Dreams are taken in many different ways. Some people analyze them, others brush them off.
“You can think of dreams as the little dramas our minds make up when the ‘self’ system is not keeping us alert to the world around us,” according to dream analysis researcher William Domhoff’s website.
On his website, Domhoff says there is no definitive answer to whether dreams have a hidden meaning. He says that some may have metaphors or symbols but many are simply “doodles” taken from our lives.
Sheila Purcell, a registered psychologist, said that dreams are a method for people to process memories.
“Dreams are a necessary part of the processing of all the stimuli, internal and external, that comes through us in life and doesn’t get processed fully during daytime,” she said.
While that may make dreams sound trivial, Purcell said they’re absolutely necessary to remain mentally healthy.
“The fact is if you don’t have dreams processing your experience, you’d go psychotic. Studies show that people who are dream-deprived would go psychotic. We just need that to function,” she said.
Kerry Palframan, an alternative energy and spiritual counsellor, said she thinks differently.
“Dreams tell you who you are at all levels of your being – mind, body, emotions, and spirit,” she said.
Palframan said dreams bring you information, guidance, direction, and help you align with your life’s meaning and purpose. According to her, the information contained in her dreams saved her life as she struggled with life-threatening illnesses.
“The dreams brought me the information I needed to stay alive and lead me towards practices, healing . . . and understandings about myself that all led to my survival,” she said.
While dreams may not have a guiding function, they do communicate to us, in a way, Purcell said.
“[Dreams] process our lives in a way that if we look at it from a waking perspective, it does speak a language,” she said.
This language, according to her, can help people understand their subconscious mind better, which can be threpeutic.
“When you get to know a person and a bit about how their mind works, you can get insight into what the dream is . . . [Sigmund] Freud called it the golden road to the unconscious,” Purcell said.
Palframan said that to analyze a dream, a person must identify the most outstanding symbol, whether it be an object, person or animal from the dream. Then they must find the most outstanding feeling from the dream and make the connection between the symbol and the feeling to the waking time event that had just occurred.
Purcell’s version of analyzing dreams involves understanding a person, the way they think and work, in order to understand the way their mind processes events.
“There’s not much more complicated than a human brain. You do need to get to know people and listen to them talk, and you get clues. It takes quite a bit of practice to get into that,” she said.
Analyzing a dream is very dependent on the person that dreams it, she said.
“Everybody’s an individual and so each person’s dream life is quite unique, just as every person’s psyche is,” she said.
Still, there are some common symbols and dreams that people share. Walking naked into a classroom, writing an exam that you haven’t prepared for, those are all examples of standard anxiety dreams, Purcell said.
“Almost all children have nightmares, particularly women being chased, stuff that seems to be really fundamental to human nature,” she said.
Domhoff said that people who have a greater interest in dreams have a greater motivation to pay attention to them and find them to be worth remembering.
Palframman said dreams have saved her life, and continue to guide her every day.
“My early morning dreams always tell me what is to come for that day – dreams earlier in evening tell me what happened the day before,” she said.
“So dreams are my guidance system in life. I’d be lost without them!”
