Dreams, An Amalgum Options

I thought that instead of using seperate threads to ask for dreams to be interpreted...we might just pool our dreams and their interpretations into one thread. That way we can also COMPARE what we dream and our different interpretations of those dreams.

well in any case, i have a strange dream that i need help with. two nights ago i dreamed i was a little girl who had wandered off from her parents (at a boring car dealership, looking to buy a truck)....and came across a small girl's academy. I DID not like the girls there; they were snotty and privileged. In any case, i caused some mischief and knocked over the cake for a graduation party and the guard was sent to deal with me. Heres where it gets weird. The guard was a vampire. He wanted to suck my blood. He couldn't catch me so he turned to one of the younger girls and tried to attack her. I got a knife and tried to cut off his head...but it was a cake knife and it was blunt and he was very much alive. He turned slowly towards me, grabbed the knife and started walking slowly towards me. He started sawing off his limbs...first his wrist and eventually his head. But he kept walking. And as he cut off his head, i realized that was my chance to get away. I ran back to the dealership...but he could now see through my eyes, and for as long as i lived he would be able to find me. So the only remedy was for me to stay indoors and blindfold myself when i would travel so he couldn't figure out where i was staying.

what does it mean!!!??

well in any case, i have a strange dream that i need help with. two nights ago i dreamed i was a little girl who had wandered off from her parents (at a boring car dealership, looking to buy a truck)....and came across a small girl's academy.

Children in general represent innocence, our past selves, playfulness and ignorance (not the pompus sort, but rather from a child's perspective they are inexperienced). Parents represent our most fundamental source of authority. To dream of them represents our uderstanding of right and wrong (not just you should not kill, but also your place in life and your personal values) Your parents are at the car dealership because they are you trying to find a means to travel in a way that complies with your basic values.

Remember vehicals represent transition, a vehical bywhich the spiritual self journies. It could be serious, maybe not - most often somewhere in the middle. By running away from your values (your parents) and finding the accademy it sounds as though you are shaking off the old way of living you had when you were a young and ignorant little girl. Any place of learning can be about self discovery. In your case I think it means you are growing up. You are transititioning from being that young girl who only knew how to live life as she had been raised. You are starting to reach out and discover life outside this paradigm.

I DID not like the girls there; they were snotty and privileged.

The girls represent your sub-concsiousness' befief that those who do not share your same values are undesirable and may seem as such.

In any case, i caused some mischief and knocked over the cake for a graduation party and the guard was sent to deal with me. Heres where it gets weird. The guard was a vampire. He wanted to suck my blood.

In other words because you feel that those who do not share your values are undesirable you feel that you might mess up and not fit in or cause problems. Maybe you feel as though not very many share your core beliefs.

Personally I think the vampire guard is merely a manifestation of your beliefs about those who do not share your morality. But to disect the figure is to see it in a compound way - guard and vampire. Guards represent caution and self-defense, as well as logical and well grounded thinking. Vampires are contradictory characters. The both represent the fear of death and lust for life. Thus a vampire guard would be the part of yourself that wants to live a Great life, not die young, yet wants to do so in a rational way. It chasing you at the party is that part of you trying to keep yourself from deviating from your values.

Its acting as something to keep you in check. Sort of like an alpha male in a wolf pack. And really it is a representation of primitive self-defense. To preserve the greater ego, the lower regions of the mind will produce an emotional reaction in an attempt to get you to stay the course and not do something that might contradict the way you were brought up. If you are currently involved in activities that contradict your upbringing then its no suprise you would dream like this.

He couldn't catch me so he turned to one of the younger girls and tried to attack her.

The vampire is that little part of your mind that is speculating what might happen if you do not follow your main values - you may spend away your life, rather than truely living it.

I got a knife and tried to cut off his head...but it was a cake knife and it was blunt and he was very much alive. He turned slowly towards me, grabbed the knife and started walking slowly towards me. He started sawing off his limbs...first his wrist and eventually his head. But he kept walking.

By getting the knife it is like your ego denying your lower self, like saying your wrong, what it represents won't come true. By turning on itself it is a part you saying you cannot get rid of me, you cannot deny me. Running away is yourself not dealing with the conflict represented by the vampire.

And as he cut off his head, i realized that was my chance to get away. I ran back to the dealership...but he could now see through my eyes, and for as long as i lived he would be able to find me. So the only remedy was for me to stay indoors and blindfold myself when i would travel so he couldn't figure out where i was staying.

The vampire represents an inner conflict. On the one hand you desire to (you lust for life, as a vampire would, remember the vampire represents a part of you). Now that you are older and your kiddie days are long gone, you are starting to realize it and that you no longer need to obide by your riggid up bringing. But - that vampire, don't forget, he's a two edged sword. Its the part of you that wants to live, but also does not want to die. In this case death can be translated as self destruction. The reason this aspect of yourself is confronting you is because its a part of you that believes your younger way of life was the right way. And that is why you ran back to dealership. You went back to what you thought was safe. But it wasn't enough to forget about what the vampire represented, the message it gave you, the sense of fear of the unknown. Thus the only way to deal with it was to blindfold yourself - suppress it.

If I had to gesture a generalized guess I'd say you are comming of an age where you are at a cross road. You are now an adult and I think its finally starting to set in on a sub-conscious level, yet there is still a part of you that does not want to go to that accademy in your dreams, just a part that wants to remain in that safety zone repsented by your parents. Keep in mind your parents represent what you already know as safe, that which is also deffined by your core beliefs. They do not necessarily have anything to do with your parents alone. They might but the dream was more centered around you and the vampire, not you parents. So in that respect your parents represent a safety net. One you are having difficulty overcoming.

I like your dreams you add details!

Hope that helps.

This post has been edited by Acid09: Dec 12 2007, 04:09 PM

WOW.

That explains a lot.

I didn't realize how revealing dreams really are (IMG:style_emoticons/default/oops.gif)

its interesting that this particular representation of myself happened to be male. it doesn't surprise me though.

how did you get to be so good at this? i'm curious as to how you could read this seemingly confused dream and actually make something of it. It was REALLY bothering me. I knew it meant something important to me.

what is really strange is ive had a preview of it before; sometimes i will have fragments of dreams from my childhood that come back to me later on as fuller more meaningful versions.

i wonder that these types of dreams have a trigger, or are used to reinforce a message (since i usually slip into lucid awareness when i recognize a dream), or if my brain is just lazy and recycles imagery from my youth (since i am so SO old!!!). It all feels like a cycle anyway. *sighs

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) thank you acid! That really helped.

This post has been edited by valkyrie: Dec 11 2007, 09:45 PM

Greetings,

Dream interpretation is one of the few activities where it is in practice just like it is in theory. Therefore it is rather simple to assemble a dictionary, if you will, of meanings for symbols and themes and place them in context of each other- some individual deviances is inevitable so the particulars and of course what the dream is referring to varies. The most coherent theory I have yet heard on why dream symbols mean the same from one person to the next comes from C.G. Jung who held people are just that similar. Sigmund Freud did great work in assembling dream theory in to what can be called a dictionary; however his work was largely discredited and seldom used for psychiatry. Jung- and if one is careful Freud- are wonderful source for information, but reliable dictionaries are allover the place. There are naturally other systems, but mostly culturally biased so cannot be used unless one identifies strongly with it or the meanings simply hit too close to disregard. What ever the system one is still doing the same thing: putting symbols in context.

What is really strange is I’ve had a preview of it before; sometimes i will have fragments of dreams from my childhood that come back to me later on as fuller more meaningful versions…”

Several people I have talked to have had similar experience. Modern dream theory has a very convincing explanation but I'm inept to explain it. Magically however, it may be that past dreams are coming back because of the meaning/symbols/events from that dream holds particular application in a new context. The mind is recycling the old relevant imagery as apposed to creating new possibly less relevant imagery.


Also, your idea for comparing dreams and interpretations is interesting, and might have unforeseen results.

I didn't realize how revealing dreams really are

Dreams are your thoughts being fromulated and expressed from your lower mind. Basically when you share your dreams you are sharing your thoughts, feelings, desires and experiences.

its interesting that this particular representation of myself happened to be male. it doesn't surprise me though.

Even this has meaning. Dreaming that you are the opposite sex means you aspire to fullfill the role of that gender ie a dreaming of being a boy means you aspire towards independance, financial security and being the bread winner of the family.

how did you get to be so good at this? i'm curious as to how you could read this seemingly confused dream and actually make something of it. It was REALLY bothering me. I knew it meant something important to me.

I am good at what I do because of lots of experience with dreams/practice interpreting them and formal education to really fine tune my ability. Sometimes my interpretations are dead on and sometimes they are way out in left field. There is no single one way a person interprets dreams. Sometimes the dreams do not actually tell the whole story and an interpretation of a symbol is determined by a person's age, gender, cultural back round and other prior knowledge about them.

The way I interpret dreams is I look for correlations between symbols and mundane situations. For example say you dream of a car. Well when I see that I think things like "what is a car, what does it do, how does it apply to the individual in question?" and often times I can come up with several interpretations, especially for more esoteric symbols like say a jar of mayo (a friend of mine once dreamed she was walking a jar of mayo). Some symbols are more generallized than you might think and really only fall into a set of interpretations. Again, the car, it is a vehical and all vehicals (planes, bicycles, wagons etc etc) tend to represent similar things - change, transition, travel - to what extent, degree of destination depends on the other details of the dream.

When interpreting a dream there needs to be a context, a narrative that can be applied to regular life. A context is created by multiple details and I mean everything from time of day, to color schemes, weather a person is clothed or naked or around naked people. The more details the broader the context is and the more accurate of a interpretation can be made.

As a person provides a context I begin to single out symbols and interpret them individually and then place them within the context of the dream in a way that provides an overall meaning to the dream entirely. You can see this as I interpreted your dream. I told you the difference between a guard and a vampire and then combined them to create one symbol with multiple meanings and used that to explain the situation in your dreams.

I like the dreams you ask for meaning because you provide a lot of details and really each detail can be seen as a symbol and yes dreams are very revealing. If you give me a journal on someone's dreams (say a minimum of 25 dreams) I can give you a complete psychological profile of the individual's personallity as well as even determine any prominant mental disorders, past truama and personal habbits or compulsions. I can do this with high accuracy too.

Interpreting dreams is almost like a form of telepathy. When a member asks for an interpretation I litterally imagine what it is going on and try to think of how all the details fall into place and I come up with an interpretion based on prior knowledge and the context of the dream.
I do not sit here with a dictionary looking up the meaning to symbols because I believe dictionaries only provide a hint at a meaning. They only look at the one specific symbol but fail to place it within the context of a dream (which would be impossible since no two dreams are exactly alike) - and they tend to be culturally biased. Yes dream dictionaries can help, but I seldom use them.

Where interpreting becomes a real challenge is when trying to gauge these four emotions - fear, saddness, anger and joy. From these all other emotions originate. Interpreting a dream becomes difficult because you are trying to determine the degree that these emotions are presant and how they apply to the dream. It is also difficult to bridge social-cultural boundries. For example for a typical white american male to dream that a lion is in their bed room would likely indicate some fear or anxiety. Now if you were some bushman out in south africa dreaming of a lion would more likely represent pride and strength. It would also depend on what the lion was doing.
Dreams are almost impossible to interpret in cases where the subject is schizophrenic or suffers from a psychotic disorder. This is because they already live in such a delusional world that no context can really be made for the dreams and no solid meaning can be made and sometimes it might even just feed into the subjects delusions.

Finally intrepreting dreams can depend a lot on instinct and hit and miss guesses. That is the reason multiple meanings are given for each symbol. Symbols almost never have just one meaning. By giving multiple meanings I increase the likelyhood that one will hit and apply to the person.

The funny thing is that many psychologist don't think dreams have any intentional meaning. That they are simply a bi-product of the sleep cycle and we only give them meaning as we recall them. I think thats wrong I think our brains are really super-computers with mental skills far beyond what we currently use.

what is really strange is ive had a preview of it before; sometimes i will have fragments of dreams from my childhood that come back to me later on as fuller more meaningful versions.

i wonder that these types of dreams have a trigger, or are used to reinforce a message (since i usually slip into lucid awareness when i recognize a dream), or if my brain is just lazy and recycles imagery from my youth (since i am so SO old!!!). It all feels like a cycle anyway. *sighs

Do you mean the dream is reoccuring or just chunks are reoccuring?

"what is a ________, what does it do, how does it apply to the individual in question?"

I will be sure to use this line for any new or old imagery or themes that show up in my dreams.

destination

yes this is very important and its a crucial factor to that overall interpretation that i never even considered!

"Dreams are almost impossible to interpret in cases where the subject is schizophrenic or suffers from a psychotic disorder. This is because they already live in such a delusional world that no context can really be made for the dreams and no solid meaning can be made and sometimes it might even just feed into the subjects delusions."

thats interesting because, I've researched some information on Schizophrenia in the past, and one of the ways you can tell a person has it is if they possess fragmented speech and are unable to understand proverbs or analogies or idioms. Perhaps the same thing that affects the ability to connect a word with an abstract meaning is the same thing that influences Symbolism in dreams.
Wouldn't it be strange if all schizophrenia was, was a sleep disorder? But no. I wouldn't go that far! Still, if we're talking psychology....One thing I HAVE noticed is some of what is considered healthy person's thought patterns in a dream can be compared to the brain patterns in a mentally unstable person. For instance, when i was a little girl i kept having this terrifying nightmare about "bouldersoldiers". They would role and squish people. Then, they were evil rock men...but when i finally discovered the two words rhymed but no other real connections to each other, i was able to laugh at the dream. now granted looking back, it still has a very real meaning to me and i wouldn't dismiss it because the two words rhymed. i understand that i had replaced "soldiers" (a very real thing) with "boulders" that could not be argued with or defeated, and the only thing i ever felt was a deep angry hatred from them that i could not associate with humanity so my mind made the necessary changes so that i COULD understand.
but if what i researched was true, a Schizophrenic would not be able to understand WHY they replaced one word with another, and they would be unable to make a healthy connection between the two, even when fully conscious. For them, it would be like they were still in a dream state mentality, when you simply except that what is happening is happening and seemingly confused subjective material should be considered concrete. So in other words, In the waking state a normal person would have full faculties over their subjectivity AND objectivity and would be able to tell the difference. In a Schizophrenic in the manic state, they would NOT possess this important trait.


"Do you mean the dream is reoccuring or just chunks are reoccuring?"


err. Actually i have no one reoccurring dream at the moment. But when i mentioned 'fragments' of my dreams returning in new forms i was speaking about old symbolism being recycled in my dreams, or small familiar scenarios or characters or objects coming back to haunt my other dreams. Once in a while, i will leave off one dream for a night, and fall asleep only to continue it.

I worry that i must not be progressing enough for my old dream imagery to become obsolete. Or perhaps i am a dreamer of habit and familiarity is a comfort. In any case, i really do feel like a stone gathering moss!
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err. Actually i have no one reoccurring dream at the moment. But when i mentioned 'fragments' of my dreams returning in new forms i was speaking about old symbolism being recycled in my dreams, or small familiar scenarios or characters or objects coming back to haunt my other dreams. Once in a while, i will leave off one dream for a night, and fall asleep only to continue it.

I worry that i must not be progressing enough for my old dream imagery to become obsolete. Or perhaps i am a dreamer of habit and familiarity is a comfort. In any case, i really do feel like a stone gathering moss!

Its called chunking. Our brains have trillions of neural pathways and links. If each link were to represent a mile you could go to the nearest star. To remember a single image a person actually uses many neurons and sometimes a memory is spread throughout the brain its not just in one spot. But when we memorize something we are not just remembering what it looked like but also what it smelled, felt, tasted or sounded like. Thats just the sensory stuff. We also remember the environment, the time of day and year, weather or not other people were around and all for just one image.

Chunking itself is when information stored in the brain gets compressed and I guess you could say "attatched", or mixed with other information. Its like a mnemonic, for example remember how you remembered the four main directions back in grade school? Never eat sour watermelon or never eat soggy wauffles, corresponding to north, east, south and west. The saying is compressed information.

In our dreams "recycling" symbols works in much the same manner. Your brain uses a symbol from a previous dream to produce a new one. THe same symbol may or may not mean the same thing in the new dream. It could be that the symbol has the same meaning, its just being placed in the context of a different dream.

"Its called chunking. Our brains have trillions of neural pathways and links. If each link were to represent a mile you could go to the nearest star. To remember a single image a person actually uses many neurons and sometimes a memory is spread throughout the brain its not just in one spot."

this is interesting because speaking of mental disorders...the neurodegenerative disease called Alzheimer's can be potentially off set by this same kind of 'chunking' that you describe. At least, this is what i remember from a video i watched in psych. class! That, along with word association. Perhaps all those cross road puzzles are good for us after all; trivia games may protect us from dementia, and rhyming may even build up a healthy vivid dream life. Fascinating indeed!

what if dreaming actually protects us from dementia by said chunking? What a scientific term. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/i_triangle.gif)

-valkyrie

fatherjhon,

i looked over some Freudian dream interpretation and indeed, it is useful...if one doesn't get caught up in the culture of it. Jung i already knew about, as far as the concept of archetypes go. But i wonder how far an archetype can be developed before it loses its value? You have the usual dream imagery: car, gun, bird, bride, etc etc. and each symbol, according to many a dream dictionary, commonly defined and acknowledged within the culture which owns it. It is silly to say a culture can possess a word, simply by attaching personal significance to it...but it is also very logical. It is human nature to scrounge up a representation of something otherwise abstract. It is why we have language and mathematics. It is why we have difficulty expanding beyond this point or breaking down into a neutral territory of thought. We cannot shake off the weight off words. They are too packed. I do believe, when Robin started out...it was just another tag for a bird. But then people started to think of spring getting closer, and they wanted something to associate with...and Robin was the perfect candidate for 'harbinger of spring' and 'happiness' and the word was there, and people felt like they needed something short and sweet to attach the idea to, so they used what was in front of them. At least, that explains why the same darn "deep meanings" are recycled in different images around the globe. The problem is, now we have words, that no matter what, have (inescapable?) associations...one cannot say Robin without happiness, harbinger of spring, or "gee gosh golly batman" running through the head. We've all brainwashed ourselves.

Can a dream go without this? And if so, can it be considered less ambiguous? Interpretation would be impossible; but it would be unnecessary. Sensation, primarily physical, would probably guide the dream. (and stealing a lil bit from Freud's thesis that women are passive and activity is a masculine feature) can i assume that dreaming through association is passive and is a reaction, and dreaming through pure sensation is active in itself. Perhaps sensation is primitive but it can't be said that it is causes such a reaction. the evolution of sensation and identification dies in itself, because once defined, it can only turn on itself and eat its tail. So we overlap our meanings instead.

But that just leads to more confusion, and lizards swallowing themselves. mass chaos!
hence gods and the concept of time, and baby booms. dammit, women breed too fast! (its late, im tired, and extremely eccentric at this point)

i welcome the sensation of sleep.
goodnite!