THE MESSAGES OF DREAMS

You jolt awake in the middle of the night, your heart pounding. It takes you a moment to realise that, no, you didn’t just sit for your O Level exams without revising or rush out for a job interview wearing nothing but a bath towel.

Depending on which dream interpretation dictionary you consult, you might find that dream reveals anxiety about work, a sense of shame or embarrassment, or perhaps even a deeply repressed inner exhibitionist.

Given all these possibilities, is it true that dreams can reveal our deepest secrets?

The world of dreams opens before us while we sleep. Dreaming is, of course, the process of having a dream. Dreams are mental manifestations of images, sounds, thoughts and emotions. They are usually symbolically related to the dreamer’s reality. It is an involuntary mental process, in which your emotions concerning your actual life appear, uncensored. It is also where we reproduce information stored in our memory.

Humans have long sought meaning in dreams. Ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians saw them as messages from the gods. Greeks and Romans used them to predict the future. But the belief that symbols in dreams harbour secret truths about ourselves originates with 19th-century psychologist Sigmund Freud. He proposed that dreams functioned as a kind of wish fulfilment revealing our deeply repressed desires.

All dreams mean something, because they are always related to emotions and symbols that relate to our present or past experiences. One common type of dream that may occur is nightmare, which are rife with frightening emotions and inspire a similar feeling in us throughout the next day. They are related to our traumas, childhood abandonment, stress, fears, insecurities, dissatisfactions and problems with our health or relationships.

What do our dreams mean? There are lots of hypotheses and explanations as to what symbols that appear in dreams mean. However, they may not automatically fit into the reality of the person dreaming, so you really need to know the emotions that have produced any given dream as well as the person’s present circumstances in order to be able to understand the exact meaning of any given dream. So, if you want to know a dream’s meaning, pay close attention to the emotions you felt during that dream and then see if it is repetitive or recurrent, which may indicate that there is something in your mind or life that needs to be worked on or overcome, psychologically speaking. If the emotions are nice and positive, your dream is indicating to you a way forward, the satisfaction that comes from living how you want to and may also show longings, desire, dreams and goals you would like to achieve.

If, on the contrary, the emotions brought out by a dream are unpleasant, uncomfortable or painful, the meaning of that dream is very important and revealing because it shows you a part of your subconscious that needs to be resolved or overcome, such as traumas, fears, worries, etc.

There’s no formula for interpreting dreams. Dreams are not a cache of Easter eggs, waiting to be discovered. But they do offer an insight into how we process the world during the third or so or our life that we spend sleep

By Hanyah Chady