Thursday, February 26, 2009

An Alternate Meaning in Dreams

Many people take there to be meaning in the strange visions of dreams. I have seen the huge volumes that claim to allow you to identify the symbolism within your nightly dreams. Yet I have also heard the other view; that dreams are the pieced together collection of thousands of random neurons firing as you sleep.

I believe the truth as always lies somewhere in the middle. Most people take the meaning of dreams to be held in the elements they contain, in what they dream about. However, we can see that if our dreams are made up of random neurons firing then what is in our dreams is entirely random. Surely there can be no meaning in those elements individually if they are simply random.

I take my meaning from a different viewpoint. If dreams are our brains desperate attempt to reconcile random brain activity then maybe there is something in the way we choose to piece together the bits. If thousands of random thoughts are firing as I sleep, some memories of past events, maybe someone I know or a place, something that happened that day or maybe even just an emotion, my brain could interpret these things in a million different ways. So why then does it choose to piece it together into the single dream I have?

Well if dreams are an attempt to make sense of these random thoughts then it’s only logical that our brains would piece them together so as to make the most sense to us. So maybe there is no meaning in dreaming of my mother, or home, or my lunch from yesterday. Maybe though if I dreamt about walking home and my mother giving me said lunch that has meaning. In the way I interpret the relationship between three random thoughts. Seeing my mother as a caregiver, providing security at home and whatever else we may choose to read into it.

Most dreams are far more complex than this simple example. They combine the entire menagerie of our thoughts including our sub-conscious. If we look carefully at the interplay of our dreams we might be able to find hints at those thoughts we hide from even ourselves. It is not in what we dream that we may find this meaning, but rather in how we dream it.

No comments:

Post a Comment