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.
|
|
Bookmarks