Bugfolk:
Those were some interesting, and in my mind valid, thoughts you shared up there. Here are a couple of mine:
Originally Posted by BugFolk
... If dreams are only relevant to the dreamer, then how can people really help interpret someone else's dreams? And those dream encyclopedias?
In my opinion, people really can't interpret someone else's dreams, at least not without meeting the dreamer personally, getting to know about them and their particular lifestyle, and then asking a series of careful questions about what the dreamer thought about the things they were dreaming. Dream interpretation is certainly possible, but it is a very intimate process that does not translate well to posts on a forum.
And yes, those dream encyclopedias are junk; just ignore them. Everyone should. Sure, it is possible to develop a set of archetypes that everyone shares (i.e., dreaming of water, losing teeth, getting lost, etc), but those archetypes are mostly meaningless by themselves, sort of like signposts with no words on them. It is the attachment of the dreamer's personal context that makes the archetypes mean something that matters (i.e., what is the dreamer doing in the water? what did the dreamer feel when her teeth fell out? what was the world like in which the dreamer was lost, and how did the dreamer react to being lost? and most importantly, what is it in the dreamer's waking life that these signs might really be pointing to?), and that cannot come from one of those dictionaries.
Or what if the meaning to a dream turns out to be something embarrassing? Can I be judged poorly based off what I share from a dream? And others too from what they share? If so, maybe we should all guard them, our dreams, like our deepest secrets.
That is an excellent point.
I did a lot of dream interpretation work years ago (in direct contact with the dreamers, of course!), and these days I often note an embarrassing "signpost" cropping up from dreams reported here. I doubt many people (including the dreamers) will notice that they are, say, talking about their inner weaknesses, biases, needs, or fears when reporting a dream, but someone might. And someone might judge.
The truly paranoid among us might even imagine that the dream journal pages are nothing more than a data mining operation, assembling the details about a dreamers' likes, dislikes, and general personality trends into a specific personal profile which they can then sell to the highest bidder. This is of course most certainly wrong, since the algorithms probably don't exist yet for accurate profiling, but it does leave pause for thought.... especially when you consider the level of importance sites give to reporting dreams.
I personally don't have a dream journal on line, and rarely post my specific dreams here. This is mostly out of laziness and the innate conclusion that I really don't believe my dreams would be of any real interest to anyone but me, but I have to admit that publicly sharing the moments of extreme personal intimacy that dreams often are is something that I feel very uneasy about doing... this is just me, of course!
Or is it even important to remember what we dream? Should I even be interested in it?
Yes, and yes; especially if you are interested in lucid dreaming.
Haphazard as their content may be, dreams still represent a good chunk of your conscious experience. To ignore dreams as inconsequential is like throwing away a potentially significant portion of your life; that never seems like a good thing. It is better, I think, to learn to remember and appreciate your dreams, incorporating them into your memories and, by doing so, expanding your life a bit.
Also, and almost as an aside on this thread: In order to lucid dream, which for me is an excellent end in itself, I believe that you must make your dreams important; learn to remember them, record them, and make them an important facet of your waking life.
So yes, I think it is important to be interested in your remembering your dreams.
And note that I didn't even get into remembering your dreams as tools for interpretation, introspection, and personal improvement which is a whole other potentially valid reason to make them important. But that is another subject altogether for me, and one that is open to lots of argument, especially because I believe that many, if not almost all, dreams, really mean nothing at all.
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