Making sense of senseless dreams...

[Madysen]

All my life, I've been having completely senseless dreams. Honestly, not a single one of them has been helpful in allowing me to learn something about life or improve my life (and I've studied dream signs...I'd know if there was something there). You could say they're fun in that they're so random, but for once, I would like for a dream to make at least some sense. Is there any way I can use control to achieve this? I've only used control once since I started trying my hand at it (I closed a door...) and I know I'll have to practice more to get to the level I want, but can y'all supply any advice?

[Serith]

I've never thought much of the theory that dreams were meant to convey some sort of message to us help us with our lives. Sometimes we learn things, but those times are the minority. However, even though normal dreams rarely give us any obvious help for our waking lives, there are many ways that you can use lucid dreaming to improve your life. Are there any skills you want to improve upon? Practice them in dreams, where there's no consequences if you make a mistake. Are you an artist or a musician? Find museums and concerts in your dreams, and recreate the things you find when you wake up. Do you have any fears you want to eliminate? Face them in dreams, where you know they cannot hurt you, and they'll scare you less when you're awake. As for how to get any useful information out of dreams, you can always ask dream characters questions. A lot of the time they tell you nothing that makes sense, but sometimes you learn something interesting. There are a lot of ways your dreams can help you in real life, even besides the ones I've mentioned, you just have to try different things.

[Leixor]

All my life, I've been having completely senseless dreams. Honestly, not a single one of them has been helpful in allowing me to learn something about life or improve my life (and I've studied dream signs...I'd know if there was something there). You could say they're fun in that they're so random, but for once, I would like for a dream to make at least some sense. Is there any way I can use control to achieve this? I've only used control once since I started trying my hand at it (I closed a door...) and I know I'll have to practice more to get to the level I want, but can y'all supply any advice? I think if you are looking for a direct "oh I dreamed this and that applies to this" you'll be looking a long time without much to show for it. I do believe normal dreams can be used to learn about your life, especially really abstract ones. It's not gonna be just glaringly obvious usually though. It's like looking at one of those inkblots and saying what you see. It's really just an inkblot, but what you can see in it can say a lot for you because it comes from your personality and psyche. A dream which already comes from inside of your mind, being then analyzed by the same mind that concocted it, there is a lot of you in whatever you come up with. Learning more about yourself is always useful. That's what I think anyway. Edit: and to go further, obviously lucid dreaming could help you in this regard. Consciousness of yourself in one of your "senseless" dreams would give you the ability to learn from it, without changing it. Instead of going through the strangeness accepting all as you see, perhaps you can find the source of it, or some reason behind it.

[DNK]

Expectations can help. Expect and auto-suggest before sleep that your dreams will make sense, will have some sort of coherent narrative structure. I tend to have the problem of random/stupid dreams, but generally when I spend the minute or so it takes to suggest to myself that I will have a coherent, realistic, meaningful dream, my mind obeys fairly well. I'm actually focusing on that more than lucidity right now.