Now you can start connecting your dreams to the events and feelings in your daily life. Over the period of a week you’ll be surprised how much you’ve written down. Sometimes, you probably won’t even remember waking up and your notes can seem like some strange letter someone left for you during the night. Some days your writing will be almost illegible, others it will be nonsense. You have to be quick as the memories will be gone in seconds, so don’t even wait until your eyes are fully open. You’ll get the most details if you’ve woken in the middle of a dream.
It’s important to use pen and paper, not your phone or computer as the light might wake you up and speed the disappearance of your dreams. First thing in the morning, and any time you wake up during the night, write down whatever you can remember about your dreams. One way to help you do this is to keep a dream diary. But the key to understanding exactly what they mean to you is to connect them to the events and feelings in your daily life. Common dreams like being able to fly or falling, your teeth falling out or having no clothes on in a public place probably mean something similar in most people. Your dreams might show you all kinds of insights into things that you didn’t realise you were thinking about. What this means is that if you can interpret the symbols in your dreams, you have a window into things in your subconscious. So, the theory says, we experience our thoughts as emotions and symbols instead of words with clear meanings. But when we’re asleep, the part of our brain that controls language becomes less active while the part that controls emotions becomes more active. When we’re awake, our thoughts mostly appear in our minds as words, like conversations we have with ourselves. Maybe dreams are the result of our mind organising the thoughts we have during the day, but they appear in dreams with symbolic meaning. Are dreams messages from our brains?īut perhaps the truth about dreams lies somewhere in the middle of these two ideas. When we wake up, we try to make sense of these random images and feelings and put them into some sort of story. It said that dreams are just a collection of random activity in the brain while it’s organising memories and events from the day. However, the other theory was the opposite. Freud believed that if we understand what dreams are telling us, we can understand our hidden feelings and the problems they cause. One was the idea that the things we see in our dreams represent things hidden from our conscious mind. Are dreams just recycled thoughts?Īround the 18th and 19th centuries two main ideas about dreams became popular. And, of course, we probably choose to forget all the times we dream about such events but they don’t happen. Dreams of a phone call from an old friend or the death of someone close, for example, are more likely to be the result of coincidence than prophecy. It’s not too difficult to believe that, by coincidence, a dream event is followed by a real-life event that’s similar to it, especially if the subject of the dream is something that happens often in everyday life.
Even if we forget 95–99 per cent of our dreams, that’s still a few thousand remembered dreams across a lifetime. So, by the time they reach 80 years old the average person might have had 140,000 dreams. But if most people have four to six dreams every night after the age of ten, that’s as many as 2,000 dreams per year. Even today, many people can recall a time they dreamed about an event, place or person and then, later, the dream came true in real life. People thought dreams were messages from the gods, sent to give us knowledge or insight. Throughout history and across cultures, dreams have been associated with prophecy. But are dreams just dreams or are they trying to tell you something? Do dreams predict the future? Probably, in either case, the details were mostly forgotten before breakfast. Maybe you tried to hold on to it because the dream was so interesting you wanted to relive it. Can you remember a time when you woke up from a fantastic, scary or weird dream? Maybe you had to turn on the light and calm down.
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