You can read about dreams “till the cows come home” as we say in the South and not get to the end. Dreams are a Big Deal. You’ll find them in the Bible, in history, legends, and family stories. Dreams have shown the dreamer solutions to problems, new inventions, and scared us to death at the same time.

Start with the idea that dreams knock at your door to bring you a message. If you ignore the knock, the dream may knock louder until it gets your attention, perhaps in a nightmare. Even though, we’ve trained to see dreams as “just” a dream, the brain goes right on producing several every night. If you interrupt the dreams (crying babies, illness, partying late) the brain will create more the next night. Biology and psychology need dreams, it appears. T

Back to my metaphor of a dream knocking at your door—you ask, what do you want me to know? The dream unfolds the message. Sometimes it unfolds the messages in a series of dreams, much like chapters in a novel. You wouldn’t rip one page out of the novel and expect to know the whole story. Thus, the reason many people keep dream journals. A few words, a feeling, etc. can reconnect you to the dream.

There are many theories about dreams and just as many suggestions about how to understand them. And, they fall into categories, too.

Here are a few:

1. The recurring dream. These dreams can start in childhood and continue for a long time, seemingly at random times.
2. The Pre-Cognitive Dream: These dreams come true. Or, at least give you a dejavu experience.
3. The continuing daydream: This dream continues the work you do during the day. You rake leaves all day and you dream of raking leaves.
4. Death dreams – often comes to us when something needs to be put to rest.
5. The “it was not a dream” experience – This dream usually involves seeing people who have died and they appear to us to tell us they are OK.
6. The “what The heck?” Dream: This dream doesn’t make any sense to us. It is full of symbolism, metaphors, people, etc. that leaves us feeling it was a weird dream.

If you read Sigmund Freud’s book written in 1900, The Interpretation of Dreams, you would discover he thought all dreams were personal, from your unconscious, and were mostly about sex and aggression.  He thought dreams were like a 3-act-play in that there is a beginning or introduction of the problem, a middle, and an ending where the solution is delivered.

His colleague, Carl G Jung, has given us another view. He, too, could agree that dreams come from our own minds, but he added that some dreams tap into the Collective Unconscious, and we have dreams that are not of our own personal experiences but of historical and cultural knowledge. In other words, a there is a spiritual component to our dreams. Some Church or Christian groups have dream groups as much as they may offer prayer groups.

Both Jung and Freud and more modern theorists believe the story of the dream is not the meaning of the dream. We start with the story and investigate the words, feelings, numbers, colors, etc. In other words, it’s a puzzle and we are the mystery.

In Gestalt theory, we ask the dreamer to experience every aspect of the dream. For example, if the dreamer describes a road where lots of cars and people are traveling, you might ask the dreamer “what is it like to be the road? The travelers? The vehicles? All of that information tells a story.

Of course, dreams sometimes have a sense of humor. One person had recurring dreams about going into a house with a U-shaped porch. The floors on the inside of the house were covered in rugs that had rats running under them. She would wake up horrified. I suggested the dream introduced itself by saying this dream is about YOU.  And, since she had just married and blended their families, she referred to the children as rug-rats. It was simply a dream about the anxiety of how life had changed, with a twist of humor.

It could be if you “wake up on the wrong side of the bed”, it is a result of a lingering feeling from your last dream. Feelings are one thing about a dream that does not have to be interpreted. Anxiety is anxiety; wonder is wonder; fear is fear; and well, you get it.

Sweet dreams to you all.