dreams don't need interpretations in order to be meaningful

Posting this here since its neither a lucid nor a non-lucid topic, but involves dreaming and often a supernatural component. We need better categories.

Let's suppose I'm an jerk, and that one day I become slightly more or less of a jerk. Presumably, this change would involve some altering of patterns in my mind, such as something that I realize in one context being understood in a different context in a way that is emotionally real to me. I succeed in "putting myself in someone else's shoes", or maybe I experience something that makes me feel that "nice guys finish last" and I go the other way with it.

It seems to me that there are dreams that correspond to that kind of development, that the dreams reflect that process of mental integration or change. "Interpreting" the dream isn't necessary for that integration though. It might add something to it, or take something away from it, but the dream itself is the experience of an aspect of the change taking place. And no interpretation can completely capture that.

I was going to try to illustrate with an example, but it seems vain to keep posting dreams about my internal moral dramas. So hopefully the idea by itself is clear enough.

An example would help us understand your question better it's a little too abstract for me at the moment.

I think dreams are among other things a way for our mind to create meaning in our subconscious in a creative way. I think they may not "need" interpretation to create meaning, but at times interpretation can help.

For example, let's say that you are a scientist, working on solving an important problem. You think of it throughout the day. Naturally your dreaming mind will continue to work on the problem, and it might use creative metaphors for your problems. You might not recall these dreams, and even if you did, on first sight they could look like none sense that has nothing to do with your problem. Even if you do not recall the dreams or you do not recognize the meaning behind them, your subconscious creative problem solving may help, and some day you may wake up with a revelation that may be a key to solving that problem, and you may have no clue how dreams helped, and you don't need to know.

However, effective interpretation could speed up the process by letting you analyze your dreams, and through the interpretation come up with a solution faster because your waking conscious mind may notice something your subconscious has not come up with yet but which your dream made you think of. Your conscious mind evaluating the work of your subconscious mind may provide the key.

If you were able to do lucid dreaming, then you could further work on solving the problem by using your conscious awareness in the dream to for example ask pertinent questions of your dream characters, who might respond in surprisingly useful ways.

Is interpretation or lucid dreaming necessary for getting meaning or other benefits out of dreams. No. Can interpretation or lucid dreaming help reach your goal faster or make connections that become only clearer once conscious and subconscious work together? Yes.

Now the big question is this: can the conscious mind interfere in some situations with the creative working of the subconscious by imposing its biases and thus making it harder for the creative subconscious to reach innovative solutions? In other words, can there be situations in which dream interpretation or lucid dreaming may make it harder for the subconscious to reach a creative solution to a problem that requires an opener mind than your conscious mind? And I fear that in some cases the answer to this question may be yes. Some dreams may be better left non-lucid and uninterpretted.

Ok, this might be an example of what you are saying.

When I was a kid, i always wondered where the witch of the south was in The Wizard of Oz movie. I'd never read the book. This was just original observation. I mean, who makes a movie with a witch of the north, east and west but no south? Bizarre! I wondered who she was or what happened to her.

I stopped eating meat when i was 13, cruelty issues, read Peter Singers book and that was the end of meat eating for me. But I had this dream for years - I'd be in a room, like a nice hotel banquet room with lots of people and starting to eat. I'd put my first piece of food in my mouth with a utensil and realize I'd just put a piece of meat in my mouth as i had forgotten i was a vegetarian. This would never happen in real life. Then I'd be paralized, not wanting to spit it out as i was in a nice place but unwilling to swallow. A sort of, you've forgotten who you are dream and now your stuck doing nothing. Had this for decades.

Then around age 36 watched the Wizard of Oz and realized Dorothy represented the witch of the south in that movie and it was all complete in my head. Who knows the director's intentions it worked for me, and I began to identify with her for the first time. I was never really a big fan or the movie before, probably because it was missing a witch. Soon after that i noticed a dream of mine was precognitive but before that, after this realization, i had that same dinner scene dream where i didn't even take a bite but pushed the table over table cloth and place settings included with some proclaimation about how i wanted to relate to the world as an ideal and my place in it. ( a bit personal to mention specifically)

So that would be a change in a dream that followed a person insight.

JoannaB:

For me, lucid dreaming in a first person video game like manner definitely interferes. I'm not saying its bad for other people, but for me almost the whole point of the dream is to change or bring in new knowledge, and the more I'm trying to control the dream the less room there is for that to happen.

It seems to me that dream interpretation only hurts if a person gets too carried away with it, and tries to make the dream into something more or less than what it really is. A reason I brought up this topic is my dreams have become increasingly weird and abstract, where they don't attempt to represent things using waking life metaphors. I'm having trouble making sense of some of these dreams, so I'm just exploring the extent to which it even makes sense to try. Another reason I brought it up, is sometimes dreams do a marvelously good job of packing a lot of meaning into a single metaphor. People post these dreams, such as in the mystic dreams forum on the dreammoods site, and it seems to me that although I may 'understand' the dream in some sense, I can't possibly offer an adequate interpretation. Likewise for some of my own dreams from a couple of years ago. Its like trying to interpret art.

Weirddreamsorg:

Here's an example from this past weekend. Three guys are driving a car in fresh snow on a dirt trail leading into beautiful mountains. They go a few hundred yards, to a point where it seems to me to get really perilous. Then they back up to the trailhead which ends in a warehouse-like area next to a shopping mall. They are apparently arms smugglers, and the tire ruts serve to make their ferrying of arms back and forth between the mountains and their cache easier. Two of the guys turn on the third guy, presumably to steel his cut of the spoils, and they start thwacking each other with automatic rifles which they aren't able to fire. The next scene is abstract, and I'm uncovering some geometric objects embedded in other objects, not like waking life objects. This uncovering is somehow helping these forms to develop and spread, and there are three kinds of people now, men, women, and people who have some kind of symbiotic relationship with these forms.

In one possible interpretation of this dream, the mountains represent religious truth. The tracks in the snow represent religious ideas, which are there largely for the sake of channeling religious truth in a direction that can be exploited. The guns I guess would represent specific thoughts or psychic abilities. The ineffectual fight between the men would represent the petty philosophical squabbles that people engage in, which for the most part seem to me to be more like intellectual turf wars than a process of improving our understanding.

The forms in the second part of the dream are more difficult for me to 'interpret', which I guess is also related to why they weren't expressed in waking-life metaphors. These have to do with our muses, fates, demons, anima, and the sense we're trying to make out of them. Part of my point is that my sense of these things is changing, and although thinking about them or 'interpreting' them is an important part of the process, its not the whole of the process, and a lot of that is going on whether I'm consciously interpreting them or not. Maybe this is almost so obvious that its not worth pointing out, but its something I was thinking about anyway.

I think my favorite quote from Freud (even if he never actually said it) was this:

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

When I was in college, I interpreted a lot of my dreams and, foolishly, those of others. In time I noticed that I was both attaching far more "meaning" to symbols and events in the dreams than was likely there, and inventing memories to "fill in" bits of the dream to help it better conform to the interpretation (and, foolishly, allowing others to do the same when telling me their dream). In a fortunately short time I realized that I was allowing the interpretation to drive the dreams, rather than the other way around, and I stopped.

I think this sort of interpreting goes on a lot. I also think that often doing so is okay, like when a trained psychoanalyst has you talk through a dream, with that creative talk doing real therapy, but I have a feeling that post-dream interpretations (embellished rightly or wrongly, but always with the best intentions, with the dreamer's current feelings and desires) have a tendency to be more about the dreamer's waking interests than in the dream itself.

I think that dreams do fine on their own, that whatever necessary communication to be made is being made, whether you consciously understand that communication or not. If you're not using them as a jumping-off point for introspection, with the understanding that you are making interpretations as a helpful waking-life exercise and not to specifically identify the truth of the dream, that's fine. If you find some global meaning in what you can remember, are very careful not to remember things that didn't happen, and are satisfied with drawing meaning from generalities of the dream like mood or setting, that's probably cool too -- it may even have been the point of the dream. But it might be wise to take a step back and really consider your intentions and waking-life biases before you go into a dream line-by-line, symbol-by-symbol, to create intricate or profound interpretations of dreams that may never have meant to say such things.

I think the OP is correct: sometimes it is best to trust in the machinery of your mind's ability to do its job, and let the information flow between unconscious and conscious flow undisturbed by intrusions from unnecessary, overindulgent, and very often incorrect outside sources (including your waking self).

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Sageous:

I think the 'sometimes a cigar is just a cigar' thought implies a premise about the nature of symbolism that's more limited than the way I think about it. In waking life, a cigar in the hand of Monica Lewinski is not "just a cigar" even though it is also in fact a cigar. The symbolic meaning isn't something that's either there or not there. I'll try to illustrate with a couple of dream examples.

Somebody on another site concluded based on a dream that China is going to invade the Middle East, primarily on foot and on horseback. I think this conclusion makes no sense because the Chinese army wouldn't have a chance to get through the Himalayas that way, particularly if India had American air support. Plus predictions apocalyptic wars are usually unreliable, and tend to say more about the paranoid and xenophobic mind that created the dream than anything else. But if the person says that the images in the dream represent an invading Chinese army, well yeah they do represent that, he should know because its his dream. This doesn't imply that they can't represent anything else to him or anyone else, or that what is represented is true or real.

Maybe that's not a very good example. I'll have better luck with the next one hopefully....This weekend I dreamed about black rubber bands laid out on a go board instead of stones, and suggested that they "probably have to do with people's thoughts about vibrations, among other things." You suggested in response that sometimes a rubber band is just a rubber band. As you probably know, go stones are placed on the vertices of the grid on the go board. In one of his early books, Briane Greene has a figure where he represents the tiny 'curled up dimensions' of string theory as little black loops on the vertices. This figure made an impression on my mind because I regard it to be topologically incorrect. When I've just a day or two before commented on this site about whether vibrations of the astral body correspond to the vibrations of string theory, this is related in my mind with that image. It is one of the things that image represents, the form is the same. It doesn't imply that the dream "intended" something about that, or "means" something about that. And it doesn't exclude the many other possible things that such an image corresponds to, hence my qualification "among other things". A dream is not a one-to-one map from an image onto an idea that the image represents, with dream interpretation being the identification of that idea. Its a matter of thinking about the images and seeing what can be learned from them. And I think its true that there's a lot of value in thinking metaphorically about images. There are a lot of essentially similar patterns in life that appear in a lot of different forms, and understanding in one context can very often be usefully extended to other contexts. With qualifications of course, since a simile isn't an isometry. In my case, an image of a grid with little black loops on it is related in my mind to the vibrations of string theory. It doesn't make any sense to suggest that its not related in my mind that way. And it would seem bizarre to me to suggest that the activation of both in my mind within the span of a couple of days should be regarded as a random coincidence, as if my mind is uncorrelated with my experience.

Similarly with cigars. I think we've talked about cigars and dicks enough now that I can never have a dream about a cigar that has absolutely zero connotations in relation to dicks. This doesn't say much of anything about the conclusions a person might try to draw about someone's life or psychology based on that connotation, but the connotation is there. A cigar is never, ever, just a cigar, either in dream or in waking life. This doesn't mean that trying to explain every appearance of a cigar as a dick-centric parable makes any sense though. Actually I think I can cook up a fairly plausible image where its the other way around and a dick represents a cigar.

It seems to me that your comments on this subject are haunted by the ghosts of things you've experienced with dream interpretation in the past which are foreign to how dreams are actually dealt with in these subforums. I guess you see it that way too. Sort of like how my comments about gurus tend to driven largely by experiences that I've had that are not entirely relevant to what other people are discussing. (See /inner-sanctum for a current example.) Your thoughts about dream interpretation and my thoughts about gurus are relevant because they're important to us, and they connect to continuing real world issues. But those thoughts may not be the best keys to understanding what other people are saying.

Of course I've done the same thing by distorting your "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" thought with my only half-relevant objection. So take it for what it is I guess.

Another thought: I do not think that there is anything wrong with the meaning of a dream evolving after it is dreamed, both through changed memory and through self-interpretation or acceptance of others interpretation. A dream is not a static thing set in stone in a given point in time. It is fluid, and if remembered is bound to evolve. The dreamer may round up the plot. Interpretation may change it so that it no longer has original meaning. As long as the new interpretation and changed plot helps the dreamer at the updated point in time, I do not think this negates the usefulness of dreams or of dream interpretation. I think often dreams are a way for our mind to think about issues, to make sense of things/problems/life. If our making sense evolves I think that is good. As long as neither the dreamer nor others force a sense onto it that appears wrong to the dreamer and the dreamer attempts to accept it even though it appears wrong, as long as that is not the case, if the dreamer feels that the new insight gained with the aid of the artifact of the dream which may be misremembered and reinterpreted but leads to a new insight which is valuable, what is the harm in that? In fact I would say that it could be wrong to try to keep a dream static if the dreamer is evolving in the meantime because a static dream fixed in time that is past is not as useful to the dreamer in a changing present.

Okay, Shadowofwind, now I'm confused.

When I wrote my post, and the bit about the cigar,* I was doing so under an assumption I drew from your OP that you felt that dreams represented a meaningful communication between you and your unconscious (or your muse, or other minds, or whatever), and had constructive value whether you interpret them or not. So I made a post basically agreeing to that, and now I am told that I was wrong; that no, not only should dreams be interpreted, but everything in the dream must mean something and ought to be interpreted.

I obviously misunderstood the OP, and should not have posted what I thought was an agreement to it.

Regarding those rubber bands: I didn't know or failed to remember the association you might have held between go, vibrations, and Brian Greene's imagery. Given your perspective on things, I suppose those rubber bands could have held meaning during the dream, and certainly could be ripe for interpretation by you after the dream... I take back my statement, especially given my misunderstanding of the premise of the OP.

I agree, I likely am haunted by my brief adventures in dream interpretation. Why? Because it is an occupation open to errors that can be very damaging (especially if you're interpreting someone else's dreams without a solid knowledge of that someone else or the training to interpret and walk them through that interpretation). In a sense, you have a lot of power to imagine things that were never told by the dream itself, thus opening avenues for delusion or misinformation that could really upset your waking life. Here's an extreme and thematic example:

You have a dream where an old male friend and you are sitting by a pool smoking cigars, and, even though (let's say) the setting is in truth simply some day residue of a forgotten moment in your past that might have involved your friend, an outdoor scene, and some sort of snacking or smoking (yes, I know you don't smoke; this is just an example, bear with me), you decide after interpretation that, since you were both smoking cigars, you must have some homosexual feelings for your friend, and need to act on them. So, while your dreaming mind simply supplied a couple of meaningless props inspired by no more than a couple of perhaps misread memory engrams, your waking mind managed to convert that empty image into a full-blown life-crisis. Haunted indeed.

*Freud was using that phrase as an umbrella metaphor, by the way; he simply meant that sometimes objects in dreams carry no meaning at all, aside from filling in space, appearing to complete schemata. Though your assertion that a cigar for you is never just a cigar is a little disturbing, I believe the point stands: objects, occasionally, are simply objects, and they may carry no meaning beyond their own existence.

JoannaB:

That all makes sense, and such post-dream creative interpretation can be most helpful, either as a form of introspection or as a tool for therapy by a qualified psychologist. But I must ask: does interpreting a dream so freely ultimately have anything to do with the dream itself? After all, if you're adding to the dream or even changing your memory of it to suit, albeit constructively suit, your current waking-consciousness needs, the original dream and whatever message it was supplying becomes pretty much irrelevant. This is not a bad thing, in the context of your post, but it does create meaning that was never in the dream in the first place.

And, of course, I must repeat that I had thought that the whole point of the OP was that dreams carry out meaningful communications between you and your unconscious whether you interpret them or not, so (unless you get that communication right) any interpretation you do after waking creates meaning that is secondary to what had already been communicated, and that secondary meaning isn't necessary for the dream to matter.

Very confusing.


P.S.: I just realized that this post might be seen as dripping with sarcasm. Please be assured that I am speaking sincerely, and any snideness or sarcasm was a result of bad writing, and not my intentions.

I believe that dreams may have original meaning (original intent) as a message from subconscious to conscious, but since both our subconscious and our conscious evolve, the meaning changes if the dream is remembered, retold, and interpretted. The original meaning will have a first "impact" if the conscious "gets" the message the subconscious tries to send, and then the changed meanings over time may add additional messages which may reinforce the original message or they may change the direction in a new way, and neither is necessarily a bad thing. I think a dream can be a tool for gaining insights if one wants to, and there may be different insights over time if one chooses to continue using this tool for further introspection or making new sense out of life.

Let's say that someone has a dream that is caused by anger and the original message is one of anger, but then dream may be interpreted after the anger has cooled down somewhat, and if the dream's symbols are useful to the dreamer in the new situation in a new way that is no longer fueled by anger but by creative inspiration of taking that message in a new direction that is pertinent to the dreamer in a new way. Is that wrong? How important is it to remain stuck in the moment in the original intent? And if the dream continues to be useful as a tool for making sense of something in a new way, why would that be wrong? And it would not negate that there was an original meaning, but the original meaning may no longer be relevant in the changed circumstances, even though the dream is.

Those of us who live in the US interpret the US constitution in new ways not just with original intent, and I think that is right, because why should it matter whether a new interpretation is not what the founding fathers intended? The circumstances have changed. We no longer have legal slavery, and they did not have the technology we do, etc. However, as long as the Constitution remains a useful tool for interpreting what the laws of this country should be, let's keep it. This does not negate the fact that this document did have an original intent of course.

^^ Actually, I was (and had thought the OP was as well) implying that you need never even know the original meaning or intent of the dream, that the machinery of your mind works just fine whether or not you're "getting" its actions.

There is no need to be "stuck" on a meaning that you never consciously held in the first place, even if you did get that initial meaning. A dream's meaning is probably ephemeral, lasting about as long as the dream or perhaps for the next day; to attach and hold meaning to it forever would not be wise, I think (though it seems to be done a lot).

Regarding changing the meaning later: Can't you do that with anything? Why hold out dreams as a source for interpretation when you can do the same with a tree, or a passing dog, the curl of a smile, or perhaps the shape of clouds in the sky, or literally anything at all? After all, all you are doing is attaching meaning to perceived symbols so that those symbols can teach you something or help you through a problem. Again, there is nothing wrong with this at all, but wouldn't dreams because just another source for your own work, rather than a meaningful entity unto themselves, if you replaced all their initial meaning with stuff that works better for you later?

Regarding your note about the Constitution. The funny thing is, we amend the Constitution, we don't replace it. Yes, details change with society over the years, but the initial premises of the Constitution and Declaration (i.e., life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness; democratic process, separation of powers) remain constant... indeed, amendments are meant more to bring societal changes into the Constitutional fold than add to it (i.e., slaves were always people; we're just recognizing it now, or women ought to have the right to vote). In a sense, the core of the Constitution has not only retained its meaning over the centuries, it's maintained its relevance, thanks to the people's interest in preserving that meaning. Also, keep in mind that the Constitution is not an interpretation of our laws, it is the foundation of our laws... the difference is significant, and I think ties the metaphor in nicely with the significance of that initial dream communication.

So you are right on all counts, JoannaB, but do the things you say (all of which make sense) maintain or elevate the importance of what's in your dreams, while you dreamed it, or does it dismiss it?

For me the importance of the dream's meaning at the time I dreamed it matters to some extent, and at the moment my subconscious may have been passing a message to another part of my subconscious, and even if I never received the message consciously it did that job (or failed at it, which is also possible). Then interpretation of dream may bring forth some original meaning mixed in with evolved meaning. Ideally one becomes more aware of cause and effect, and of one's thoughts and problems either in the past or in the present or both, which may ideally help with approaching the future.

Contemplating a tree or flower or some object may help as well as a focus of meditation. Whatever tool works.

If someone finds dream interpretation does not help them but something else does, then they should do that something else instead.

The nice thing about dreams is that they can be interpretted to give one very rich insights because they are a product of one's own mind based on something - problems one is trying to solve mixed with memories mixed with word association and whatever else. The results are often fairly imaginative, and may work very well as tools for further insights. However, this may not work equally effectively for everyone and that is fine.

Personally I tend to dream in metaphors a lot, or interpret my own dreams as metaphors. Were these metaphors the original intent of my mind? I think yes in some cases, since sometimes I recognize the metaphor, start interpreting while still dreaming, and I remember a dream in which I dream that fish are a metaphor for dreams. Now of course I only have access to my memory of the dream, and I cannot tell 100% that it was not that my waking mind came up with the metaphor after the fact after all. Ultimately I don't think it matters to me. As long as the metaphor helps me understand something about myself, namely that my obsession with dreams has replaced my previous obsession with fish keeping, I find the insight useful no matter whether I got it while asleep or upon waking up.

Sageous,

I think there's a difference between saying that a dream changes me even when I don't reflect on it, and saying that it has no meaning that can be constructively reflected upon. There's also a difference between saying that the value of a dream can not be completely captured in any collection of interpretations, and saying that no meaningful interpretations are possible or useful. Here I'm not trying to characterize what you were saying, I'm just trying to better describe what I was saying. If I were to start a thread extolling the virtues of feeling, it doesn't mean that I would disagree with someone who replied extolling the virtues of logic. I would probably argue with them though if they said something that seemed to me to wrongly diminish the value of feeling, even if I was in other regards mostly in agreement with what they were saying about the value of both feeling and logic. JoannaB has been posting thoughts about the value of dream interpretation. I don't have a quibble with anything she's saying, because she's in no way contradicting the points I was trying to make. Personally I would avoid retroactively changing a memory of a dream, but that might be a matter of personal preference as much as anything. In your case, it seems to me that we see dreams in much the same way, but that you might see some possibilities to be more mutually exclusive than I see them.

In regards to your cigar example....That kind of dream interpretation would seem ridiculous to me. In that situation I would consider whether I had homosexual feelings for my friend. If there seemed to be some, I would consider whether it would be more fruitful to suppress them, act on them, try to reinterpret them, communicate them but not express them, or some other approach. The dream has no authority to tell me what my feelings should be or what I should do about them. But certainly it is an opportunity to consider the possibility. If my homosexual feelings were so weak that they wouldn't even be present except for my misplaced association of penises with cigars, then I think it would be pretty silly to take them very seriously. And yes, the exact same comments apply to a waking life experience of smoking with my friend.

I have at times had homosexual feelings in relation to male friends by the way. I doubt I'll ever be in a situation where it will be appropriate to act on them. So again in my case those cigars are penises. They're also mental images of inanimate objects, they don't tell me who I should be, how I should feel, or what I should do. Even for a man who has no homosexual feelings whatsoever, assuming such a man exists, the cigars still afford an opportunity to reflect on the absence of those feelings, if that is of interest.

Here's another example, in case it helps. As I've probably mentioned, I was briefly jailed a few years ago for allegedly stealing $60 of building supplies, something I was innocent of. At that time, my job was essentially to help steal hundreds of thousands per year for cronyist homeland security contractors, but that activity was considered just fine both by the law and by the people around me. I'd be an idiot if I didn't reflect on what I could learn from this experience. Its also true that the experience changed me whether I reflected on it or not. I think its also true that there was an element of providence in those events happening, and I think I can support that conclusion fairly well taking into consideration other details. At the same time would be presumptuous to make absolute and limiting judgments about the full nature, extent, and 'intent' of that element of providence or destiny. And it wouldn't be very smart to try to confine the 'meaning' of the experience to one lesson. I learned a variety of things from it. To me this is all very much like interpreting a dream. If someone were to try to tell me that any connection between the arrest and my work is likely coincidental, and that I am likely to do little more than confuse myself by thinking of it otherwise, I don't think that would be right. And I did get a lot of that kind of crap from people when I pointed out the irony of my arrest in context of the drone war related work we were doing.

JoannaB; Thanks for sharing your thoughts here, they're appreciated. What you say seems reasonable to me.

Sageous; What you're saying seems mostly reasonable to me too, and of value, so thanks for that, notwithstanding my qualified quibble with the 'sometimes a cigar is only a cigar' expression.

The first telling of your dream shadowofwind, meant nothing to me other than the literal although I'm sure I could have forced some meaning if I tried. This is why I think it is next to impossible to interpret someone else's dream unless you know them well. With more background information, yes, I can see many paths up a mountain, etc. I have found dreams to be both literal and figurative at the same time. Getting rid of a doormat in a dream literally came true for me once at the same time I stopped letting someone treat me like a doormat.

The value of dreams doesn't lie in their interpretation, in my opinion. Sometimes their meaning just comes to light when there is an evolution in development I think.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by JoannaB

Personally I tend to dream in metaphors a lot, or interpret my own dreams as metaphors. Were these metaphors the original intent of my mind? I think yes in some cases, since sometimes I recognize the metaphor, start interpreting while still dreaming, and I remember a dream in which I dream that fish are a metaphor for dreams. Now of course I only have access to my memory of the dream, and I cannot tell 100% that it was not that my waking mind came up with the metaphor after the fact after all. Ultimately I don't think it matters to me. As long as the metaphor helps me understand something about myself, namely that my obsession with dreams has replaced my previous obsession with fish keeping, I find the insight useful no matter whether I got it while asleep or upon waking up.

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I tend to think very literally and my dreams can be very literal too. While I disregard dream dictionaries, I have had the occasion of having dream symbols from a book start appearing in my dreams after I read the book. It was almost like it was a symbolic vocabulary building exercise. I also have a friend who frequently uses metaphors and similes while conversing with me and those appear in my dreams as well. Who said what first and what caused an effect just collapses when dreams are involved.