Dream Interpretation Thread

[Flushgarden 0]

I've had a couple different reoccurring dreams. There is one dream that I've had 3 times. The dream really isn't complex at all. There are just several UFOs in the sky. They look like stars and if they weren't moving you probably wouldn't be able to tell that they're UFOs, but they're moving all over the place and flying in different formations and stuff. I'm always the only one that notices them. Nothing ever happens, but in the dream I definitely have the feeling of being scared of what they might be preparing to do. I've lived in 3 different places; Maine, Tennessee and California, and I've had the dream in each location. Each time the setting of the dream is where I'm currently living. I've also had a lot of disaster dreams. Usually it's tornadoes. I had never actually seen a tornado in person until last year (it didn't really harm anything), but I've been having dreams about them for a long time.I've also had some dreams that I'm not in, and I don't know anybody else in them either. It's like I'm watching a movie. Anybody else ever have that?

[Zealous Donkey 0]

I've had a couple different reoccurring dreams. There is one dream that I've had 3 times. The dream really isn't complex at all. There are just several UFOs in the sky. They look like stars and if they weren't moving you probably wouldn't be able to tell that they're UFOs, but they're moving all over the place and flying in different formations and stuff. I'm always the only one that notices them. Nothing ever happens, but in the dream I definitely have the feeling of being scared of what they might be preparing to do. I've lived in 3 different places; Maine, Tennessee and California, and I've had the dream in each location. Each time the setting of the dream is where I'm currently living. I've also had a lot of disaster dreams. Usually it's tornadoes. I had never actually seen a tornado in person until last year (it didn't really harm anything), but I've been having dreams about them for a long time.I've also had some dreams that I'm not in, and I don't know anybody else in them either. It's like I'm watching a movie. Anybody else ever have that?

I have had dozens of dreams about tornados. The main one I have is when I am trying to get me and my nieces and nephews to safety. We usually barely make it to the celler, but then it never hits. After I go out side feeling relieved that it missed us, I see two or three more only seconds away. These dreams seem to really get my heart pumping.

[Southern Buddhist 1]

I had a dream where Jesus was driving a pickup. and I was in the back. I tried to flip my daughter into the back of the truck, but I missed her, and when Jesus backed up. He ran her over. I can't really blame him though, I don't think there are cars in heaven.

Freudian interpretation: Jesus is the best part of you, and the normal rest of you is the you in the back. You fear harming your daughter (running her over), but you realize that it could only happen through an innocent mistake, because the best part of you loves her perfectly (as Jesus) and doesn't want to be a bad parent. It's simply part of you fretting that you're an imperfect parent, and the rest of you reminding yourself that perfect or not, you're still motivated by love.Truly Freudian interpretation: your daughter is also an aspect of your self, your "inner child," so to speak.

[Southern Buddhist 1]

I have had this reoccuring nightmare since I was a kid and I would say that it has been about 4 years or so since I last had it but all it simply entails is me in a car with an unknown person. I am in the passenger seat. All of a sudden a thin cord wraps around my neck and starts strangling me in a very agressive way. The person in the driver seat just sits there, really plays no part at all other than to fill the seat it seems. After a little bit everything goes dark but I can still feel "alive" but then a counter begins at ten and counts down. I know that is the counter telling me how long it is till I die. I usually wake up at 1.

It's so straightforward there's not too much to interpret (i.e., no bizarre dream-twisted elements). Why you have it I don't know, but Freud broke dreams down into categories like wish-fulfillment dreams, anxiety dreams, etc. This is a straight-ahead anxiety dream. If you wanted me to get all mystical I would suggest that the fact that it's always strangling might suggest that it occurs at times when you are holding back from speaking something of great importance to you. For instance, you might have the dream when you really want to tell a boss off but can't, when you're thinking of proposing, when you're upset about something but can't talk to the people involved to clear the air, and so on. You feel out of control (the passenger), like nobody's on your side (the driver's not helping), and your voice is being silenced (the strangling). Your subconscious is telling you that you need to speak up, and the counter is telling you that you've avoided it long enough and need to take action.

[Southern Buddhist 1]

There is a nucleus (bundle of neurons) in the brainstem which actively maintains the paralysis during REM sleep. Note that the paralysis is only active during the REM phase of sleep - during the other, slow-wave phases of sleep you can actually move around. 99% of sleep-walking cases happen during SWS rather than during REM. Most narrative type dreams happen during REM (although you can have some dreams during non-REM). It's kind of an important function if you think about it...there have been some animal studies where if this nucleus is ablated you will see the animals walking around acting out their dreams. There is a rare disease in humans too called REM Sleep Behavior Disorder in which the paralysis doesn't happen properly and people act out their dreams. It's very dangerous.

I've always heard sleep paralysis described as terrifying, but what I've experienced of it has never bothered me. I find it peaceful. Sometimes I even imagine I'm in my coffin, if I happen to be lying in a dignified, coffin-potential position, but that's not really upsetting, either. I must notice it only when I'm closer to waking up and thus able to be more aware of my surroundings and hence my safety. I also have been capable of lucid dreaming several times in the past.There was actually a murder case in which the defendant claimed he had REM Sleep Behavior Disorder and couldn't be held responsible because he didn't know he was driving to someone's house, stabbing them to death, and driving home and getting back into bed. Dangerous to you, if you wander into a busy street thinking you're walking along the beach, but also dangerous to others.

[checkymcfold 0]

my dreams are exclusively silent and come in the form of a series of very vivid still images where all dialogue is understood but not actually spoken. i very, very rarely dream about people that actually exist in real life.is that weird? what does it say about me?

[Southern Buddhist 1]

my dreams are exclusively silent and come in the form of a series of very vivid still images where all dialogue is understood but not actually spoken. i very, very rarely dream about people that actually exist in real life.is that weird? what does it say about me?

I love that you love Bjork. I like the older stuff, like "Human Behavior" (one of the remixes) and "There's More to Life Than This."My husband is largely a silent dreamer, too, and also with very vivid images. I think that might just be more likely in males, with their greater tendency to key in on visual stimuli.That the images are still, rather than moving, and that you rarely dream about people you know is a little strange to me. I don't know what that means. Can't help ya there, I'm afraid.

[Southern Buddhist 1]

Here is one of mine, from several years ago, interpreted by a friend:The dream: Prince Charles was in Korea. He saw a huge crumbling castle right in the middle of the vibrant, bustling capital city, and he told the people that they should tear that castle down to make more room and build something new and better in its place, because it was taking up valuable real estate. It turns out, though, that the people got very angry at this and Prince Charles was forced to flee for his life. I was in his party, and remember thinking as we ran for his limo and raced to the airport, "But he's right. The castle is an old heap. Why can't they see that?"What was going on in my life: I was thinking at the time of going into therapy to deal with some issues stemming from a bad childhood and the death of my father. My friend's interpretation: Prince Charles is your superego. He's saying you have valuable space in your life and your mind being taken up by these old issues. You need to clear them away and tear down the things that are keeping you in suffering (crumbling). The people are your id, a faceless threatening mass that hates and fears change. The me in the dream is my ego, right in the middle between the id and the superego, and I'm agreeing that although the id hates change, the fact is that change needed to come. The ego is telling me the path to take.

[checkymcfold 0]

I love that you love Bjork. I like the older stuff, like "Human Behavior" (one of the remixes) and "There's More to Life Than This."

in all fairness, that was my gf, but i do love bjork, too. my favorite albums are homogenic and vespertine. a lot of the vespertine bonus tracks on whatever version i have are pretty sick remixes.if you like icelandic chicks, try isabella torrini. she's one of my current favorites.

My husband is largely a silent dreamer, too, and also with very vivid images. I think that might just be more likely in males, with their greater tendency to key in on visual stimuli.

like boobs.

That the images are still, rather than moving, and that you rarely dream about people you know is a little strange to me. I don't know what that means. Can't help ya there, I'm afraid.

weak. that's what i was genuinely wondering about.

[Balloon guy 158]

my dreams are exclusively silent and come in the form of a series of very vivid still images where all dialogue is understood but not actually spoken. i very, very rarely dream about people that actually exist in real life.is that weird? what does it say about me?

Pretty obvious that you are self focused and may be socio-pathicGo to a friend's funeral and see if you like any of the women. If you do then the real test begins

[checkymcfold 0]

Pretty obvious that you are self focused and may be socio-pathicGo to a friend's funeral and see if you like any of the women. If you do then the real test begins

the best part about my dreams is that you never talk.and, most of the time, don't even exist.

[HangukMiguk 8]

I had a dream where I was at church last night. In the dream, me and several people I know from church were involved with some sort of play. The play, for some reason, had me playing a gay person. We were rehearsing, and all of a sudden someone called me a faggot. I was startled, looked at them, and must have looked at them strange, because they said, "It's in the script."I look through the script to find the majority of it to be just that. Calling gay people faggots, a whole load of hate speech (my church doesn't do any of this IRL). I get infuriated, and ask, "Are you serious?" The woman that was overseeing the play says, "Well, yeah. You got a problem?" "Yes," I say, "this is ridiculous! What kind of BS are you pulling? You might as well be over at Westboro Baptist Church." And then storm out of the room in anger, with several of my close friends at church following me, wanting to talk me down.I decide I don't want to talk, I instead hide in a large library for several hours, just wandering around this library. It reminded me a lot of a library in Chicago I visited. Anyway, I eventually leave, and head back in the general direction of my church.I instead find myself in a pavillion where my mom and one of my female coworkers (who have never met each other) are eating off an all-you-can-eat buffet. They ask me how it was going at church. I wind up recanting the above story to them, getting angrier by the minute. And then I wake up.

[Southern Buddhist 1]

I had a dream where I was at church last night. In the dream, me and several people I know from church were involved with some sort of play. The play, for some reason, had me playing a gay person. We were rehearsing, and all of a sudden someone called me a faggot. I was startled, looked at them, and must have looked at them strange, because they said, "It's in the script."I look through the script to find the majority of it to be just that. Calling gay people faggots, a whole load of hate speech (my church doesn't do any of this IRL). I get infuriated, and ask, "Are you serious?" The woman that was overseeing the play says, "Well, yeah. You got a problem?" "Yes," I say, "this is ridiculous! What kind of BS are you pulling? You might as well be over at Westboro Baptist Church." And then storm out of the room in anger, with several of my close friends at church following me, wanting to talk me down.I decide I don't want to talk, I instead hide in a large library for several hours, just wandering around this library. It reminded me a lot of a library in Chicago I visited. Anyway, I eventually leave, and head back in the general direction of my church.I instead find myself in a pavillion where my mom and one of my female coworkers (who have never met each other) are eating off an all-you-can-eat buffet. They ask me how it was going at church. I wind up recanting the above story to them, getting angrier by the minute. And then I wake up.

Now, see, this is how it's done. This is a meaty (so to speak) full-on Freudfest. The cigar-fellating one would be proud.You got church, which is just a specific setting for the more general realm of morality. You got food, which is a specific for the more general idea of nourishment and attention. And you've got sex, sex, sex.I think Freud would say the whole dream is basically a case of the struggle with latent homosexuality and homophobia. Since in his theory every character in the dream is an aspect of yourself, here's what's going on: your higher morality, your superego, the aspect of yourself that most rigorously insists that you conform to society's demands, the most judgmental part of yourself, accuses you of being gay (or of playing a gay "role" in some part of your life, i.e., being overly feminine or overly submissive to other men). It uses the worst, most hateful language in order to make you ashamed, to underline its own horror at being socially unconventional.The less conformist part of you, the more accepting part, the part that believes in full, free individuality, gets angry and leaves, which is essentially both a fight and flight reflex. Either way, it takes this attack as a threat. You (correctly) identify the judgmental part of yourself with social conservatives (the Baptist church) and you energetically argue an alternate view of morality to oppose the hateful view. Then you leave, trailing after you a group of people who attempt to make you conform to social norms (i.e., straight) with more palatable language. They're trying to calm you, but also trying to get you back into your proper "role" in the "play."The library is a symbol for knowledge, in this case probably self-knowledge. You find it peaceful and calming, and only start to return to societal demands when you've been calmed by self-knowledge, checking in with your innate wisdom.Only instead of getting back to social pressure directly, you meet your mom and female co-worker who are voluptuously filling/gorging themselves with all they can consume (are you one of the things they're consuming, symbolically???). Immediately the social pressure comes back, in another way, and you react in the same way, essentially going in a circle and looping the dream back on itself. There's no point in that, so you wake up.I would guess that in your life, you're feeling too much influence from women or even from your own "feminine side". That's stressing you out and making you feel "gay" because you aren't resisting it. That's why the gayness in the dream is a role rather than real. You're "playing" gay but aren't comfortable with it. Part of you is ashamed and wants to reassert traditional male privilege (hence all the "faggot" talk), but part of you is okay with sitting back and letting female energy take charge in your life (which is why you fight back). You try to gain knowledge about the path you truly want. But while being in the library calms you down (a sign that you believe if you could resolve this conflict, you would have internal peace), the library doesn't actually give you any answers (because your subconscious doesn't know the answer yet -- it's still wrestling with it via this dream). Then you leave the library only to find women "consuming all."Mind you, "gay" need not necessarily mean teh buttsecks. It could be any kind of energy going on that's not traditionally macho -- for example, you may have recently discovered a real talent for painting or acting and this dream is fighting that as not macho enough. It could mean that your girlfriend got a great job in another city and you're wondering if it's "gay" to move with her there.

[Southern Buddhist 1]

An article on dreaming:Winding Through ‘Big Dreams’ Are the Threads of Our LivesBy REBECCA CATHCARTPublished: July 3, 2007I was in the fluorescent pallor of a windowless office, staring at the dense grid of an unfilled spreadsheet, when my mother called to say my father had died. It wasn’t a surprise. He had been given a diagnosis of terminal cancer the year before. But it was a jolt to my system — one switch, pulled down with a thump, the power fading and the conveyor belt coming to a stop. My memories from that week are a jumble of misfiled pieces. But at the end of the second week, I had a dream that remains crisp and vivid in my mind. I sat up in bed and saw my father across the room. His figure was full and healthy and framed by the yellow light that glowed in the stairwell outside my door. He was grinning, green eyes on me, and listening to sounds from the dining room below, the clinking of plates and the voices of my extended family laughing and sharing memories of him. He raised his dark eyebrows and laughed with them.“Back to life” or “visitation” dreams, as they are known among dream specialists and psychologists, are vivid and memorable dreams of the dead. They are a particularly potent form of what Carl Jung called “big dreams,” the emotionally vibrant ones we remember for the rest of our lives. Big dreams are once again on the minds of psychologists as part of a larger trend toward studying dreams as meaningful representations of our concerns and emotions. “Big dreams are transformative,” Roger Knudson, director of the Ph.D. program in clinical psychology at Miami University of Ohio, said in a telephone interview. The dreaming imagination does not just harvest images from remembered experience, he said. It has a “poetic creativity” that connects the dots and “deforms the given,” turning scattered memories and emotions into vivid, experiential vignettes that can help us to reflect on our lives. Grief itself is transformative. It is a process of disassembly. The bereaved must let go of the selves they were, as well as the loved ones they have lost. The dreams we have while grieving are an important part of that process.“Our dreams have to do with how we internalize the people we love,” said Pamela McCarthy, director of counseling services at Smith College. “You learn to look within for the loved one and the particular function that person played in your life, such as caretaking or guidance in the case of a parent. This becomes part of a function that you can provide for yourself.” Cultural narratives in regions like Vietnam and North and South America assign special importance to such dreams and consider them actual encounters with the spirits of lost loved ones. “This notion is so widely shared by traditions all across the globe that some scholars have gone so far as to argue that religion itself actually originated in dream experience,” Kelly Bulkeley, past president of the Association for the Study of Dreams, wrote in his book “Transforming Dreams: Learning Spiritual Lessons From the Dreams You Never Forget” (2000). Current dream study has its epic narrative in the life and dreams of the pseudonymous Ed, a widower who recorded 22 years of dreams about Mary, his deceased wife. Ed made his journal available to G. William Domhoff, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a leading dream theorist.Dr. Domhoff and Adam Schneider, his research assistant, categorized the 143 dreams and cross-referenced them with Ed’s waking reflections on his wife, their marriage and her death from ovarian cancer on June 15, 1980. In a path-breaking study in 2004, Dr. Domhoff asserted that Ed’s dreams could not be the nonsensical noise of a restless brain stem. They represented the currents of loss, love and confusion in Ed’s waking life.Ed and Mary’s love began on a seaside boardwalk in 1947. They wed a year later, when Ed was 25 and Mary 22. In his more comforting dreams, Mary appears young and radiant as she did that day, with dark hair and bewitching eyes.In Ed’s dreams, his companionship with Mary and her withdrawal during an arduous illness are recurrent themes. Sometimes, his mind weaves these threads together to poignant effect, as when Ed finds himself standing across the street from where Mary sits in a car, unable to cross over. Other times, they form jumbled, comic events. Ed and Mary are lost in a city. They see Jerry Seinfeld and ask him for directions. Soon, Ed realizes that Mary has left with Mr. Seinfeld. He broods behind a building and begins to sink in quicksand.Almost 20 years after Mary’s death, Ed dreams he is walking down a hallway in their old apartment. It leads to Mary’s hospital room, where she lies, gaunt and still. Her head, according to Ed’s journal, is “hanging over the top edge of the bed.” Her hair is sparse, as it was after chemotherapy. “I sit on the bed,” he writes, “and cradle her in my arms.” Such composite images and sudden scene changes, Dr. Domhoff conceded, may be the brain’s effort to make sense of random neuron fire. But they are more likely to be symbolic of Ed’s emotional struggle. Dreams, Dr. Domhoff wrote, are the “embodiment of thoughts” from our waking lives. Deirdre Barrett, assistant professor of psychology at the Harvard Medical School and editor in chief of the journal Dreaming, wrote the first significant study on dreams of the dead. She collected dream reports from two sample groups totaling 245 people at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and found 77 such dreams. Her findings were published in the 1992 issue of Omega: The Journal of Death and Dying. The type and intensity of these dreams, Dr. Barrett wrote, corresponded to phases of her subjects’ waking grief. She arranged the dreams in four categories based not only on common content, but also on concurrent stages of grieving. The most common was “back to life” dreams, which made up 39 percent of the dreams of the dead in Dr. Barrett’s sample. In such dreams, subjects were surprised or frightened by the appearance of a deceased loved one. Dr. Barrett theorized that these early dreams corresponded to the confusion and denial of early stages of grief. Dr. Domhoff is not willing to link dreams so closely to stages of waking grief. But, he said in an e-mail message, Ed’s dreams did dissipate in intensity and frequency over time. Dreams that occur during rapid eye movement, or REM, cycles are the most memorable and emotionally powerful, said John Antrobus, a retired professor of psychology and sleep research at the City College of New York who founded the sleep laboratory there in 1965. The dreams have power because brain activity during REM is most similar to that of a waking state. The emotional responses to REM dream content, therefore, are most like the responses during waking cognition. In REM, the amygdala, the lima-bean-size gland at the base of the skull responsible for emotions, and the hippocampus, the tissue curled up under the temples that enables memory, are active. The two organs, along with areas in the frontal and prefrontal lobes near the forehead that enable attention and coordination, work simultaneously in producing dreams. “You have an image of a lost loved one, and along come all kinds of emotions you’ve tied up with them,” Dr. Antrobus said. “Their image comes up, and all parts of the brain associated with the loss get activated, as well in REM sleep, because they’re part of our survival system.” In a study last year, Dr. Antrobus and City College graduate students linked the body’s circadian cycle and the singular level of brain activity in REM to the high emotionality of REM dreams. Core body temperature rises gradually from its nadir in the middle of the night during slow-wave sleep, the least active brain state. As morning nears, subcortical brain activity tied to the circadian cycle increases. When these cycles coincide in the last and longest REM phase, the study found, the mind produces its most dramatic dreams.“The brain is waking up,” Dr. Antrobus said in an interview. “It starts waking up long before you are fully awake.” Dreams during this active period are more likely to be highly memorable, vivid, and experiential, what Dr. Antrobus calls “superdreams.” “That’s what people talk about,” he said. “That’s what they’re usually remembering. That’s what these ‘big dreams’ are.” He added that the four or five phases of REM in a normal night’s sleep might include similar dream content. Just as the image of a lost loved one stimulates parts of the brain associated with loss, the content of dreams early in the sleep cycle could set the tone for that night’s dream experiences. Our memories upon waking, therefore, may be our recollection of a night’s cumulative dream content. Apart from an effort to understand the physiology behind the content of dreams, what do we do with big dreams? If we ignore them, said Dr. Knudson of Miami University of Ohio, “we discount our most valuable resource in understanding ourselves.” America is not a country with a ritualistic approach to grief. Many employers offer as few as three days off after a family member’s death. Dreams of the dead keep alive our connections to lost loved ones. “Big dreams, those dreams that stop you dead in your tracks, are for precisely that purpose,” said Dr. Knudson, whose father died three years ago. “They pull us out of our headlong rush forward. They yank us back down from our schedule books and our jobs.He continued, “I don’t want to get over my father. That’s not to say that I want to suffer on a daily basis or that I don’t want to understand that he is dead. But I look forward to dreams in which my father will come again. What does it mean to ‘get over’ it? I think that is crazy.”

[Southern Buddhist 1]

And another:Why We Dream: Biological Theory Roundup by Ransom Riggs - June 30, 2009 - 10:17 AM We’ve all had strange dreams: as a kid I was not in the least frightened by the Count Chocula character while awake, but I suffered through many a nightmare about him, his fangs dripping chocolate blood as he stalked me, Bela Lugosi-style, through the eerily empty halls of my school. God knows why. Other dreams make even less sense: I’m packing for a trip when there’s a knock at the door. It’s Fedex. For some reason, supreme court nominee Sandra Sotomayor has overnighted me a kitten.So why does the brain produce this narrative junk? We still don’t know why for certain, but the last few decades have produced a number of interesting evolutionary theories that move beyond old-hat Jungian archetypes or Freudian “wish fulfillment,” and Scientific American’s Jesse Bering recently laid out the Darwinian contenders.Brain conditioningIf your brain went completely dark all night, the theory goes, it would begin to lose function just as rarely-used muscles will atrophy. Several researchers, including the psychophysiologist Fred Snyder, argued that the adaptive purpose of dreaming may therefore be primarily to stimulate the brain or to keep it “in shape” during prolonged periods of inactivity. Later research offered support for this general idea. For example, specific categories of neurotransmitters were shown to be highly active during this period, while others seemingly “rested.”In other words, as psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, “Dreaming might be a kind of screen saver in which it doesn’t really matter what the content is as long as certain parts of the brain are active.”External vigilanceMost dreams are notably lacking in olfactory and auditory content, and one theory holds that that’s because if they weren't, the dreamer would be particularly susceptible to real-world threats like fire or noisy predators. Being a “light sleeper” in relation to these other sensory domains had adaptive benefits, and since we’re in the dark anyway and our eyes are closed, there’s less of a risk in hallucinating in our secret visual worlds while our brains are being recharged.Threat SimulationThis theory holds that dreams function as practice run-throughs for dangerous situations that may occur in the real world; they’re drills. (Of course, this theory doesn’t explain my kitten-in-the-mail dream; what was that preparing me for?)“By giving rise to a full-scale hallucinatory world of subjective experience during sleep, the dream production mechanism provides an ideal and safe environment for such sustained practice by selecting threatening waking events and simulating them repeatedly in various combinations.” What we should see in contemporary dreams, argues Revonsuo, are “threat scripts” depicting primitive themes of danger that would likely have been relevant in the ancestral environment, such as being chased, falling and so on.Dreaming as problem solvingAccording to Harvard University psychologist Deirdre Barrett, “sleeping on it” really works in terms of real-world problem solving, and may actually be the evolutionary purpose of dreaming (even if those dreams don’t always make sense to us.) In other words –– dreamscapes provided our ancestors (and therefore us) with a sort of creative canvas for solving real-world problems. In support of this, Barrett describes the work of Stanford University psychologist William Dement, who in the early 1970s instructed hundreds of undergraduate students to work on a set of challenging brainteasers before bedtime, so that they’d fall asleep with the problems still on their mind.This was posted on mentalfloss.com. One comment below it said

One of my psych classes in college espoused the “activation synthesis” theory. Like your “brain conditioning” description, your brain randomly fires neurons throughout the night. Then, as you begin to regain consciousness, your orderly mind tries to make a narrative out of all these pieces of information that have been triggered. Thus, the cat, Fed-Ex, and Supreme Court Nominee neurons in your brain fired, and your brain forced them into a (slightly) cohesive structure.

[vbnautilus 48]

The other big theory right now which isn't quite mentioned in that article is memory consolidation. The idea is that dreams constitute a sort of rehearsal process which helps memories burn in. There's some evidence for this -- sleep deprivation can lead to worse memory for things the night before -- which is part of the reason staying up all night before a test is not a great strategy. The activation-synthesis model I think is probably the most reasonable description of where dream content comes from in the brain.I sometimes do the following demo in class: One student leaves the room. She is told that while she is gone, someone will recount a dream. When she comes back she must learn about the content of the dream by asking only yes or no questions. Her goal is to "psychoanalyze" the dream and determine who dreamt it (if the class is small enough, or just if it was a male or female in larger classes). However, when the student leaves the room I tell the rest of the class that they will answer according to the following rule: if the last letter of the question is A-M we answer "yes" otherwise "no". In other words, our answers are random, but unified. The dream narrative that results from this process is a result of the questions the person chooses to ask, and our random confirmations/disconfirmations. The trick is that the origin of the dream is of course the student herself -- it reflects what is on her mind, and is also random/bizarre.

[Flushgarden 0]

I had an odd dream the other night.For some reason unknown to me I had to push a mattress along the side of a road every day. It was the same route every day, and the total round trip was about 40 miles. The half-way point was a house (I don't know who's house it is), where I was allowed to take a short break before I had to turn around and push the mattress back to where it came from. On this particular day in my dream when I got to the house my wife was there with a lot of people that I knew from high school. They were playing volleyball and socializing and having fun and stuff. However when I attempted to talk to anybody I was completely ignored. It was like they couldn't see me. I think the high school people are there because I recently was coerced into joining facebook and have come into contact with a lot of old friends and acquaintances. I still can't figure out why I had to push a mattress for 40 miles every day or why I was being ignored/unable to be seen. I do remember having a feeling of shame because I had to push the mattress.

[suicideking 0]

a feeling of shame because I had to push the mattress.

Hate your job?

[Flushgarden 0]

Hate your job?

I have hated previous jobs but right now I play poker for a living. Sometimes its a grind and can be stressful, but I love it and wouldn't trade it for a real job.

[chaselove 0]

I use dreambible.com when I get weird dreams.

[brvheart 1,752]

I use dreambible.com when I get weird dreams.

If you're a spammer, that was clever. Nice work.

[Mercury69 3]

OK, I'll go out on a limb here.what does it mean when I dream I can suck my own dick?

[CobaltBlue 662]

OK, I'll go out on a limb here.what does it mean when I dream I can suck my own dick?

That you're male?