What Does it Mean? Dreams, a Lack of Control, and Personal Meaning
I’ve always been notorious among my friends and family for having some really strange dreams. I’d tell them all about them in excruciating detail but could never figure out what they meant. Around Christmastime one year, my best friend gifted me a large book that talked about the different meanings of different things in dreams. She handed it to me and simply said, “figure ’em out yourself, Belle.”
The world our mind comes up with when we’re unconscious is completely out of our control (I’m not going to count lucid dreaming, that’s a whole different conversation). Dreams tend to be entirely nonsensical and yet, in many cases, make all the sense in the world. You could find yourself flying one moment and all of the sudden be in the middle of a room you’ve never seen before. And yet, in all of this nonsense, a sliver of reality will peak through. While this sort of thing sounds terrifying and existential, sometimes the things your brain just wants you to know even the most mundane or insanely stupid things about you.
For an example in this duality of man, I turned to my good friend Julia. I’ve lived with Julia for all three of my college years so far, so I know how strange things can be in both her waking life and the life she lives in her dreams at night. When I asked her about any dreams where she felt like she had been shown something she wasn’t fully aware of beforehand, she told me about two of her dreams.
“Shortly after my family dog Padme was put down, I had this vivid dream about her walking up and crossing into the gates of heaven. This really stuck with me and it really helped me process and come to terms with her loss and the grief that it had made me feel from it. Oh, also, I had a dream where I fell onto a hot dog and got ketchup all over myself. I think it meant that I was craving something. Probably hot dogs. I thought the dream would be sexual since I wasn’t wearing anything but it wasn’t. Just a hot dog and ketchup.”
I then go another one of my close friends and roommates, Lauren. I have heard many tales of her mortifying recurring spider dreams. Her arachnophobia is well known by everyone in the apartment, so these come as no surprise to us. I asked her about them and if she thinks they may have any meaning to her.
“So, my spider dreams normally happen when I take naps during the day. Basically, I will wake up half asleep and I will see spiders either crawling on me or the wall. If they’re crawling on me, I try to swat them away immediately, but if they’re on the wall I will normally stare and blink or try to crush them. It may have something to do with me facing my fears because if I was fully awake, I’d be way to scared to even try to crush them,” Lauren tells me.
My third and final roommate, Sydney, was my next target for questions (look, I don’t have the confidence to talk to many other people other than the ones I live with. Leave me alone). They tend to have strange dreams as well. Not only this, but when they take their famous long naps during the day, they tend to have more serious dreams. I asked them if they ha any memory of this happening before and if it meant anything.
“So,” Sydney says, “I had these constant recurring dreams of me driving my mom’s old ’96 Honda. It was always me at 5 or 6 years old even when I would have this dream later on. It would never be me driving, not knowing how to drive, ya know. My passengers would always be my stuffed animals and they’d be buckled up. I was always speeding, never pushing down on the brakes, and whatever. Every time without fail I would look back at my stuffed animals, look forward again, and get into a car accident. I feel like I projected my feelings of how my stuffed animals were like my first close friends and how I always used them as a way to connect with people. Losing that as you get older is hard. They were my friends when I was younger, too.”
“I used to be embarrassed of the Dan and Phil fanbase when I was younger, so much so that I denied even to myself how much I enjoyed their videos,” a friend who wishes to remain anonymous says, “Around when they announced that they were going on tour, I had a dream that I went to their show and had front row tickets. They ended up pulling me on stage and everyone loved me and I was so honored to be up there with them. Truly a life changing moment. I don’t think my brain wanted to let me deny any longer that I was a fan of their content. Shortly after the dream, I ordered some merch of theirs and still continued to feel embarrassed.”
“In fifth grade, I really liked this boy in my class and I would dream about dating him every now and then. All of the sudden, one night I dreamt that he broke up with me and I was pissed. This girl from my class who I hardly spoke to walked up to me after he left and asked ‘Do you want to date me instead?’ to which I responded with a sigh and an ‘Okay, fine’. Then, we were walking in to school together holding hands. I was still sighing and rolling my eyes, but honestly holding her hand felt kind of nice. I think that was the first instance where my brain wanted to tell me I was bisexual,” another anonymous friend says.
I have had dreams that have shown what I’ve been really thinking, as well. After my dad had a massive stroke, I would have dreams about him being in a comatose or death-like state and then, out of nowhere, popping up perfectly fine and unscathed. I’d wake up realizing nothing prepared me for the in-between: the long road to recovery he had and how things wouldn’t go back to normal. I didn’t want to think about that, but I had to.
I decided to take different things from significant dreams of mine and put them into the Wombo.ai app. This app takes images, a theme, and a written prompt and generates dreamlike images out of the image and prompt. I decided to do this out of curiosity, as I felt maybe it would show me how these things look in a more dream-like state. I also was curious because these are all things that I may not think about on a daily basis but, for whatever reason, my unconscious mind deems them important enough to bring them back into my head at night. These are things that I may not be consciously passionate about, but seeing them sparks a very nostalgic or bittersweet reaction, as many of these things are from my childhood and adolescence that I don’t think I appreciate enough when I’m awake. Maybe that’s what my brain is telling me: to remember these things that I used to appreciate more.
I talked to people around Arcadia University’s campus these same sorts of questions: have you had any dreams that have told you something about yourself and, if so, what were they? I asked 35 people and charted their answers.
I also interviewed Julia and Lauren some more, as their dreams are very entertaining and their interpretations are also interesting as, while they may not mean anything major, their brain still made them think about it.
As life has continued to pass by, the more I realize that these types of dreams can be so important — not just to myself, but other people. Sometimes even the silliest or most insignificant realizations can go unnoticed or not accepted by the conscious mind. You may come out of a dream craving a hot dog more than you already realized you did or coming to terms with the fact that the things you loved as a child won’t be there for you forever. Once you fall asleep, you are out of the driver’s seat and forced into the back of a mini-van with a TV that shows you the things you may not have thought you’d see. Whether it’s ketchup, spiders, or Dan and Phil, you aren’t in control over what you learn about yourself.
