Because learning about your brain and sleep can be fun . . .
If you keep a dream diary for a while and try to understand each dream you recover, you’ll soon realize not every dream has a deeper meaning. Not every dream illuminates some insight into the subconscious. Sometimes a dream illustrates a slice of your life from the near-present or the past. But sometimes the dream…
Understanding the meaning of the numbers in your dream is about pattern recognition and delving into their significance to you. My grandfather used to say that the number 13 was lucky for him. As related by my mother, he readily acknowledged how some people thought number 13 was bad luck. People also said that about…
Scott Harris Alexander was one of the men who burst into the room in the middle of my dream. Who is Scott Harris Alexander? No idea. The name must have meant something to me. My subconscious supplied the name, after all. When it was time to interpret the dream I had no idea what that…
Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” is a great song about a child and his nightmares, but there’s nothing great about shaking with fear and lying in a pool of sweat from having a bad dream. Nightmares can shake the strongest, toughest person to their core. That’s because they reveal our deepest fears. Some people feel once you’re…
Sometimes you’ve got to go deep within your mind to understand and interpret your dream. They say nothing worthwhile is ever easy. And it’s not true. Many worthwhile things are easy: brushing your teeth and getting dressed, for example. Those things are so easy that they get taken for granted. They’re also very worthwhile. Plenty…
The questions in the headline aren’t easy to answer. There are a lot of different opinions and only a few points of consensus. Here’s one definition: Dreams are a phenomena that happens primarily when sleeping, whether remembered or not. They’re a type of brain activity that results in communication between the subconscious mind and the…
Part 1/7 “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” Donald Rumsfeld When former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said…
Here’s yet another reason why most dream interpretation dictionaries and websites are useless for understanding the meaning of your dreams: the implications of the symbols themselves can change from dream to dream. The actual meaning of the symbol depends on the context of the symbols and events of the dream. The context changes between dreams.…
The educational system has made you poorly equipped to understand it when it does One “good” thing about taking a literature course these days is the Internet. It can make it less time-consuming. Yet, as it is in many areas, the Internet is a double-edged sword. It cuts both ways. Literature courses often have onerous…
What were you doing in the dream? Fighting, I don’t know. I don’t remember it well. Maybe there’s a puzzling line or two a character spoke in the dream. “Hopa, hopa!” What does that even mean? What makes a faded dream? A memory is formed in your brain by linking it to other memories. For…
The time it takes to understand a dream can be much longer than it takes to have it. It’s one key point when it comes to dream interpretation. Unbound by physical constraints, unlike other information transmitted through your five primary senses, dreams are more than pictures: they’re communications affecting all the senses. You’re making a…
When you call someone a “dreamer,” it’s something of an insult. Yet, when you call someone a “visionary,” that’s high praise. Why? What’s the difference? There’s not that much beyond the way the word sounds, the connotation it carries. To many people’s way of thinking, dreaming connotes pie-in-the-sky fancies. Impractical ideas. Something that doesn’t work…
Not every dream is symbolic of something, though many are. People tend to ignore dreams without symbols unless they’re an instance of deja vu where one has the feeling they’ve been somewhere or done something before. Dream journalers tend to talk about dreams with symbols more often. They’re more interesting because we learn from those dreams. They…