Public Dream Journal:

As with abstract art and French philosophy, most of the meaning that comes from dreams comes from the discourse that goes on around them. The point of this string is to allow everyone to describe their dreams and engage in a discourse about them.

I’ll start:

The other day, I had a dream in which I was underwater and there was what I interpreted as a shark that was like a stingray but perfectly square. Me, and whoever I was with, kept pushing it back. But it kept coming at us.

The square/stingray might represent the inability of rational thought to combat your personal demons.

An interesting subject for the thread.
Keep it up.

with love,
sanjay

Yeah, Zinnat. It was an experiment and consequently risky. But I had hoped it might have an effect similar to the “what song are you listening to now” string.

Thanks for the support.But we’ll have to see what happens. Personally, I’m hoping it wanders into real philosophical issues such as the mental and physiological structures at work in dreams and others such as dream’s implication for the noema/noesis relationship as established by phenomenology.

“For me dreams of water are either references to unconscious memories (usually repressed) or to mana = water as life substance permeating the unconscious, not to be confused with spirit which is symbolized more often by air or fire. Water flows upon earth and so it is bound to the body and physical life. Sharks, as relatively primitive fish, are symbols of the anima and the bodily soul, and depths of meaning. Pushing it away, if I dreamed it, would indicate that it represented a memory or idea or feeling that I am currently resisting, and the fact that it can’t decide whether it is a shark or a stingray or what indicates ambivalence about it – thinking maybe it isn’t as dangerous as it feels. Of course every dreamer has their own dream vocabulary. These are just some common ways my own dreams seem to communicate to me. Anyway, I often find that when I have a dream similar to this one, within a day or two I am struck with a painful memory that seems out of nowhere at first, but then I realize that it was in the back of my mind earlier. In one case for instance it turned out that I had been holding back thoughts of my daughter (who died too young 7 years ago.)”

Thanks for your input as well. You seem to be taking a Jungian approach to it.

And sorry about your daughter. Being a Grandfather (which assumes my being a father( I could could only begin to understand how painful that could be.

That said, what interests me is how the mind manages, through what may well be a juxtaposition of mental contents, such amorphous and organic forms as the shark in my dream.

Many of my dreams have to do with frustration. I’m given a guitar to play, but it has no frets. I am to go on stage in a play, but I forgot my lines. These dreams seem to indicate a my id’s problems with ego interpretation. Often I am back at work, even though I’ve been retired for some time now, and am expected to perform meaningless tasks.

You will never get to the correct interpretation of a dream unless you have an understanding of the human mind. You also need to be very self-aware, far more than most people actually are. A third requisite is that you need to want to know the truth. This last is vital and rare. The dream talks about the dreamer and the truth in our degraded world, the truth about the dreamer, is rarely what the dreamer would like it to be. So you have to face the truth about yourself, and if you are not prepared to do that, then forget interpreting dreams.

Except that you can practice the necessary skills which are involved in proper dream interpretation: making connections, developing an awareness of what is going on in your own mind, developing a good memory for the details of what you did and thought yesterday (this is a LOT harder than it sounds). You don’t realize how poor you are at these things until you become good at them.

If I’d had your dream, I’d be asking myself what encounters, if any, I’d had with sharks/sting rays, or if I had read or seen anything on tv relating to the same — this is the making connections bit or the beginning of it, because you then have to find the connection between your past experience of sharks and what’s going on in your life or mind right now, by which I mean yesterday and today. But to understand the connection, you have to understand something about how the mind works — bummer, but there it is — and hence neither Freud nor Jung nor any of their ilk came even close to being able to interpret dreams. And the funny thing is, that if they HAD known how to interpret dreams, they would have seen that their own dreams were giving them away, giving them away as charlatans and little boys playing games. Ironic or what?

d63,

As dreams and other supernatural phenomena like OBE, NDE, Tunnel Experience etc have been the subject of interest for me since long, i think that i can contribute a little here.

Instead of dreams, let me take some common symbols within those one by one.

LIke, if you see a clump of women shoes in the dream, what does it stands for?

Any gussess?

with love,
sanjay

The mathematically perfected demon devouring people in the sea of their issues.

Actually, Ierrellus, dream research has shown that about 70 to 80% of dream content is negative. And my experience has shown that to be true as well.One explanation may well be supplied by phenomenology in recognizing the noetic nature of dreams. Think about it, when you move about in real life, you always have the advantage of mass and the inertia that comes with it. For instance, when you run, you have the advantage of the inertia of the swing of your legs. But in dreams, that advantage no longer exists. And this may be why we tend to have a lot of dreams in which we’re running from something, but can’t quite get the job done. Of course, this is a more obvious and introductory example and the possibility may actually apply to a lot of other frustrations we tend to experience in dreams.

The more unfortunate possibility is that the negativity, given that dreams are generally believed to be the result of brain activity while sleeping, is the result of a natural lean in the physiology (the wiring) of the brain towards it. And this possibility gets some shine from the propensity towards negativity you find on the internet -including these boards.

Another point concerning yours: if you read Kafka’s novels (The Trial and The Castle) you will notice how women tend to basically fall into K’s arms and then disappear as easily. And God only knows how many dreams I have spent searching amusement parks for the woman that fell into mine while desperately wanting to ride the rides that I never seem to get on.

It is just subconscious problem solving in conceptual form observed by the sensory conscious in terms with which it can relate, thus “metaphorized”. Those who perceive “unresolved issues” in their lives more often dream “negative dreams” (“what to do about this threat?”) merely because the whole purpose of the brain/mind is to attempt to resolve such things. Those who perceive their life as a pleasant ride tend to have “positive dreams” concerning “what hopeful fun to have next?”

Design engineers do the exact same thing cognitively when working out how to accomplish a problematic specification and/or working out what added features can be conveniently installed - “negative and positive problem solving”.

One can swing from negative to positive dreams by either resolving the more serious conceptual issues or by simply “rising above the noise” as though floating above the Earthly issues below and seeing a wider perspective from a distance. In short - “Chill”.

Ok, let me answer it myself.

A clump of women shoes represents marriage in the dreams.

Second one-

What a playing ball (like we use in golf or baseball) stands for in the dreams?

with love,
sanjay

I refer you to my new post: Classic Dream Interpretation (Psychology)

Yeah, Sanjay, but are you really sure the subconscious is that capable of such sophisticated symbolic systems? I have doubts myself. Although I would admit to more elaborate systems of meaning in those motifs that tend to repeat themselves. For instance, I think the amusement park dream that occurs a lot for is about play and escape. Similarly, I tend to have a lot of dreams about travel when I to go work when I wake up. And this, of course, suggests escape.

That said, sorry I haven’t been responding. I’m not ignoring you. I’ve just been focusing on longer pieces for the last few days.

Also, I would tend to agree with the previous poster’s association of being underwater with the subconscious. In fact, water tends to play a major role in expressing emotional tone (rugged, choppy waters suggesting turbulence) which seems to be primary form of meaning that dreams impart.

d63,

Your doubts are valid. Subconscious is certainly not capable of manufacturing such a complex phenomenon like dreams. The reason of the dreams is entirely different. I know this from my personal experiences.

I can offer four premises about dreams (though those are facts to me)-

1- We neither do nor can see dreams on our own, as Freud suggested. On the contrary, they are shown to us.
2- A dream is more real than the awakened life.
3- No either living or dead, who is known to us in this human life, ever comes into dream in that very apperance.
4- One can never see his image in the mirror or somewhere else during dreams.

But, how i derived those conclusions is a very detailed and different subject altogether.

with love,
sanjay

Had a dream today in which I encountered, yet again, another Kafka girl in that she fell into my arms then eluded me.

But isn’t this result of her being a noetic phenomena while lacking a noemic foundation?

iNTERESTING(

jAMES…

.

I was in an airport, idly waiting for my flight. I glanced up at the clock on the wall and it said I was two hours late for my flight. Surprised and panicked, I ran to customer service in the nearby hall. When I got there and looked up at the clock, it said I still had four hours to my flight. From then on, every clock I looked at gave me a different time. So there I stood, with a ticket in my hand, lost as to where I was located…in time. I had a destination to go, but I didn’t know where I was.

It is said that the subconscious is a formless space that has no idea of time. The mind, on the other hand, cannot function in non-time. How do they understand each other? And what happens when you give your subconscious a driver’s seat? Does it know where it’s going? Does it even know where it is?

These are good questions. :slight_smile:

Have you ever woken up one minute before your alarm went off? Again and again? If the conscious mind is asleep then what is keeping time so precisely? The unconscious must have some form of time keeping without one’s awareness. Time is encoded in the body, and manifests through physical changes: natural sleep/wake cycles, transition to adolescence, menopause, symptoms of old age, and such. All function according to internal clock. Some body changes/functions already come with pre-set alarms at birth and can be anticipated beforehand.