Some of us dream more and some less frequent. But we all have them.

Every one of us dreams.

But mostly we don’t really think much of them. We awake after having one and are quick to brush them off as meaningless or just plain weird. And then just go about our day without giving them much thought later on. If any.

There are multiple historical and biological reasons to why we rather choose to ignore our dreams. One of the biological reasons is that consciousness has a natural aversion towards the unknown. Anthropologist have consistently documented a strong sense of ‘misoneism’(fear of the unknown and new) in all primitive and isolated people. When they encounter something new. Their initial reaction is always to respond with either fear or hostility.

So if our consciousness is averse to things we do not understand and our psyche also seems to be fragile. Then why should we ever take up an interest into our own dreams!? Our dreams most of the times are odd, strange and unknown. we can’t really seem to make much sense of them most of the time.

One good reason for paying more attention to your dreams is that we sleep for about 30% of our lives. And a good portion of that time spent sleeping is reserved for dreaming. So in fact we spend quite a substantial amount of our life dreaming. So Given this fact alone, that we do it all the time. Is maybe enough reason to pay a little more attention to them.

Observing your dreams in different ways might be very beneficial in helping you deal with some of the problems you can be faced with in your life. But how can we start doing this? Instead of looking at our dreams at face value to looking at our dreams from a different perspective?

As we hold a pen in our hand and tilt it’s angle to see other sides of it. In the same way we can look at our dreams from different angles and in doing so might reveal things that were hidden from us before. Doing this might even be a helpful tool in coming to understand what it is that’s bothering you or what it is that you really want in your daily life.

This experiment demonstrates that in a sense our mind is kind of like a dark cave where you constantly have to shine your flashlight on its walls in order to to see what it is that you need to see. But just as a car that drives around a corner does not just magically dissolve. In the same way all of these places in the mind still exist when we stop shining our flashlight at them. And just as you might see the car reappear around the corner at a later time. So can memories or feelings spontaneously reappear seemingly random at later times.

We experience this phenomena daily. It’s one of the reasons why you suddenly forget someone’s name, location of your car-keys or when you walk in to a room and forgot why you came there in the first place and suddenly remember a few minutes later on.

Or even years later for some unknown reason when a particular memory rises to the surface because you smell or see a certain thing or hear a certain song or noise. The knowledge was never gone. It remained there all the while laying dormant in your subconscious.

So how does this relate to our dreams? I think that a good way of understanding this is by looking at the history of the dream. And what role it played for us in primitive times and the transformations it undertook in our process of becoming ‘modern’ man.

There is debate about how long modern man has roamed the earth but it ranges from 350.000 years to 100.000 years. Whatever may be true. In both cases it is a very long time.

When man and women still roamed the earth when their developmental stage was still different from ours. Their psyche was not shaped as ours is now. Their psyche was divided into two or sometimes multiple entities.

This mystic participation meant that people would grant power and significance to animals and things around them in a way that would be thought of as weird or inappropriate in our times. For example some tribesmen might believe to be spiritually bounded to the crocodile so it would allow them safe passage swimming through crocodile infested rivers. Or the buffalo for protection and gain during hunts.

Or some even believed that their souls had incarnated into specific threes and that they had a parental and authoritative role over their people.

It is believed that the dreams these people experienced where not seen as abnormal and were not disregarded in the same way that we do to our dreams now. Their dreams played an important role in their way of life and were deeply incorporated in how they acted, expressed and organised themselves.

But just because it’s now 2018. And identifying with your wood-soul seems like kind of a bizarre thing to do in our times. This does not mean we can not experience the same sort of disconnects that these people in primitive times experienced.

And just because we don’t have connections to these wood-souls anymore. Even in modern times our dreams might still be helpful in understanding what the causes are for these possible disconnects in our psyche.

To have more large and complex civilisations we had to shut parts of ourselves off. The structures we inhibited became more complex so we could cooperate and understand each other better and achieve more complex tasks. To do all of this we had to in a sense, narrow our flashlight .

The narrowing of this flashlight is directly linked to our capacity to ignore other things and concentrate on only one thing at a time. This is on one hand the product of civilisation. This capacity to suppress certain feelings and urges is what made specialism and craftsmanship possible. To narrow your focus on one specific thing for the short term so you can benefit from that focus in the long term.

As civilisation emerged and progressed we could still find ourself in this similar state of disconnects as described in primitive times above. But we would no longer loose connection to our wood-soul. But we would still become controlled by our tempers and could become unreasonable. Or we could still suddenly be urged to act out erratic behaviour. Or feel depressed or cheerful for no seemingly apparent reason.

Dreams were still interpreted still in a much deeper sense than we do now. But became of less direct importance in peoples life. There was now a state, society and structured religion to consider and it’s own place in it and all of the duty’s that came with it. Our psyche had to abstract a lot of the self away to allow itself to incorporate with the complex society it inhibited.

It’s just that instead of seeing the direct connection of what we felt and dreamt and linking it directly to the world we perceived around us. we started directing the causes of these disconnects inward.

It is about around the time of Aristotle that the dream was described to be a product of the human mind instead of the ‘divine’ and was thus of natural origin. But although the conclusion was that dreams followed the rules of the human body. According to most dreams still held kinship to the ‘divine’.

We had to give up a lot of our intuition to discipline ourself in a way that would allow us to function properly in a complex civilisations. And as time progressed and our societies we inhibited became more complex. Dreams gradually became of less direct importance to us.

Man become more rational and as institutions of all kind grew and played ever increasingly important roles in our lives. Man gave less and less significance to their own dreams. Up to the point where we are now almost don’t see dreams as of any importance to us at all anymore.

I’ll admit. It’s hard to identify with your ‘wood-soul’ and giving identifying with a parrot a go in our modern times. Our way of living is so wildly different from that of our forefathers in primitive times. It has taken millennia and a lot of restraint and training to function properly in a world that is so complexly structured as ours. And these structures came with a ton of equally complex rules.

But that is all the more reason why maybe we should pay even more attention to our dreams. As our dreams do not have to abide by these strict rules.

So here we are with science, smartphones and internet.

In our time. A man or woman who would start to rally the people for a war against the English because of visions and voices he or she is hearing would be put in a mental hospital. And probably rightfully so.

But this does not mean that you should be afraid to at least entertain the idea that there still might be some meaning left to the dreams you are having.

For just a very short time in our existence we have stopped believing that the world is human centric. That the stars and animals have no deep personal meaning to us any longer. The stars are not there to guide us anymore or hold any significance at all.

The stars we have abstracted to giant balls of thermal nuclear explosions composed of hydrogen gas lightyears away. That have no direct significance to us in any way.

The animals are also of little importance to us anymore. We don’t come into contact with threatening wildlife. We also don’t rely on hunting for our survival anymore. Times where people would have genuine fear for and need of wild animals are long gone.

As we continued to abstract away all these things that used to be of great importance to us we gave up a lot of our intuition. More than 99% of the time we existed as a species we felt like the world revolved completely around us and that it was human-centric in every sense of the word. But in this very short timespan we became more and more disconnected from our dreams.

These are obviously extreme examples. But it is good to keep in mind that these studies were done on clinical patients in a mental hospital who where experiencing severe neurotic symptoms.

Freud noticed that when he encouraged these patients to talk about their dreams. And continue to talk about the images in these dreams and their feelings related with these dream-images. That these feelings and images had two main causes or motivators: wish fulfilment and avoidance.

Freud later received a lot of criticism for his theory. During his practice he often used to pressure his patients which created resistance in the relationship. And there was fear for overproduction by focussing on parts of the dream that where not relevant or misleading. Or that the method might have been successful for middle/upper class Austrians while it might not be useful for other people from different classes and ethnicity’s

But despite all the criticism. Freud was the first person ever to create a clinical method using dreams in a successful way. And described a method for revealing the root of the complexes people had.

In reality his friend had come to center of his ‘complexes’ through merely looking at symbols he did not understand.

This opened the mind of Jung to the idea that you did not necessarily need to use free association for discovering the complexes people had. It showed him that the dream was not necessarily the only starting point. But that any point could be used for reaching the center of a problem. So in this sense a dream or a seemingly ordinary observation can be equally valuable as a starting point that may take us to the same destination.

But despite this, dreams still held a great significance to Jung. Dreams appeared to be more sharply delineated and are presented to us in a purposeful structure. This is what led him to his believe that the presentation, shape and structure of the dream needed to be taken into account as well. And maybe was even more important than the content of the dream itself.

A normal experience has a starting point, a development and an ending. But this is not the way that our mind creates dreams. Our dreams are created spontaneously in somewhat in the same way ropes are made, by weaving many different strands of thought together at the same time. Our dreams are in a sense painted with a very broad brush.

Because of how these dreams were created. Jung was led to believe that there should be put more emphasis on the structure and shape of the dream rather than the apparent content of the dream. Like the example of the pen in the beginning. He found that the dream had to be looked at from different angles and that he should not stray away too far from the shape and presentation of the dream as what could occur when using the technique of free association.

He wanted to stay as close as possible to the presentation of the dream as so to exclude all unimportant or misleading thoughts and associations.

There can occur very interesting contradictions between our disciplined and conscious thoughts and the rich fantasy created by our dreams. While we have stripped many concepts in the world of their emotional energy in todays society. Something else is now needed to make in impression on us that might help us change our behaviour. And that is exactly that what our dreams provide. The psychic energy the symbols that our dreams present contain such a strong power relative to what we experience in our mundane life that we are forced to draw attention to them.

At first the woman did not wan’t to admit what the dream was trying to tell her. But ultimately she saw the truth and confessed. The dream said: “You see your friends as inferior and think to highly of yourself”.

Messages like these can be very unpleasant to hear. And you must be willing to hear the answer. But when done so it can be very helpful.

In our daily live we are constantly bombarded with numerous exchanges and experiences. Some that can make us feel confused and tempt us to follow paths that are not fit for our personality. The dreams have sort of a corrective function for telling us these truths subconsciously.

There is a lot more to be said about the theories described above. Carl Jung and Sigmund freud alone combined wrote dozens of books regarding this subject. And i encourage you to read some of their work if these things interest you.

In any case i hope you that the next time you have a dream you don’t just brush it off as weird or meaningless but that you give it some more thought.

Dreams are often the only way how our subconscious is still able to tell us something. And it might be worth listening.

Add a comment

What is your view?

Send

Related posts:

What Were You Doing at Fifteen?

While I struggled with braces on my teeth and conjugating the past tense in French and German, Michelangelo was carving his first works. The braces were not a pretty sight. The Madonna della Scala…

Lists in Python

Lists in Python are very handy in maintaining elements that may or may not be similar in a particular order that you assign them. You can create lists of grocery store locations, items being sold…

Vimeo CDN Locations

There is no turning back. Video streaming has become such a huge part of how we consume and approach media today. It’s not only become a medium — it’s turned into a language. Brands and entrepreneurs…