Do Dreams Really Mean Anything? Can your dreams be helpful in your life?

Okay so I remember my dreams almost every night. My dreams can be anything from running from people with M16's to talking to sick killer whales to hanging out with my deceased brother. I write down many of my dreams mostly the ones with my brother and the really vivid ones. I don't really ever see a meaning behind them and most of them seem so weird and out in left field. I tend to have more scarey dreams than anything. I read that dream symbols are not universal and that they mean different things to each person who dreams them, so how do I interperate them? I also read that you can train yourself to answer tough questions in your dreams, what do you think?I have also been trying to have a lucid dream, it worked once, I realized I was wearing a watch, which I never do in my waking life, so I realized I was dreaming and the first thing I wanted to do was float up in the air. I started floated but then quickly started falling then I woke up. That was the closest I had come to lucid dreaming. Anyway just wanted to here thoughts on what you guys think of dreams.

Some time ago I wrote a little article about dreaming, so here is the link, though I could quote it here too

Dreaming
  You dream when you sleep, don't you ? everyone dreams something, every time they are sleeping, due to our brain still works, even if you are out of order, usually you can't remember what you dreamed, that means that you slept very well, but if you do remember something, it is usually the last moments before waking up, couple of seconds. It is believed that when you dream all movement and views are happening 7 times faster than in our real life, hey maybe real life is a dream too ? hum, but that is another topic.. it is faster, because the brain is so powerful and fast and can handle information so fast, that you can't believe it yourself.. to sum up, if you sleep 7 hours, you dream something for 7 hours and if the theory is right 7*7=49 hours (another longer life ?). But what can we dream ? the brain is so powerful, that it can remake everything it wrote, so if you saw something you will never forget it, just that it will be somewhere deep inside you. If you're dreaming a place you know and you walk to a place you still weren't, it will be created from different parts. The most enjoying dreams are when you understand and know that you're dreaming, that rarely happens, you can feel like a GOD there, just that this effect does not take long, in my opinion dreams can be created with machines, by creating some dream machine which could control it, it is even much better than some Virtual World, because your brain can send an exact signal of touch, taste to you, you can dream that you're kissing, if you ever kissed of course and think that the emotion is real, even if no one is near you, you can dream that you eat ice cream, even if you really don't, but the feeling is the same. I don't believe that dreams can tell the future, because the brain only executes things which already happened or from different parts put a puzzle together, not the future. Nightmares and etc. can be dreamed due to you have something inside you what scares you, usually if you're afraid or you watched a horror movie and went to sleep and your brain just creates something. Of course dreams can be very stressful, you might get insomnia or never get a good night sleep due to them, therefore you can lower the stress too, if you dream nice things. It is nothing more than your brain showing pictures to you with incredible speed in addition sometimes with taste and touch.

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This is my view,
Quatrux.

all i know is what scientists know about dreams, that they dont know if/what they mean.

but i know this. if you have a really good/weird dream you really should send it to this site

I'm in AP Psychology in high school and we learned about dreams a bit ago.There are a few differing theories about what dreams are.One is that its the Unconsciouss's way of fulfulling different wants.Another theory is that its just a jumble of incoming messages from the senses and that the brain is just trying to make sense of them.And one more is that dreams help us remember things about the previous day.

dreams are crazy. its part of your pre-consious. something thats going or happened in the past but your not thinking about it.i thought it had to do with your pre-consious. im drunk and its almost 1:30am and i have a final. ill elaborate later.

Edited December 17, 2005 by twitch (see edit history)

If you ask the whether dreams have meaning, I must reply with the question of whether waking life has meaning. Some philosophers actually argue that there is no such thing as meaning. I think that meaning is always something we choose to see in things, and our lives are richer for whatever meaning we see in it (whatever the part of life it is, in which we see meaning). This is at the root of the difference between religious and non-religious points of view as well.

REM sleep stimulates the brain regions used in learning. This may be important for normal brain development during infancy, which would explain why infants spend much more time in REM sleep than adults (see Sleep: A Dynamic Activity). Like deep sleep, REM sleep is associated with increased production of proteins. One study found that REM sleep affects learning of certain mental skills. People taught a skill and then deprived of non-REM sleep could recall what they had learned after sleeping, while people deprived of REM sleep could not.
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/404.htm

REM sleep is not the same as dreaming, for there seem to be purely physiological functions fulfilled during REM sleep. Scientifically we have no means to study the function of dreams and the function of REM sleep separately. It is reasonable to assume that dreams play a role in the functions of REM sleep, but there is no way to be sure.

Well then that would be a dream of life, wakin or otherwise.

 

I was visited last night by a dream of so strange and vivid a kind that I feel impelled to communicate it to you, not only to relieve my own mind of the impression which the recollection of it causes me, but also to give you an opportunity of finding the meaning, which I am sill far too much shaken and terrified to seek for myself.

 

It seemed to me that you and I were two of a vast company of men and women, upon all of whom, with the exception of myself—for I was there voluntarily— sentence of death had been passed. I was sensible of the knowledge—how obtained I know not—that this terrible doom had been pronounced by the official agents of some new reign of terror. Certain I was that none of the party had really been guilty of any crime deserving of death; but that the penalty had been incurred through

their connection with some regime, political, social or religious, which was doomed to utter destruction. It became known among us that the sentence was about to be carried out on a colossal scale; but we remained in absolute ignorance as to the place and method of the intended execution. Thus far my dream gave me no intimation of the horrible scene which next burst on me,— a scene which strained to their utmost tension every sense of sight, hearing and touch, in a manner unprecedented in any dream I have previously had.

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to add what BrickTamland said little is know about dreams the only known facts about dreams are that they are unconcious and are sometimes hard to figure out. But their are common dreams people have one of the most famous of them is they see them selfs falling from the sky and right before they hit hte ground they wake up. some people say this dream symbolizes that the person is having a heart attack and if they don't wake up by the time they hit the ground they won't wake up ever.But here is dream that i had that was very distrubing to me at least and once you read it as well it will be disturbing to you as well.like this one dream i had it was xmas eve day 1 day before the huge earthquake/tsunami that hit last year. in my dream i was in the stone church with candles burning for light almost live a mideval church, anyways I was at the alter praying at a picture (of jesus i think). and then this huge earthquake erupted and then everyone started screaming and running while a small group of people where praying and the church began to fal apart and then the ground split open, right before i started to leave i turned around turned around I saw the man in the picture smile and disappear and was ooh **** and then i woke up scared and sweating trying to figure what the hell happen by then it was time to go the xmas service and then the news hit about the earthquake and then I was like HOLY ****.to me that was most disturbing dream i have ever had in my life.of course the oldest dream i remember is that i was maybe 4-5 living at my family farm before moving. anyways i was sleeping and in my dream i was surround by fire screaming and calling out to anyone to get me out of their and while do that was trying to figure out how to get out as well.so thats a few dreams for people to think about.

sometimes what you dream it will happen in real life , happened to me , or it did ever happened to you that when you are dreaming about a phone calling , someone is calling you ? It happens a lot to me , more of this kind !

lol i have crazy weird dreams too =/ but i hardly ever remember them, and if i do, it's only like snatches of it. i don't think dreams mean anything that's GOING to happen. it's more like, it conveys your feelings (though sometime inaccurate...i had a dream where i was trying to talk this guy's mom into letting me marry her son...who i don't like...seirously...o.O) but they're just there to remind you what can happen and what has. =]

I must be very boring, I seem to have very unusually weird dreams. Like the other week, I remember flying around a tree (well more like levitating) and then this face, shaped like the First Emperor of China came towards me, and I round-housed it, and it shriveled away.All of my dreams are like this. It's like a compilation of all the images in my head stuck together, and when you have a photographic memory, it doesn't do you any favours.And in answer to your query, no I don't believe dreams mean anything. Call me a boring fart if you wish, but dreams for me are just compilations of images that your brain throws out at you to cope with the stress put on it whilst sleeping.

Someone care to explain to me what 'lucid dreams' are?

Lucid Dreaming is basicly where while you are dreaming, you somehow realize that what you are doing is just a dream and the waking mind (the part of the brain you use when you are awake) gains controll of the dream, i think making it what you want it to be...

if you ever want to know the definition of somthing, you can always go to https://www.google.de/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=7AkjVIatDsKH8QfNkoC4DQ&gws_rd=ssl and type in define:word in this case it would be define:lucid dreams, or define:lucid dreaming.


but yes, i think that dreams do have a meaning. i beieve that dreams are the inner desiers of your heart... i have had multiple nights where i would go to bed thinking man i really want more memory and a new video card, for my computer so i can play games on it...like world of warcraft, and i would dream that i got them and im sitting there playing... or somthing along the lines of that... then theres days where i say to myself i want jessica to go out with me... and then in a week or so ill have a dream that jessica is going out with me...

then there are the dreams that tell my future ill dream my dad is calling me and asking me to mow the lawn.... i wake up and start doing the dishes and 10 minutes later i get a call from my dad asking me to mow the lawns... its creepy >_<

I think dreams only have meaning because you want them too. I believe that dreams are made up of things you do, people you see, and things you hear while your awake. In dreams, sometimes things are straight-forward and seem easy to understand, and sometimes nothing makes sense and you analyze it. You give dreams meaning based on how you feel about the 'awake' situation, and what you would like it too mean. Hidden meanings, I don't think so. Personal meanings felt inside the self, a good probablity.

I have two theroes on this topic that I have widely discussed with many other people. The first one is the possibility of the body going over the days whole entire scheme of events and taking the most significant ones and playing them over, sub conciously of course. As far as what I know, I think the body logs all of the days feelings, understandings and new knowledge. I think that those are blended together and placed into a summary of the day at the end of this so called log. It's like this, if the body was mad at so and so time, then the dream may be something mad like a fight or something. If the person was scared at the time, then the dream is of a person who is being attacked by a monster or whatnot.My other theory is that both the consious and sub cousious have a day of their own. In the day time, the consious does all of the real actions in the plus side. Like typing on this site, drinking, eating and all of the stuff you do on a regular basis. on the other hand the sub-cousious does out of the ordinary things that the cosuious would never get near. So in reality, they are both opposites of themselves in many ways.What I don't understand is what kind of a dream does a person have when they are uncousious, in a coma or on sleeping gas. Anyone have some therys on this?