Dreams occupy a special place in the human experience. Along with sleep, dreams seem necessary for our survival and well-being. What we experience in our dreams is subject to many interpretations. The effects are usually,, but not always subtle, if we can remember them at all. So what is the power of dreams and how can understanding dream states be useful and help us in our lives?
Dreams are often our subconscious mind trying to sort out something or other, good or bad, that is actually happening in our wakened state.
I think we are unable to process everything we experience in our wake state as there is usually too much stimulus for our brains to get sidetracked. In that case dreams help us to process the experiences especially if they were strong, emotional or traumatic. Imagine your thoughts in the daytime getting backed up like shoppers in a checkout line. When you sleep and dream, those thoughts get checked out. The checkout line is likely your short term memory. You don't want it to get too backed up, like with a memory only doling out one coin at a time to pay your karmic debt. If there are memories you can't process, as in PTSD, they remain in your subconscious, interfering in various ways with your life whether waking or sleeping. This is why sleep and dreaming are so important to our health.
I am increasingly starting to think that dreams are somehow inherited in our DNA and could be a link to what we see as reincarnation. Mine seem to always have links to the past and what is me in those dreams could in reality be my late father. Many of them include engineering locations and sometimes the theatre. I have managed to trace one of the locations (near enough) to a film theatre in that town in 1926. The detail seems quite surreal. Back in the 1970s ABC television Australia made a documentary, where a few people in a remote village who had never travelled more than a few miles were put under deep hypnosis. One woman recalled her childhood, where she saw a mosaic floor under construction from her bedroom window as a child. They managed to glean both a town name and approximate date in the 16th century during the regresion. By a strange coincidence someone recognised the town name and traced it back to Suffolk UK. The house was traced, along with the barn where she claimed to have seen the floor. But there were two problems, the floor did not exist and her bedroom window did not overlook the barn where she described and drew the floor. The historical society investigated and discovered that the window did exist, but was filled in around 200 years later. the barn floor was excavated and the floor exactly matching the drawing still existed under 2 feet of chicken poo. Carbon dating put the lowest level back to the 16th century. Unfortunately, another of the women under hypnosis recounted her death in a Nazi concentration camp and went hysterical. Before they could bring her out of the trance,she suffered a heart attack and died. The UK screening resulted in a huge uproar and threats of criminal charges. Before this could happen, all copies of the film and records of the production team were destroyed. My attempts to unearth the records were blanked at every turn, particularly in Australia. My hypothesis on all this seems to indicate that these deep memories can jump numerous generations. However you look at it, these memories must come from somewhere and the locations are rarely recognised. Few people can ever link their dreams to their current existence.
I think sleeping/rest/dreaming.........is essential for everybody, physical rest/emotions...........prosesing it all(brain) Almost as much as water/food. Mzzls
After an hour or two of waking up, I can't usually recall my dreams--no matter how vivid they were when I first awoke. I'll remember that I dreamt, and could given tell you if it was a fun dream, a weird one, or even a nightmare, but the specifics will be lost. If dreams have any power to help us understand life, then I'm being shafted
I have PTSD dreams; ultra-realistic, Technicolor ones wherein I can actually smell the bodies. People around me get horribly butchered; I often get killed. I often thrash about violently all night. I've often awoke screaming, a few times I've awoken pummeling my sleeping partner, who in my dreams was trying to kill me. I fucking hate dreaming. If I never have another dream, I'll consider myself blessed indeed.
Sorry to hear that! What literal nightmares to have to deal with. I hope you are able to medicate, like with THC big-time. Many vets around here grow specifically to help with PTSD. I would say in your case, the checkout lane you're in is closed. So you're sorta stuck with the traumatic memories in your cart, unable to clear them or reassign those memories to another checkout lane that's open. There's the cannabis checkout lane. You have to wait in line with everyone else checking out, but at least they pass the joint down the line while you're waiting, so you don't mind so much, in fact you forget about the items in your cart or even that you're standing in line! Added bonus! With marijuana, it's more difficult to remember your dreams thanks to that joint!
Dreams are sometimes useful metaphors for what's going on in our waking lives. I dabble in dream interp from time to time. Don't think I'm any good at it. They can connect us to our loved ones, and on occasion people we haven't met yet. I also believe they're a key to spiritual realms.
