An argument for listening to your dreams, even the really weird ones.
‘A metaphor what?’- Great joke.
After a particularly striking dream, you might walk around in a haze, unable to bring your mind from it for periods longer than an hour or two. But even if you don’t listen to your dreams — and you absolutely, probably should — one hearty, sweaty, ugly-cry of a dream is definitely useful for your mental health.
As much as it drags you around for the next 24 hours, do you ever feel better for having it? I certainly do.
Because this isn’t passively watching a horror movie, dreams mean something. At least in my school of thought. How can they not? I make them myself. I view them privately, and I have learned a shitload from them over the years about how I really feel, what might be some options for me, and how to have some difficult conversation or another. ‘Follow your dreams’ might currently be some pop-culture dorm-room poster to help you enjoy how you make money, but what I mean is to really follow your dreams. Your actual dreams. The ones at night.
Got it? Good. Stay with me. So-
Our brains work in Metaphors
Specifically when it comes to sleep. Since we first started using language, there’s evidence that we used it for storytelling. Back in the day this mainly helped us to avoid danger and make progress. Think about your favorite fairytale or childhood story. Mine is “The Sun vs The Wind.” In this story, the wind is a metaphor for pressure, or force. The Sun is persuasion, coercion. The Sun wins, so the lesson is you should get what you want through persuasion rather than force.
As we grow and experience more and more in our relatively tiny lives, we capture greater volumes of metaphor in our memory. Idioms, stories and social interactions enhance and stretch our individual understanding of the world. The very person you sleep next to, may — through one single event in their life alone — have a very different view of what a kettle represents compared to you. I’m not saying they think a kettle is a completely different object with various different uses. No, those people are probably sick; it’s for tea. The end. But, as Sigmund Freud eloquently states:
“‘Sometimes a Cigar is just a Cigar”
And sometimes, it’s a hilarious memory of the time 8-year-old you fell at the beach and got a mouthful of sand, while the old Spanish men sat around laughing and smoking. Now every time you semi-trip over at the beach, you can faintly smell cigars. Obviously not speaking from experience.
…
Moving on.
Dream Dictionaries are made from LIES
They’re not. I guess they mostly are. But you know, there’s a bit of truth in everything. Don’t quote me.
When you think about it in very simple, easy-enough-for-even-me-to-understand-terms, homo sapiens were pretty close. Then we split off into vastly different cultures and genomes, and now we’re all drinking at Starbucks again. We still seem to hate each other, but that’s another story.
So some of the images we see in our dreams are almost universal symbols because they come from so very far in the past when we shared with each other. For example:
Losing Teeth / Hair = Stress
Water = Emotions
Snakes = The Penis / Masculinity
These are the top themes of my dreams. Don’t read into it. They’re probably yours, too. Over thousands of years, these metaphors have been ingrained into our very experience as a human being. Dream dictionaries that take a dream you had, break it down into symbols like those above and then try to give you a highly specific and relate-able analysis, are probably just bull-shitting you. And here’s a very important point why that may be the case:
The Core Feeling of your Dream is the Most Important
Your metaphors are your metaphors, and I, for one, am not judging you. Openly. But how the dream really communicates with you is how you feel during it. If you dream that your house is on fire, and you’re sitting there feeling happy, I assure you that this is not about fire.
If you’re having tea and cake with your family and experience an overwhelming feeling of panic, that right there is your problem. Your family are going to try to poison you in the future. Avoid them at all costs.
Seriously, though, if you can identify how you felt while experiencing the metaphorical story, you’ll likely be able to match this to something in your life.
Here’s an example. In a dream I had, I was sitting in a hot spring with a bunch of old people, men and women, talking in Japanese about their grandchildren. From the water they kept pulling up an entire pig roast, taking a bite of the meat, and putting it back into the water we were bathing in.
So how did I feel during this? Neither disgusted at eating bath-water pig nor embarrassed about being surrounded by naked old people, two very common feelings I would imagine having. No, the core feelings for me here were confusion and frustration. I didn’t understand why they were having such a nice time; the pig tasted like bathwater whenever I took a bite, and I couldn’t get in on their conversation. This summed up my feelings about living in Japan at that time. I was feeling more and more alienated by traditions that I just didn’t enjoy and conversations I couldn’t join in with because of my awful language skills.
So, sleep next to a Pen and some Paper
Not too close. But recording your dreams is fun, interesting, and gives you a little more insight into yourself. (If you don’t know yourself, believe me no-one else does). That being said, talk your dreams through with your nearest and dearest. They’re close enough to know how you work, I hope, and far away enough to see your situations more clearly. Also thinking about recording your dreams actually makes you dream more. Try it, I dare you.
To close, you might have noticed I am pretty interested in dreams. If you have any theories, research or thoughts on them, I would be very grateful if you could share them with me, or with someone who knows me, if you feel like you have to approach me from a distance. Obviously not speaking from experience again.
