Are all dreams meaningful?

How meaningful are dreams, and are some dreams more meaningful than others?

If you’re a very dedicated dreamer you might be in the habit of interpreting every single dream you remember, but when you remember several dreams a night this can feel overwhelming. If some dreams are more meaningful than others wouldn’t it be good to know which ones they are, and to focus your attention on these?

Let’s start with the question of whether all dreams have meaning.

At first glance, and to the uninitiated, dreams appear to be a meaningless mishmash of bits and pieces of recent experiences enmeshed in a surreal and irrational storyline. It’s easy to conclude that such dreams are perhaps the result of the brain sorting through the bits and bobs of yesterday and yesteryear, trying – and failing –to create a context that makes sense of them.

To some extent, this is exactly what’s happening, but with two important differences.

Firstly the dreaming brain or dreaming mind focuses on sorting through not just the bits and bobs of your recent experiences, but all your experiences – conscious and unconscious – of the last one to two days. It’s one big processing job, and the point of this is to refresh and update your mindset. During this processing, experiences from yesteryear may be called up if they resonate with those experiences of yesterday. Think of it as the dreaming brain comparing yesterday to yesteryear, deciding which old beliefs and experiences to reinforce, which to delete, and which to replace with something new.

Secondly, the surreal dreams that accompany this processing – the experiences you have while your brain and mind are updating – are not the result of failure to find context. They are the context, writ large in irrational language. This is because certain areas of the prefrontal cortex that control rational thinking are fairly inactive during dreaming, and it is left to the more touchy-feely ‘big picture’ areas of the brain to come up with, well, with the big picture.

Our mindset is not rational. Our mindset is composed of myriad beliefs, emotions, feelings, memories, sometimes working together, sometimes working in conflict, sometimes connected to each other through associations that are deeply embedded in the past and make no rational sense to us awake and yet powerfully drive our responses as we go about our daily lives.

So what we get, when we look into a dream, is an opportunity to view our mindset on that particular night, to see what’s associated with what and how this whole, amazing, deeper (largely unconscious) part of the self is governing the way we experience life.

Looked at this way, every part of a dream has meaning because it relates to the very structure of your mindset.

It’s just that you have to do a little work to translate the apparent chaos of a surreal dream into meaningful information about your mindset, information that you can use to change the way you engage with life.

How do you do this?

You translate the apparent chaos through learning the art and science of interpreting your dreams, a set of tools and techniques you apply to see through the surreal to the workings of your mindset.

You use the information you gain through interpretation to change the way you engage with life by one of two main processes. The first process is simple awareness. Awareness of your mindset can help you to make appropriate change. The second, far more powerful and long-lasting process, is to apply dream alchemy practices: exercises using the symbols and dramas of your dream to change your mindset, rewire your brain, reprogram your unconscious mind.

So, are some dreams more meaningful than others?

There are days when your life experiences are perhaps ho-hum, or same-same, and on those nights your dreaming mind has less to process. Such dreams might report back ‘Life is ho-hum or same-same’, or they might occasionally scream out ‘Look at the damage this same-same rut is causing! You are undermining yourself!’ or ‘You’re going round in circles, meeting dead-ends, you’re not resolving anything, you’re stuck, stuck, stuck!’

There are days when your life experiences are excitingly different, challenging, fearful, terrifying, out-of-the-box, or way out of comfort zone. Such days will fuel the night’s dreams and give you wonderful insight into how your mindset responds, revealing your blocks to progress, or capturing amazing transformation of your mindset, new creative solutions to challenges, or highlighting unleashed gifts, talents, and wisdom that had, until now, lain dormant.

Dreams that offer more insight than others are potentially more meaningful if you use that insight to make meaningful change in your life, in the world.

I suggest the most potentially meaningful dreams to work with are:

1. Any recurring dream or dream theme that has an unresolved or unsatisfactory ending. These are dreams that offer you the opportunity for breakthrough and major change.
2. Any vivid dream that you have at a time of change or challenge. These are dreams that offer you the opportunity to discover powerful positive growth during times that can otherwise be quite daunting.
3. Any dream that is highly emotionally charged. These are dreams that offer you the opportunity to address and heal emotional issues, and free you to move forward.

Choose your dream, and get to it!

 

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