by gg3 » Thu 16 Feb 2006, 10:00:54
Yo guys, snark isn't helpful here.
Re. dream symbolism: usually dreams are fairly literal; and symbols are often particular to individuals. One person's interpretation may not be right for another.
Dreams *are* a useful input to your problem solving. Basically what happens in dreaming is, during sleep your brain is doing general neurophysiological cleanup, just as the rest of your body is resting & rebuilding. The cleanup routines in the brain create the neural equivalent of white noise, and the brain, being optimized for pattern-recognition, imparts a story and characters to the noise flow (a similar mechanism is responsible for LSD trips: white noise turned into patterns).
The content that is imparted to the white noise is derived from items of interest to the individual, for which there has not been adequate time to think about during the waking day. In essence, stuff you didn't give yourself time to process while awake, is sitting in a queue waiting for processing time, and gets it while you're asleep. Thought processes during sleep operate very slowly, many times more slowly than during the waking state; but nonetheless, thought occurs. And this becomes an input to the sensory representations in dreams.
Another aid to dream recall is to not wake up to a radio or other content. Use an ordinary alarm clock if you must, but a light connected to a timer can be better if your bedroom can be kept dark otherwise. When you wake up, don't let your mind become preoccupied with a song or other content that runs automatically. Memories of dreams are often initially difficult to distinguish from memories of waking activities: you'll have a feeling about something in much the same way as you would toward a normal memory. Learn to observe quietly and follow the observation process without trying to direct it.
Of interest, very often we make event forecasts in our dreams, usually based on information we perceive during the waking day but aren't paying attention to. When enough such information accumulates that the brain can find a pattern in it, the pattern gets converted to a dream story plot and characters. Very often these forecasts are reasonably on target.
So it might be interesting for us to start posting relevant dreams in topic such as this one, and see if there are any event forecasts in common that are about items which are not already known or easily foreseeable. For example we all think that certain things are going to happen in the future; what's more interesting is to go for the cases were the forecast was not obvious. It's one thing to say there'll be war with Iran; it's another to have a dream that accurately pegs a detail based on an extrapolation from a minor news item read some weeks ago.
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As for me, yes, I often have dreams about probable futures. Recently there was a series of dreams that had to do with evacuation scenarios. The persistent feeling is something like, "oh s---!, here we go again, when will this ever stop?!"