My worst dream.

[bMadsen]

Hey, thanks for your interrest in reading my thread. Today, when I'm writing this I am 17 years old. Normal when I dream I can only remember the dream at the morning, but I automatically forget everything about the dream after a few hours. Though I've had a few dreams that I still remember. I'm going to talk about two dreams that hunts me and still is confusing me. I don't think the two dreams have anything to do with each other. So the first dream I'm going to talk about, I had just recently. My best friend is a year older than me, we have been best friends the past 5 years. I might be that person who knows most about him, he actually knows me better than any other person. So for about a year ago we started experimenting smoking cannabis, and when the time passed away, we suddently smoked cannabis everyday. Today, we do not smoke it anymore, but for about a weed ago I saw my best friend die in a dream. I remember (He fell down from some structures and fell on his head) I screamed and ran over to him, I was crying and holding him in my arms, he looked at me and he began to cry, then he said something about "Så kom du", what means - So you finally came. Then I woke up. I have not told my best friend about this dream, because I don't hope I'ts something negative. So the other dream has been haunting me for YEARS.... When I was a little kid I was afraid of litteraly everything. I was always hiding behind my brother or such. When I was about 9-10 years old I had this very speciel dream (Roughly told, I'ts so many years since I can't remember details): My nightmare: I'm living in a little town in an old house. My house is just next to a farm actually, and if you go futher down the street there's a house where two ladies lived together (They're NOT in the dream). But the two ladies moved out and the house was empty. One day my mother was driving me past that house, where I saw this man looking straight at me, he had something in his hand, like a shovel. When I was a little boy I was really paranoid, so my reaction was just to hide myself. When we got home, I remember the house not being the same (I've lived in the same old house my entire life). What I remember, is that the bathroom was different. More like a new room, everything was rodden, the walls was old and everything was a mess out there (It was the only part I saw of the house in my dream). Now to the part that is haunting me: I just started having my own mobile phone, but somebody started texting me, saying I was going to die. I tried to tell my family, but it was like they didnt even notice me saying it. The same number then began calling me, but I didnt answer.. Then he send me some pictures, of a corpse he had dug up from his garden (the very same house where the two ladies lived). Of what I remember, the first picture was of the pit, with the corpse in it. (Notice: He wasnt burrying the corpse, but he knew the corpse was there, and started digging it up). Then he sent a picture of the corpse looking with open eyes into the camera lence. When I saw the picture I felt so weird. The corpse was looking with open eyes, but the eyes was totally black, like a clear night with stars. The corpse didnt look normal, it was a old one, leathered skin and no muscles, so it had been down there in a long time. What I would like to know, why did I have this dream? What does it mean? when I woke up, I seeked to my brother crying. The people who I've told about the dream is my brother (at the time I told him, it felt like he didnt care) and my best friend, who cant help me he says :-) So just give me a guess or an idea on why I had theese dreams. Thanks -Madsen

[JoannaB]

Madsen, Unless you were suffering from depression or trauma in real life at the time you had either of these two dreams, I would not worry too much about them. Dreams of death do happen to people, because let's face it, death happens to people. Now most of us blessedly do not encounter death frequently, and are unlikely to dream of death frequently. However, sometimes we do. One thing to keep in mind is that dreams tend to exaggerate and blow stuff out of proportions, so when we dream of death, it may not actually be about death. Sometimes our dreaming minds take a leap and make a connection that our waking minds might not make, and go to an extreme that in waking we are not comfortable to go. I think sometimes our subconscious likes to shock us, to get our adrenaline moving, and to get our waking mind working on where it is not willing to go and clarify those boundaries for example. Also at times our minds take content from movies and video games and books, and incorporate that into our dreams. And in movies and games, death is way more common than in waking life. So you dreamed on an abandoned house, and a stalker, and a grave with a spooky corpse. this is stuff of nightmares, and it happens in nightmares. You were a kid at the time when you had this dream. Incidentally nightmares are way more common for kids than later in life, and way worse. I don't know why that is. Kids are much less able to handle nightmares, adults assume. However, is that really the case? Practice helps hone a skill, and handling nightmares is an important skill we learn in childhood. In fact, I wonder whether that is why we have nightmares less often as adults because we learn how to handle and overcome them, or is it because we do not need those lessons anymore because we had them as kids? I know that a child's understanding of what death means develops with age. I looked up when it is that kids develop a "full" understanding of the concept of death. The current scientific understanding is that most kids have a good sense of what death means around 7 years of age, but this varies from kid to kid. The aspects of understanding death include understanding it's inevitability, it's universality, and such - basically understanding that we all die eventually, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. I wonder whether at the time you had this dream this concept was still new enough that your subconscious ws grappling with it, maybe? I think you are correct in thinking that the dream about your friend dying does not mean anything negative, or at least nothing to worry about in waking life. It is not like it is going to happen in waking life like in the dream. The dream exaggerates. What it could be saying is that you worry about your friend, but not about him dying., but maybe about something happening to him. Also, the dream may not be about your friend at all. In dreams often other dream characters represent aspects of our own personality, or strangers might get faces of a friend because their face was available to our subconscious mind. It could be that the two dreams are related because you have been wondering what the dream about death meant, and this is like a puzzle you subconscious has been working on, so maybe it incorporated death into the recent dream because death is on your mind as you try to figure out what that dream from long ago meant. Of course, there may be other explanations that fit your dreams even better, but these are just some ideas that I came up with thus far. Feel free to ignore any ideas that do not sound right to you.

[bMadsen]

Thanks alot for your response! That is a relief for me to hear, I've a better understanding for the meaning of dreams now :-) I've never though of it that way, but now when you lay it out that way, it give so much sense. Respect for reading and then leaving a long reply! Again, thanks for your help!

[JoannaB]

I had another thought about this dream: What if in your dream your friend represents the aspect of yourself that used to smoke weed regularly, and your dream is telling you that that part of your self is "dead", gone, no longer who you are? Btw, dreams do usually tell us stuff we already know, because they originate in our own mind, however, sometimes we can learn new things about ourselves in dreams because sometimes we do not realize consciously that we already know something deeper down, or we do not acknowledge it.

[bMadsen]

You must be right! Because I haven't had the lust or even smoked cannabis since I had the dream. The dream might have been my self conscious helping me getting over it because I felt so bad about it! Although I know, I'm going to smoke again one day, but it dosnt have to be tommorow or even the next months (Who knows?). All my life my dreams have been confusing me, I've though to myself thats a pile of nonsense happening in my head. But I think I'll start a dream diary, and I'm going to look for theese symbols like this one! Again, I really appreciate your words, I really want to know more about understanding my own dreams, any suggestions on books, links or maybe a thread in this forum?

[JoannaB]

Personally, I have learned dream interpretation mostly through intuition and by interacting with others on this forum over time - learning from others who are into dream interpretation. I enjoy the solving a mystery aspect of it, and I seem to have knack for it intuitively, but I constantly keep learning. If you read threads in this subforum, you will see some patterns that develop over time. A few tricks include interpreting a house as the dreamers mind, trying to interpret every dream character as an aspect of the dreamer's own personality, using idiomatic expressions and stereotypes and word associations - even people who do not think in stereotypes during the day may dream in a stereotypical way because stereotypes are part of our culture. Also for interpreting dreams it helps to know about waking life issues and what is on the person's mind. But a lot of it is intuitive. Dream interpretation is more of an art form than a science I think. Oh, and usually there is more than one right answer, and also at times it is not clear cut which answer is right.

[bMadsen]

Thanks for the advices! You're right about the mystery solving, it have cought my interrest! I guess it will take some time for me to learn the understanding of dreams, maybe because the last few dreams I had gives NO sense for me! I'll give meself some time to think about it and see if I can crack it :-) But what if you had a dream involving something that came out from the blue, it have no connections with your thoughts or even the normal days you live? Such as last night I dreamt about me having my own gocart (Really, I don't want a gocart since I can get better transportal vehicels) and there was a carnival in the town? - Only connection is the carnival theres in town once at year (Aalborg Karneval), but that was almost half a year ago? Is it normal to have so weird dreams ? - Not because I think it's a problem!

[JoannaB]

Yes, it is normal to have weird dreams. I am not entirely sure it is possible to crack the mystery of every dream. Some random dreams may be random, or they may be connected to something so minor your waking mind cannot make the connection because you did not consciously notice it. For example, you could have been driving past a go cart the other day or heard it mentioned on the radio, and you forgot about it consciously almost immediately, but your mind remembered and provided you one. Also I think a lot of what goes on in dream is our mind drawing connections between what is on our mind and random stuff to see whether anything useful emerges, and sometimes those connections are just not that useful to our waking mind and do not make any sense while awake. I once dreamed that "dreams are like pancakes". Now I then tried to think of ways in which dreams are like pancakes, but it is possible that this was my dream thought because I was hungry and wished for a pancake for breakfast, and maybe dreams are not like pancakes after all, and my dream may have been a bit non-sensical. Not everything we think is equally rational or brilliant: sometimes we have fairly useless thoughts, and this is the case in waking life and in dreams. Now personally the more I look at my dreams the more useful stuff I find in them, and even some stuff that looks like nonsense on first thought, at times I find a neat meaning in it later. So that's possible too.

[bMadsen]

Wow man :-)! I have a lot to think about, though you have given me some good advices I'll keep in mind! I guess it will take some time, I'm going to make this diary and then I will try to study what dreams mean, this have totally cought my attention! Thanks again for your help Joanna, you were a big help If I have some other questions in the future - I hope its okay if I contact you !