• Question: Do Dreams have meaning?

    Asked by anon-237450 to Peter, Mhairi, Madeleine, Catherine, Andrew on 17 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Peter Kinderman

      Peter Kinderman answered on 17 Mar 2020:

      Interesting question!
      In my opinion… well… yes and no.
      People have tried to read ‘meaning’ into dreams for millennia (foretelling the future, gaining insights into our personality, revealing secrets, etc). I don’t believe in any of that.
      Then, Sigmund Freud suggested that dreams were meaningful in a different sense – revealing the unconscious processes that drive our emotions and behaviours. He suggested that dreams can give insights into unconscious drives and conflicts – he said that dreams can form a “poetical phrase of the greatest beauty and significance.” He also suggested that all dreams were wish-fulfillment.
      I don’t think dreams are necessarily wish-fulfilment – I think we often dream of things we really don’t want to happen. And I am not so sure that we can read too much significance into dreams… mainly, I think they’re the random echoes of things that we’ve seen or heard in the day being shuffled into our memories… which is why we often recognise the content.
      But… that does mean that they are kind of meaningful (they relate to the stuff we’ve seen and done), and it also means that they do indicate that there’s more going on in our heads than we are consciously aware of.

    • Photo: Mhairi Bowe

      Mhairi Bowe answered on 18 Mar 2020:

      Many psychological commentators (not all backed by science!) have said so and it is my experience that if I am worrying about something then I tend to dream about it (or something linked to it) but some dreams seem less obvious in terms of meaning and psychologists have suggested lots of dreams are the result of memory consolidation processes meaning sometimes they can feel like a random jumble. The topic of lucid dreaming is fascinating and many people can consciously direct their dreams by learning how to do this – other do it naturally, some without ever reflecting on it.

    • Photo: Madeleine Pownall

      Madeleine Pownall answered on 19 Mar 2020: last edited 20 Mar 2020 11:10 am

      Some researchers have pointed out how humans have a general desire to find ‘meaning’ in noise/messiness/confusion (this explains why people on the internet post pictures claiming that they ‘see’ Jesus in toast… ). We like things to make sense.

      I think our need to understand our dreams may come into that.

      There is something fundamentally human about wanting to make sense of things that feel nonsensical or complicated and other worldly.

      Whether or not you believe that dreams can tell us anything about our psychology is, I believe, entirely up to you. 💫

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