Have your dreams ever told you something really important about yourself?

[BjStrife]

I've read and heard about people that found messages from their subconscious in a dream and even learned things about themselves they were not aware of before. Doesn't matter if lucid or not, but it was something that was truly meaningful with significant impact on their waking life. So to sumarize - has anything presented to you in your dream ever had a large impact on your life? (except for lucidity itself, which is of course a big deal, too ) And better yet - is it possible for you to ask your subcons to show you such a thing in a dream? Like "Tell me what is the true meaning of my life", or whatnot? Please share your experiences !

[LAJ]

When I go lucid - one of the first things I do is conjure my subconscious. It always appears as someone random. It is cooperative 95% of the time. Has told me a great deal of things. It's really wild to have the ego split from the id and have conversation. If you think about it, it is all you - you are creating the entire conversation, however you have no idea what your subconscious is going to say back to you, yet you still created it. This is my favorite thing to do while lucid.

[Darkmatters]

Ok, since this is in General Dream Discussion I can say this - your dreams always tell you about yourself - especially at times of strife or problems. That's why dream analysis is one of the foundations of psychoanalysis. Keep a dream journal and include info about anything important that's going on in your life at the time and also write about any memories parts of the dreams might call to mind. Dreams help you solve problems and learn by associating present issues with similar issues from the past, so these associations are important to take note of. Often just by thinking about one dream you can't understand what the symbolism means, but dreams have a way of going over the same ground many different ways in dream after dream, so if you read over a week's worth of journal entries you'll notice similarities that suddenly jump out at you and slap you in the face and it's like "Aww Hell no!! How did I miss that before?" Think about it - dreams are built entirely from your thougts and feelings and memories, right? So how could they NOT tell you important things about yourself that you might be unaware of?

[BjStrife]

so if you read over a week's worth of journal entries you'll notice similarities that suddenly jump out at you and slap you in the face and it's like "Aww Hell no!! How did I miss that before?" I do keep a DJ, and I have noticed a similiar theme occuring in many of the dreams in a row. But it never made me come up with a solution to any problems. It is more like "In your face!" kind of attitude my dreams show me, replaying WL situations in a different way. When I go lucid - one of the first things I do is conjure my subconscious. It always appears as someone random. It is cooperative 95% of the time. Has told me a great deal of things. It's really wild to have the ego split from the id and have conversation. If you think about it, it is all you - you are creating the entire conversation, however you have no idea what your subconscious is going to say back to you, yet you still created it. This is my favorite thing to do while lucid. So, in a way, we are all schizophrenic

[TwoCrystalCups]

Yes, that i am a very strong willed person. I am stronger than what i think.

[Darkmatters]

^ Hell, I could have told you that Hathor! BjStrife, you wouldn't consciously know that dreams are solving problems - it all happens unconsciously. During dreams is when consolidation occurs - that's the process of sorting through short term memories to determine which ones get tossed out and which ones go on to become long term memories. If you've been struggling to learn something or solve a problem those memories get precedence, it's why if you've been studying something hard you'll tend to dream about it, or if you've been playing a video game a lot you'll dream about that - video games are just a series of problem-solving steps. There were studies done on rats running mazes while they had electrodes in their brains allowing the scientists to observe the neuron-firing sequences, and in dreams the same sequences of neurons would fire, in the same order, that did when they were running the maze. In other words the rats were solving the mazes in their sleep. They also did similar tests with people (but without putting electrodes in their brains obviously) while having them play a video game for a while before bed and then woke them up during each REM period to ask what they were dreaming about. The game was about downhill skiing, and the people were dreaming about snow and moving through snow - not necessarily skiing, but it became apparent the dreams were a byproduct of the unconscious problem-solving process. If you have iTunes you can see this in the excellent Nova program called What Are Dreams: https://itunes.apple.com/us/tv-seaso...-4/id354319653 (it's episode #3). An interesting fact - these problem-solving dreams take place both in REM and NREM dreams.

[Darkmatters]

Here's a video by Dr. Robert Stickgold - he's the guy who did the tests with the skiing video game: Looks like he covers a lot of the same kind of stuff here. This should do a good job of explaining how dreams help us solve problems.

[BjStrife]

Darkmatters: Sure, I understand that your dreams subconsiously make you do "the right things". Though it seems LDs make a huge improvement on that, cos for example the DCs can tell you things straight away, not just symbolicaly, as in normal dreams. That is my main goal. No luck so far, though.

[Darkmatters]

Oh, of course! I didn't meant to detract from the lucid apsects of it - just wanted to present some interesting facts that show an alternative for those like me, who don't manage to get lucid very often. I'm not sure if the sub-c is capable of communicating directly very well though, that's not it's accustomed language. Like I said, I'm not a lucid master - not by a long shot, so I can't say, but from what I've read when people get the sub-c to talk to them directly it seems to only say a few words and that's it. You could probably analyse your lucid dreams and get more from them than they tell you directly. I'm just sayin'. Heh, plus it seems dream guides (the ones in our actual dreams, not the ones here on DV) like to be mysterious and elusive. I suspect long before a person manages to find and talk to their dream guide and get them to actually say anything meaningful they could learn a lot about their subconscious (their inner self) by just stydying their normal dreams. Ok, symposium over! I now return you to your regularly scheduled thread!