Thread: dream interpratations

It's not. Dream interpretation is psychology. That differs from person to person, no website can give you an interpretation.

In addition, it is not accurate to think that one is objective enough to figure out your own dreams. We are not a good judge of ourselves. As an example, most people are slow to see and hear compliments and praise. Sometimes we need an unbiased caring individual to point out what we are missing.

I consider dreams something that I can't interpret as oddly as some people seem to do it (like, symbolically. For example a hawk would mean that you're seeking freedom or something)

My dreams, AFAIK, are random thoughts and images I have while sleeping. If I see a recurring theme like me being chased in half of my dreams (actual situation. Reading my DJ should give you an idea of what kind of chasing), I think it's fair enough to say that it means something. However, since I consider them random thoughts, individual imagery should not be considered anything significant.

Your personal imagery and symbolism is just as important as your own personality. Those are not random thoughts to the experienced eye. If you are being chased in your dreams, the other symbols and items included in each dream point to what it is in your life you are really running away from. Wouldn't you like to know what that is and why?

Originally Posted by underhiswing

Your personal imagery and symbolism is just as important as your own personality. Those are not random thoughts to the experienced eye. If you are being chased in your dreams, the other symbols and items included in each dream point to what it is in your life you are really running away from. Wouldn't you like to know what that is and why?

Sure. But I'd only trust interperations of important factors in dream. Random objects that only occur once in the dream in a subtle way are not something that should be meant to be interpreted, which is what I see a lot of people try to do. I consider these things random thoughts. Only major repeating events and themes should be open to investigation

I have not found that so in all cases. Probably keeping open minded is the best approach....but its up to you.

I agree with Under. Virtually everything in a dream can be interpreted, however identifying a theme to the dream is usually what allows that to happen. The more obscure symbolism is also usually easier to decode once you have a general idea about what the dream is pointing to. From there your feelings become very important in pinpointing what the strange personal symbols are hinting at.

Here's a fairly decent synopsis of dream interpretation condensed from the work of both Freud and Jung: Dreams as Viewed by Freud and Jung

I don't know who the guy is who wrote it, and his English is pretty poor, but then if you can read half the stuff people post in here then you can muddle through this.

See, what most neophytes to dream interpretation fail to grasp, and what all Dream Symbol Dictionaries completely ignore, is the fact that you don't interpret the surface level of the dream - you ignore that and go beneath it to the latent content. And you have to understand the associations that the dreamer makes with the various objects and situations in the dream. You can't just say "Cats mean this and apples mean that in dreams".

If I dream of a giant cat smashing me with its paw and a Korean dreams of a juicy delicious looking cat laying in a platter on his table all cooked up, do they mean the same thing? Of course not!! It also relates to what a particular image of a cat might mean to you due to some past event - maybe you witnessed a cat being run over when you were 4 and it scarred you emotionally and you dream of a cat that reminds you of that event. That means the event is an integral part of the dream interpretation. Does the dream dictionary happen to mention that fact?

Also, dreams tend to be hard to interpret unless you're going through some potent emotional turmoil that starts showing up in your dream life. That's generally when people will seek psychological help, and at those times dreams become powerful and poignant. Most dreams on a nightly basis will be pretty meaningless I suspect. Except on those rare occasions when you wake up remembering one and feeling like it was really important.

I have to disagree with much of what you just said. Dream studies such as that done by Gillian Holloway prove that there are very common consistencies with many symbols. While the overall meaning may be different for everyone personally, many symbols are universal. A cat may prove to mean two completely different life scenarios for you and the Korean, but typically a cat would reflect a common general meaning for the both of you. That being an illusionary belief or need to feel good.

I'm my own work with clients I tend to see similarities with symbols that can cross all kinds of culture bounds. It's just simply not true that dreams are nonsense. Close study of large groups of people can prove that there does seem to be some kind of universal language. 100 people dreaming of lions will generally have control issues with themselves or others. 100 people dreaming of the beach will generally show a common theme of confrontation with uncertain situations in their lives.

It would be a monumental task, but if you researched 5000 dream symbols with thousands of people you would see in the end for yourself that we are all dreaming universally.

You work with clients? In what capacity? Are you a psychologist?

Well, this does lend a lot more credence to what you say. And at least you do say that context must be taken into consideration.

Actually I agree that many dream symbols do have some widespread (probably not universal, but close) meaning. Swarms of insects for instance seem to often mean disease or sickness or unhealthy conditions that could lead to sickness.

But I also think it's important for people to understand that you can't just look up symbols in a book without some understanding of the processes that create dreams and how to interpret them. This is exactly what far too many people think they can do.

As a great example, here's the section on Dream Symbols from that paper I linked to above - this demonstrates how dream imagery can be interpreted in this particular instance.

3.2.2 Dream symbols In order to point out the differences between both interpretations of dreams regarding the meaning and role of dream symbols, I shall quote the following dream-report.10 One young patient tells the dream: "I am in the tree in unknown garden and I am picking apples. I look around carefully to see if I am being watched." We have learnt that patient's associations are a must when interpreting dreams. So let us tell the associations that the patient told to the therapist. The content of dream reminds the patient on his childhood, when he picked some of pears in the foreign garden without permission. The feeling of bad conscience, intensified in dream, reminds him on an event from the previous day. On the street he met and talked for a while with his acquaintance, a woman who was otherwise indifferent to him. In that moment, a gentleman, who he knew too, passed by and he got the same feeling as when he stole the pears. Picking apples reminds him also on the scene from the paradise. He could never really understand how picking prohibited apples had such a crucial consequence for the first human. Sometime ago he was constantly mad at God's punishment for man's sins, which is why he believed God created people in the way they are: curious and greedy. He also remembered on his father who punished him few times for no obvious reason. The worse was when he got caught while secretly watching the girls that were swimming. In connection to this, he confessed that he had recently started an affair with some house-maid, but he could not induce her to engage in sexual intercourse. He had a date with her in the evening before this dream occurred.

Now, Freud would interpret this dream above all as fulfilment of wish that remained unsatisfied during the day. Picking apples in connection with the patient's associations is an expression of erotic scene. The censorship transformed the latent motive into symbolic image, where apples symbolize breasts. As regards the associations of father's punishment and the paradise, we could say that the events in the past significantly transformed patient's superego (the influence of social norms, patterns of behaviour) and are therefore responsible for the repression of sexual desire. Also the uneasy feeling he had when talking to his acquaintance was a consequence of inherited social norms.

The dream with apples is undoubtedly an erotic scene for Jung too. However, more important is the myth of Adam and Eve. It is a myth of sin that was punished with Adam's fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. Considering patient's associations, we can say that erotic dream scene was presented as sin. The dream points at improper relationship to the opposite gender. The patient's central conflict is expressed in desire to have a sexual intercourse on one hand, and commit a sin on the other. He also has a fear of being observed, which is present in the myth of Adam and Eve too. Eve persuaded Adam to take the apple off the tree, but he could not hide from God seeing it.

Sorry for wall of text, but this is great stuff.

And it helps to understand that the reason so many symbols can be read almost universally is precisely because they emerge form the *collective unconscious that's common to us all.

* Another of Jung's terms that's all-too-often misused by New-Agers to justify telepathy etc. That is not what it means. It's simply inherited thought-forms that we all share in common, which are largely what make us human.

well most of my old dreams, were due to the way I was brought up and how I feel now, (ie. damsel in distress.--ie.Disney Princess). I mean I can identify closely with the 90s Disney princess. Ariel-red hair "wanting to be a part of a different world" in her case human, my case?-college world (live at the parents' home!), Jasmine "trapped" feeling, Belle- bookworm and "wanting to much more than this provincial life" and of course Mulan (the Relfection song's line.. "If I tried to be myself I would break my fam'lys heart.

or it maybe be due to I read a lot of books fairytales and not, as well as watched the Disney movies.

I'm glad this thread was bumped - I looked into a dream dictionary (actually the one linked in your profile daeryk) and I must say, a lot of the things I looked up do seem quite likely. It would be interesting to compare several different dream dictionaries and see if the symbols have the same meanings from one to the next. It would also be interesting to learn just how these meanings are arrived at.

I think I have to revise my original dismissive attitude toward them and say that they actually can be a good place to start when searching for meaning in a dream, as long as you understand that it's only a template of generic meanings and that your mileage may vary.

a couple of months ago I had this dream which involved a dark-skin roma , an arrow that pireced her, and a greenshirt guy. I somehow interpted it as "I think the arrow might stand as my parents crushing my hopes of moving into Residence and of a program of MY choice. Yet I want to be free of my parents and be able to travel (which is what the gypsy probably stood for). The male might stand as the little I hope I have left of convincing my parents to let me move into res and go into the program of my choice."

and a lot of my dreams have this theme in common also repeats a theme in my dream's about self identity seeking and coming into my own.

In response to Dark Matters, I am a dream researcher and analyst. I have a number of clients I work with privately. I'm also in the process of writing a book on dream interpretation. The website listed in my profile *link removed* that you went to is part of an ongoing research project. What I'm trying to do is find correlations between dream symbols and real life situations so that they can be presented easily to the average person. So if 100 people tend to be experiencing something when a certain symbol was witnessed, then perhaps you are too. I try to provide real life examples whenever possible.

The site is still rough. It needs a lot of work on grammar and improvements in explaining some of the symbols. Currently I have about 1600 symbols and am working to get it up to about 6000.

I hope to eventually make the site an authority or respected starting point to interpreting dreams by offering realistic probabilities for the symbols. Much of what is available today is just beyond ridiculous. No thought at all. The psychic or spiritual crowd has really taken this area hostage.

Thank you!

I was afraid my rather hard-headed insistence a few days ago had driven you away. Heh yeah, the grammar is rough, but the way the dream symbolism is presented is good - it doesn't just say "This is exactly what this symbol always means" - it does allow leeway for a more individual interpretation. I think I'm going to spend some more time looking it over.

I've been thinking about some of my dreams, and in particular those that seem to have revealed some deeper 'meaning' (I emphasize this word because I think it's really the wrong word - it's not that they 'reveal meaning' so much as that dreams are caused by our deepest thoughts and desires, and by interpreting them we can learn about those thoughts and desires). And I realized that the importance of many of the dream images wasn't that the images carry any inherent message, but that they bring up associations.

Example - a Volkswagen Beetle. That's the kind of car my mom had when I was a kid. No dream dictionary could tell you this - it's totally personal imagery.

I think dream dictionaries can help us interpret certain images - namely probably those that don't come with strong associations of memories or ideas that reveal themselves as we write about the dream. I do agree that a house for instance can represent your life (something I saw in a dream dictionary recently), and that driving a car can represent the way you're living your life - if you have a hard time steering or braking, it probably means you feel you're not properly controlling your life.

But it's only maybe half of the story. Dream dictionaries can only deal with the archetypes - ideas found in the Collective Unconscious (which Jung later re-named the Objective Psyche because even during his lifetime there were New-Agers who liked to misappropriate the term to support telepathy and etc). That's the part of the unconscious that's universal - inherited ideas that we all share. There's still the Personal Unconscious - realm of repressed thoughts desires and memories, which is a large part of a person's psyche. And no dream dictionary can tell you what lies in there - it comes out through association.

** update **

Ok, I started looking at books about dream interpretation - I'm becoming more interested in this subject. I decided to get this one: http://www.amazon.com/Dream-Sight-Di...rhf_ee_p_img_1

Anyone interested can use the Read Inside feature to preview the beginning of the book. It sounds like one of the best of the Dream Dictionary type books available. And I found what I was hoping I'd find - the author is familiar with both Freud and Jung and understands that the Collective Unconscious and its Archetypes comprise only part of the unconscious, and that the Personal Unconscious is also important. He also goes into great detail explaining how he interprets dreams, rather than simply providing a list of dream symbols and what they mean.

Heh, I also decided to get a Kindle and I ordered the Kindle version of the book. I'll wait till the Kindle comes into read it, though I could read it right on my computer. I'm largely interested in seeing how this type of dream analysis handles association like the kind I mentioned above. I suspect a lot of contemporary dream interpretation methods concentrate mostly on universal symbols and largely ignore personal meaning. But this author at least seems to deal with it to some extent anyway.

Twice in the last year I had a dream which has to do with gypsies. I only seem to be have dreams which has gypsies when I'm thinking about a particular program and living in res up at the nearest college

less than two days ago I had a dream that involved an aparment building, and swimming through mud (in my clothes too) and something to do with bridges.

I use dreammoods for general symbol explanation. Usually, while reading, a more accurate explanation comes to me, specific to my particular dream. It's a basis I build on, not a bible or rulebook