After many years of looking at this subject, I finally came to the conclusion that generally -- but not always -- dreams carry no real meaning; they are basically a continuation of the work your brain does during the day to draw usable imagery from the information your senses supply and allow perception to occur; except that the imagery created during sleep usually comes not from senses but from day residue or memory… just random stuff.
In my opinion, the unconscious portion of our mind does a fine job communicating with the conscious portion of our mind all the time, during wake or sleep. The connection is fluid, active, constant, and there really is no need for the unconscious to send us cryptic signals during dreams in the hopes that we’ll be able to understand and use the advice (which to me also seems remarkably inefficient!). In other words, the random imagery generated during dreams (in the absence of the actual imagery created during waking-life) is generally just that: meaningless random imagery and nothing more.
However: With all that said, interpreting your own dreams can be a very good thing to do.
Because by their nature dreams exist solely as memories, and often quickly fading memories at that, how you recall that random imagery upon waking can indeed tell you a lot about yourself. I personally have come to believe that a lot of imagery in dreams was not created during the dream at all, but later, as a dreamer tries to make sense of her dream *. By the same token, symbols and meaning that never occurred during the dream might be attached to the memory of the dream. And I believe that there is nothing wrong with that:
How you interpret the random imagery of dreams, or how you build upon the memory of the dream to convert it from random imagery into a meaningful experience, really can tell you a lot about yourself, and is an excellent example of how our unconscious mind operates. In other words, your memory and interpretation of a dream might very likely reflect issues you are dealing with in waking-life (or refusing to deal with), or obligations you are ignoring, or feelings you've been suppressing, or etc. This is a very good thing.
For example, lets say you have a dream that is literally nothing more than separate flashes of a bus, an old house, and a friend you haven’t seen in years. Upon waking, you gather that imagery into a bundle of meaningful memory, maybe by putting yourself on the bus, perhaps with your friend in another seat, looking wistfully at the old house (now high on a hill). Now you have yourself a comprehensible story to which you can attach meaning; perhaps that you and your friend have become strangers, traveling through life on the same path yet apart, and your friend still longs to revisit the old world you two once shared –- and you decide that maybe you should call him. Through that interpretation, and not the dream itself, you’ve worked with your unconscious to make a decision about a subject (rekindling old friendships) that you’ve been ignoring or neglecting. The interpretation had little to do with the original dream imagery, but was still very useful.
tl;dr: Dreams are generally just random imagery, meaningless by nature, but how you remember that imagery, and the meaning you attach to the memory, can be valuable.
I could be wrong about all of this, but at least it is something to consider.
All this, by the way, might indicate that the only person truly capable of interpreting a dream is the dreamer. Having someone else interpret your dream –- especially someone who doesn’t know you well, or hasn’t been well trained in the art of getting you to draw your own conclusions –- would only result in them attaching their meaning to the imagery, and keeping you from determining something helpful on your own.
I suppose It would be nice if I addressed your specific questions:
How deep does interpretation go in your opinion? I have friends who swear by it and friends who deny dreams have any sort of meaning.
Hey, I think I might have answered that one!
Do you have go-to resources for interpretation, like online dictionaries or books? How did you learn?
I highly recommend staying as far away from dream dictionaries of any sort, as in my opinion they not only cannot interpret an individual's dream, but they can lead that individual astray.
I learned mostly from experience, and from a brief period long ago when I thought I was good at interpreting other people's dreams, but I also read folks like Jung and Freud.
There is one little book I found that was most helpful (especially in explaining what I'm trying to say here). It's called Inner Work, by Robert A. Johnson, and seems to still be in print.
*[EDIT: I just realized that I left out an important bit. I forgot to mention that when a dreamer is massaging the memory of a dream in order to make sense of it, she isn't consciously aware that embellishments are happening. Once any changes or additions are made, they will be remembered, without question, as if they were original details of the dream. Again, there is nothing wrong with this sort of editing; it's just how we make sense of things.]
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