“What dreaming does is give us the fluidity to enter into other worlds by destroying our sense of knowing this world.” — Carlos Castaneda
Have you ever become aware you were dreaming?
Did you walk around your dream? Did you look up and down and left and right? Did you search? Did you meet others? Did you realize that you were in a place only you could be in?
You can become aware of a dream, and participate in it. This is a real phenomenon called lucid dreaming. It’s pretty damn bizarre, but it couldn't be more interesting.
Dreams take you places. They can be incredible, horrifying, humbling, and worth remembering. But what’s the point? What are they for?
Dreams are a universal human experience that can be described as a state of consciousness characterized by sensory, cognitive and emotional occurrences during sleep.
There is no cognitive state that has been as extensively studied and yet as frequently misunderstood as dreaming.
Psychoanalysts and neuroscientists are concerned with different aspects of dreaming. Neuroscientists want to know about the cognitive mechanisms that lead to dreaming, while psychoanalysts want to know what the contents of a dream reveal about a person’s subconscious.
The age-old question seems to be, do dreams have meaning? Or are they just random neural firings that create a world of bizarre nonsense? After decades of research, the jury is still out.
Carl Jung had a lot to say about dreams. He believed dreams were the subconscious’s way of delivering messages to the individual. The messages are, of course, delivered to you symbolically.
He wrote:
A symbol is the best possible formulation of a relatively unknown psychic content
