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Every night when you go to sleep, your mind produces an unscripted and chaotic scene of varied production scenes, where you are both the author and the actor and the audience, all combined. For hundreds of years, we have turned to mystical guides and teachers to make sense of these sleep stories that keep appearing.

Psychology provides a more decent explanation. Your dreams are not coded prophecies but an internal mirror that directly reflects your deeper waking stresses, your emotional conflicts, your unresolved fears and issues along with your forgotten memories. So, when we strip away the supernatural myths and the mumbo jumbo, learning the dream, interpretation skills is not only an excellent self-discovery tool, but it is also a way to interpret the issues, the secrets and the fears in our minds.

Is dream analysis real?

The question – is dream analysis real and is it capable of interpreting what’s going on in the human mind?

I don’t believe dream interpretation in the sense of actually believing in mystical symbolic certainty and supernatural decoding systems, or universal dream dictionaries as such.

I also don’t think dreams are secret prophecies passed on from one realm to the other. But I do think every dream element is profoundly meaningful and it reflects EXACT subconscious material. Sometimes dreams are just fragmented noise and garbage floating around, like physiological residue, stress discharge or random associative mental leakage.

Introduction to analysis!

I do strongly believe there is something real occurring in psychologically coherent dreams which includes symbolic repetition, attachment themes, identity structure, bodily concerns, relational dynamics and subconscious tensions or conflicts. And because of the repeated coverage around the same core organisational themes. It becomes solid ground for interpretation.

To me, a dream is a compressed emotional muddle of that dreaming person, and this is what I think is happening.

Those that don’t believe or are sceptical have experienced poor dream interpretation such as vague mysticism, spiritual theatrics, cosmological nonsense or people forcing meanings into dreams. And that does deserve some level of scepticism and dismissal. There is much nonsense around and I’m going to show you that dream interpretation is accurate when it’s done correctly.

Dream exposure!

I think dreams expose emotionally truthful patterns with sharp on accuracy when done correctly, contextually and psychologically, instead of done with woo, woo or superstition.

There are people out there destroying this very valuable tool by associating it to a lot of unverifiable mumbo jumbo!

The central principle is not that dream symbols possess fixed universal or collective meanings in a simplistic dictionary like way, but rather the dream or the dreamer naturally converts what’s called abstract emotional structures into a spatial, behavioural and sensory metaphor. Dreamers operate less like coded messages and are more in line with condensed symbolic models of psychological structuring.

This process is absolutely not supernatural, nor is it arbitrary. As human cognition already relies upon metaphorical structuring during our waking and conscious life. Emotional overwhelming in the dream is described by psychology as linguistically flooding, drowning, pressure or collapse. Psychological or mental burden in the dream is experienced, as a weight, heaviness or dragging, and social anxiety is often described as an exposure, a scrutiny of being observed or seen and then judged. An identity confusion is experienced, has been lost, trapped or directionless. The dreaming mind of the dreamer simply transforms, these metaphorical structures into immersive experiential environments within the dream.

Dream themes

So, this explains to me why certain dreams or certain dream themes recur consistently all over the world in various cultures. In dreams, large bodies of water such as oceans, storms and floods appear. In dreams associated with emotional intensity, uncertainty or loss of control and power. This happens not because water possesses magical symbolic status, but because fluid dynamics closely mirror, the deep experience of emotion itself. Emotion is always associated to feeling on or in water.

In our life, emotion appears, it spills, overwhelms, leaks and surges and then reverts like water. The symbolic relationship emerges organically from what’s called embodied cognition.

Also in a similar way, buildings and houses appear in dreams because they function naturally as representations of something that is ‘contained’ such as, different rooms, hidden or levels of differing platforms and areas that correspond to different psychological compartments, developmental periods or protected emotional or hidden taboo material.

A cellar or basement, sealed room or inaccessible space such as a corridor, often reflects, things in the area of avoidance, repression or disconnection from aspects of experience that remain psychologically inaccessible during our waking conscious life.

Dreams that include being chased, often called pursuit dreams provide another example where individuals commonly report dreams involving being pursued, haunted, chased by threatening figures. Animals, especially displayed teeth in dogs, is common or even unknown beings and entities.

A simple interpretation may be that the dreamer, is running away from something in life. A more psychologically precise interpretation recognises that the nervous system. I repeat the nervous system/subconscious mind is modelling unresolved threats through personification. The pursuing entity may represent things such as fear, which is very common, along with shame, grief, aggression, instinct and unmet dependency needs or dissociative emotional material.

Another common theme in a dream is vehicles, such as cars, trains, aircraft, and roads and these frequently represent moving through life, agency, control and the direction that we are taking.

Driving a vehicle or a car often represents or corresponds to active agency in conscious life whereas occupying the passenger seat may indicate your observation, passivity, uncertainty or reliance upon external structures. A mechanical failure, failed brakes, loss or steering control reflects some diminished psychological regulation or perceived instability within your waking conscious life.

Garbage of the mind

These symbolic relationships appear not from esoteric systems, but from just simple ordinary cognitive mapping between physical movements and existential progression.

Dreams are not random collections of unrelated imagery, or as often said, garbage of the mind. There is definite emotional organisational decluttering, thematic regulation, symbolic continuity and behavioural coherence in dreams.

Dreaming participates in emotional memory integration, predictive modelling, effective processing and threat simulation.

There is no tried and tested one proven single theory that explains all dreaming content or phenomena, it is difficult to maintain the older reductionist position that dreams are entirely meaningless and just mental by products being released.

It’s important to point out that competent responsible dream interpretation does not involve imposing arbitrary meanings, isolated symbols or making absurd claims. And that the meaning of our dreams depends heavily upon our emotional tone, experiences and behavioural context, repetition, and the unique associative network of the individual in waking experiences.

So, for this reason, no respected responsible interpreter should claim any absolute certainty regarding dream meanings. In my opinion, dream interpretation is probabilistic rather than definitive.

Historically

Through the centuries dreams have been viewed as divine prophecies and modern psychology has taken the entire focus inwardly and treats dreams as products of the human mind, processing internal data rather than external messages from external forces or mystical places.

The Neurological Stage

During R.E.M sleep, the rational prefrontal cortex goes dark. Why? The emotional amygdala flares up. Why? This creates a state of controlled psychosis. The brain creates vivid, bizarre metaphors to consolidate memories, process daytime events and trauma, and even run survival simulations. This we do know is taking place.

Two famous names in interpretation

Sigmund Freud argued that dreams protect sleep by disguising forbidden unconscious desires into more acceptable storylines.

Whilst Carl Jung counter argued with Freud that dreams are not deceptive but instead, they speak of an honest symbolic language meaning to restore psychological balance by revealing ignored parts of the self, often using universally known mystic archetypes.

Debunking

Modern clinical psychology for example rejects the idea that teeth falling out in a person’s dream means the exact same thing for everyone, it doesn’t. Instead, a symbol is only meaningful when mapped against a dreamer’s unique waking, stresses, cultural background and emotional state.

In therapy

Therapies that use interpretation as an indication as to what’s taking place within a dreamer’s mind. The interpretation is less about the decoding process of secret codes and more abouts emotional issues and emotional integration.

Some therapists use a client’s dreams only as an indicator or a mirror reflecting unresolved conflicts and current anxieties in that person’s life. These are the items that the conscious mind strongly avoids in the waken mind.

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