Do Dreams Have Meaning?
Dreams and the soul
Interpreting dreams can be a circuitous task. While more and more is known about this strange terrain in which each of us spend our nights, the world of dreams is still largely mysterious to us. It’s believed to play a role in memory consolidation and the processing of events and traumas in our lives, but whether or not each of our individual dreams has meaning is something that’s still widely debated in the scientific community.
While some scientists argue that trying to make sense of many of the specifics of our dreams is largely without value, most still agree that there’s something to be gleaned from the broader themes at play. There are useful interpretations for some of the more common dreams and nightmares that people experience. Being naked in public, losing our teeth, or being overwhelmed with work are dreams that speak to some of our most primal anxieties and most of us experience them at some point or another in our lives.
But what then of all of the specific places that we go and the conversations that we have each night? Can it all be arbitrary? Is most of what takes place in our dreams just the scattered events of our lives congealing themselves into meaningless mosaics? It’s a question to which there are no simple answers and one that remains divisive to this day. Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, two of the…
