Dreams, how to interpret them.

January 5, 2021

Woman's dreams. Pretty girl is flying in

Dreams have always interested people and stimulate their imagination. In ancient times, these were considered messages from deities or a means of predicting the future. Our ancestors believed so much in the power of dreams and their message that Alexander the Great, under the influence of a dream about a gray man who told him about an island off the coast of Egypt, changed the place where he was to build his Alexandria.

In recent years, dreams have occupied a lot of scientists. Thanks to psychology, neurology and biology, we know more and more about dreams and why they are so needed by both humans and animals.

Many researchers agree that dreaming has a purpose, but what exactly that goal is remains an open question.

What are dreams and why do we dream?

Dreams are sensual experiences that occur while sleeping. In a dream, you see images, hear sounds, and feel physical sensations. When you wake up, you may or may not remember your dreams. Scientists believe that people dream for several reasons.

Dreams are part of memory processing. They help to combine the various information we learn during the day, and this knowledge during sleep it is transferred from short-term memory to long-term memory. Thanks to which we remember the learned material better.

They reflect real life experiences.

The means by which the mind works on difficult, disturbing thoughts, emotions and experiences to achieve mental and emotional balance when you wake up. Brain response scans show that the same areas are active both when you sleep and when you associate with exciting events.

The brain responds to the biochemical changes and electrical impulses that occur during sleep. Did you know that our body goes through stages of paralysis while we sleep?

A form of awareness that connects information processing with the past and present, and prepares us for the future.

A defensive action of the brain to prepare you to face threats, dangers and challenges. May contain practical response scenarios. It's also possible that the dreams can help you practice reacting to threatening scenarios in real life. In this way, dreams can offer a fighting or flight training ground.

Today, people are still looking for meaning in their dreams. Although our methods of interpreting dreams have changed since the time of Alexander the great, our desire to understand them is very similar.

Do our dreams matter?

Dream researchers think so. Beginning with the work of Sigmund Freud (100 years ago), psychologists have studied dreams to understand what they mean to dreamers.

Sigmund Freud

In 1899, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud published his groundbreaking text The Interpretation of Dreams . In it, he proposed that dreams express unfulfilled wishes from the dreamer's life. Freud suggested that dreams consist of two types of information:

manifest content (what actually appears in your dream),
hidden content (the deep, symbolic meaning of your dream).

Freud, in his work, encouraged the dreamer to find the hidden meaning of the dream through a process called free association. With free associations, you talk openly about anything that may have to do with the images and events of your dream. Through this process, you are able to discover deeper desires that may be hidden in your subconscious.

Carl Jung

Like Freud, Jung believed that dreams are ingrained in the unconscious mind and can help heal the dreamer if properly understood. Jung has suggested that dreams show how a person has lost his balance. In the analysis of Jungian dreams, every aspect of your dream represents something in your psyche. So a dream is an attempt to communicate with yourself about the things that are keeping you from becoming a whole and a fully fledged entity.

The theory of co-creative dreams

Much modern dream research focuses on the way a dreamer reacts to the content of the dream, both during sleep and upon awakening. Researchers called this method of analysis co-creative dream theory . The basic idea is that the meaning of the dream does not come from the images that appear in your dreams. It matters how you react to the dream events.

When working with dreams, you share with the therapist how your "sleepy ego" felt at the beginning of the dream. Your "dream ego" simply refers to the version of you that appears in a dream. You and your therapist outline the basic plot of your dream, but leave out all names, places, and details. Then you examine how your ego felt in response to the dream events. You ask questions like "How did I react when I felt threatened in my sleep?" and "How have dream images changed depending on my feelings and actions?" Finally, you and your therapist discuss whether you are using similar responses and strategies in real life - with or without success.

How to analyze your own dreams?

You can use the dream study methods and principles to analyze your dreams. Some require you to share your dreams with others, as part of group therapy or with a psychotherapist.

Ullman Montague's model of dream appreciation

Ullman established a dream lab at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. His approach to analyzing dreams is called dream appreciation.

The basic steps of this method are:

As soon as you wake up, you write down your dream and then read it aloud to the group.
People in the group discuss your dream. They focus on the emotions they might feel if they were dreaming your dream.
You narrate and discuss the true context of your dream.
Someone reads your dream to you, giving you the chance to add more details.
People in your group indicate the links between your life and sleep.

The action model: exploration-insight-action

Clara Hill, professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, has written 14 books on psychotherapy, including some on working with dreams. Her model of dream interpretation connects the dreamer with the therapist.

The basic steps in the exploration-insight-action process are:

You relate your dream to the therapist and discuss the key images in the dream together.
You are talking about the feelings your dream evoked in you.
You and your therapist collect insights based on the content of your sleep.
Your therapist helps you to think about how you could change your dream if you had the power to do so.
Based on your behavior and the changes you would make in your sleep, you wonder how you can make a similar one in your daily life.

Self-analysis of dreams

You can use the above suggestions as a guide for self-interpretation of dreams. Here are some ways you can apply well-researched principles to your dreams.

Note: Keep a pen and paper by your bed so you can write down your dreams as soon as you wake up.

9 common dreams and their meanings

Certain topics constantly appear in the dreams of all people. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of research to explain why these themes are so common and widespread. However, theories about what they mean focus on a few common interpretations. Here is a short list of dreams many people experience, along with how often they are interpreted in popular culture.

Flying

If you feel happy flying in a dream, one of the common interpretations of such a dream is that you have a sense of freedom. This may be because you have risen above something in your life.

On the other hand, anxiety about flight may be related to the need to run away from something in your life.

Being naked in public

One of the popular interpretations of the dream of being naked in public is that something in your life has made you feel more vulnerable or vulnerable than you would like.

Teeth falling out

Freud saw such a dream as a symbol related to the loss of power. But over time, people expanded its meaning. Today, such a dream is read as experiencing the emotions associated with any loss.

Be pursued

This is one of the most common nightmares that people experience. One popular explanation is that you are afraid of something or someone in your life and want to get away from it rather than face it.

Be cheated

Some dream analysts argue that these dreams are largely related to feelings of dissatisfaction with some aspect of your life or relationship. It is also possible that this theme represents unresolved betrayal issues.

Being late for the exam

Variants of this test fear dream include discovering that the exam is in a different language or that you intended to quit but never did. Such a dream may reflect yours feeling that you are not living up to expectations in some area of your life.

Birth

If you are pregnant or having a dream birth, this may reflect an area of your life where you are experiencing new achievements, opportunities, or developments. People often have this dream when they are on the verge of an achievement or a milestone.

Visits from a deceased person

Dreams of visiting or seeing someone who is no longer alive can be very emotional as meetings are often very real. Some people believe that these dreams are one of the ways the subconscious mind helps you to digest the loss of someone you love or someone you need to close / break up with.

He is paralyzed or unable to speak

This dream is unlike any other. Sleep researchers have discovered a phenomenon known as REM atonia, a short period of time during REM atony where your body is paralyzed and unable to move. Scientists believe that when you wake up before the end of REM sleep, your mind may sense that your body is unable to move. In the moments between going to sleep and waking up, it may seem like just a dream in which you cannot move.

If you want to explore the meaning of your dreams, you can work with a therapist who specializes in working with dreams, try group therapy to listen to how other people see your dreams. or talk about them with relatives and friends.

Or, you can discover the meanings of your dreams yourself, using well-researched diagrams and entries in your own dream diary. Thus creating your own dream book. Record your dreams in it and observe reality. Based on your observations and repetition, you can begin to interpret their meaning.

There will probably never be a simple answer or theory that would explain the full role of sleep in a person's life. Biological, cognitive and psychological functions - certainly dreaming plays an important role in each of these areas.

Like sleeping, so and dreams are prone to disruption due to mental and physical health problems. There are many conditions (as well as medications) that can affect dreams or make dreams more difficult and disturbing. Depression and anxiety are often accompanied by nightmares and their presence may indicate the severity of depression. Tests showed that among patients with major depressive disorder the occurrence of frequent nightmares is associated with suicidal tendencies. People who are depressed or anxious are more likely to have stressful, disturbing or frightening dreams, sometimes in the form of repeated images.

Which affects the quality and depth sleep:

ANXIETIES

There is evidence that one type of drug commonly used to treat depression can alter dreams. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) affect dreams in several ways. An SSRI can reduce the recall of dreams or the ability to remember dreams. This type of drug can also make dreams worse. SSRIs can also cause more positive emotions in your dreams. On the other hand, discontinuation of SSRIs can lead to nightmares as well as worsen dreams.

DRUG and ALCOHOL

Drugs and alcohol can also affect dreams. Alcohol interferes with a normal, healthy sleep cycle and leads to sleep fragmentation. Many people say that alcohol helps them fall asleep, but ... Drinking alcohol in large amounts right before bedtime can affect and shorten REM sleep (this is where dreams come into play). Many people use alcohol as a sleeping aid. Tests

show, however, that alcohol interferes with sleep through many mechanisms, such as disturbance sleep architectures , triggering insomnia, and contributing to circadian rhythm disturbances and short sleep time (SSD). Alcohol also increases respiratory-related sleep events such as snoring and oxygen desaturation, especially in people with a history of these problems.

Marijuana also disrupts and reduces REM sleep. Research has shown that quitting marijuana and cocaine causes strange dreams.

COFFEE OR TEA WITH CAFFEINE

Coffee drunk on 6 hours or less before bedtime, it prevents you from falling into deep NREM sleep, and the REM phase (in which dreams occur) is disturbed, so you do not get enough rest during sleep.

Many people say that they have no problem falling asleep after drinking coffee, and that coffee is on them at all did not work. On the contrary, they fall asleep immediately after consuming the aromatic drink. However, research shows that drinking coffee 3 or 6 hours before going to sleep is as bad an idea as drinking a cup of caffeinated tea, e.g. black or green. A cup (200 ml) of black tea contains approx. 50-80 mg of pure caffeine, in the same amount of green tea it is from 30-50 mg. A 200 ml cup of coffee has an average of 80 to 140 mg of caffeine. The test subjects actually fell asleep without any problem. Interestingly, after waking up, they did not see any differences, but their sleep monitors showed that they lost 1 hour of sleep.

Not getting enough deep sleep makes us more tired. Being tired, we reach for caffeine to wake up, and the more we drink it, the bigger the sleep problem becomes.

To wake up refreshed in the morning, we need:

get enough hours sleep ,
go through the sleep phases , i.e. fall asleep in the appropriate sequences in NREM (deep sleep) and REM (sleep in which dreams appear).

Sources:

1. https://www.healthline.com/health/dreamwork-101-your-wide-awake-guide-to-interpreting-dreams

2.https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sleep-newzzz/201502/why-do-we-dream

3. S. Stevenson, Sleep smarter. 21 essential strategies to sleep your way to a better body, better health, and bigger succes. 2016, Rodale, NY.

International Museum of the Baroque

The Hill Interpretation Model aims to introduce cognitive behavioral changes into the dreamer's life - a kind of action plan (what and how to do), based on the information provided by the dream.

International Museum of the Baroque

According to Ullman, one of the goals of sleep is to access that part of our emotions and information that we may not perceive in our daily life. Dreams are designed to help you become real yourself in real life, to cope with restrictions imposed on us by themselves and others.