Do Dreams Have A Meaning? (soul, Baptist, Holy Spirit, bible)

[MontanaGuy]

esselcue wrote:

All my life I have had several recurring dreams...not the exact dream each time but the same theme:

I also have recurring dreams and one of the most common is that I'm flying. I've had another recurring dream with a great many variations hundreds of times, I'm trying to get to work and I keep losing my bearings and can't figure out where I am. It tends to go on and on and I find myself in all of these strange surroundings and I know I'm already late but I'm hopelessly lost. What's strange about this dream is that I'm so punctual and dependable that people could set their watch by my comings and goings and in the 28 and a half years that I worked I was probably only late a half a dozen times due to the weather so it doesn't even make any sense.

[june 7th]

Originally Posted by MontanaGuy

Coos wrote:

You're confusing that with my daydreams, when I'm wide awake, they're always about sex.

Who would have imagined?


No Freudian interpretation necessary here.

Love,

The Misses.

[june 7th]

Dreams = the unconscious mind's unprocessed projections.

[travelmate38]

Originally Posted by esselcue

Seems to me that dreams must serve a lot of purposes. All my life I have had several recurring dreams...not the exact dream each time but the same theme: the naked dream, the flying dream, and over the past few years I keep dreaming of a house we lived in 30 years ago and how that house was being demolished or changed and I was trying to stop that from happening.

Three months after my son died he appeared in one of my dreams wearing the clothes he had on at the reception party on his wedding day (white shorts, Hawaiian shirt) and he grinned at me and said "Don't worry Mom, I'm basically okay". That dream was over eight years ago and is still as clear in my mind as if it was last night. It soothed me...made me feel a little better to think my son was "okay". So...do dreams have meaning? Probably so, but I doubt even the wisest psychiatrist on earth could dare to guess what they are.

My first love, whom I was supposed to get married to right out of high school was killed in a T-bone auto accident. I dream of her at least twice a week and have for over 20 years now. The dreams are so vivid they often leave me speachless and in awe. I find myself trying to decide of they were real, in the moments after waking. Many are message oriented. This was over 20 years ago and while I've moved on and have a wife a family, she still seems to be part of my "soul" in some sense. The dreams are a welcomed experience by me, but they are so powerful and real, words really cannot explain them. I know she is still out there somwhere.

There is something to this dreaming thing that science is far from being able to explain. Sure they might be able to tell us what areas of the brain are activated and how they occur, but why and what, will likely never be solved.

My wife was born a twin, only her twin died during birth. She dreams of her twin sister all the time. Again often message oriented. My wife has dreams that almost always have serious meaning to her life and come real in some apsect. So much so, that I have aksed her not to share her drema with me anymore. Especially the bad ones.

[Mozart271]

Originally Posted by GCSTroop

On the topic of dreams, I know a few people who swear up and down that they can lucid dream. Essentially, it is where you control your dreams while you're sleeping. Somehow the conscious, collective mind exerts influence on the unconscious "dreaming" state. I guess it'd be like your computer monitor controlling the computer? Something like that, I suppose. I'm skeptical of it but I think it'd be pretty cool if you could do it.

Lucid Dreaming -- Dream Views

I read a book on lucid dreaming, and it's cool, but I don't know how much value can be derived from it. Possibly if you have a lot of dreams in which you are fearful or anxious, you could help lessen your stress by altering the dream events or realizing you needn't be stressed.

The way you're supposed to begin training yourself to become lucid during dreams (consciously realize you're dreaming) is to "train" yourself while you're awake to certain cues that arise only in dreams. Example--in dreams you can fly; if you are reading something and look away and then try to start reading again, you can't retrieve the same reading material; same goes for looking at a clock in a dream; you can think of other "impossible" things that happen in dreams.

So...During the day, look at a clock or watch off and on, then look back. same time? --> awake. Think of flying (Do not try it ). Can't do it? Awake. At some point you get trained to tell awake from dreaming.

One night, you find yourself lost in a big city, looking for, say, your hotel. You leap into the air and begin to float around the city. Lo and behold, you find your hotel by its big glowing sign. You sort of recall you can't actually fly, and have an idea this is a dream. Stress over.

You lose something valuable (Ladies, you know this one--your purse, your car?) You realize this scenario happens a lot in...dreams! You think this is a dream, and suddenly you don't care that your car is missing, because you know it isn't really missing. Stress over!

I have actually had these two lucid dream scenarios. I can't say they made any changes in my overall emotional well-being, but they were cool.

[GCSTroop]

Originally Posted by Mozart271

I read a book on lucid dreaming, and it's cool, but I don't know how much value can be derived from it. Possibly if you have a lot of dreams in which you are fearful or anxious, you could help lessen your stress by altering the dream events or realizing you needn't be stressed.

The way you're supposed to begin training yourself to become lucid during dreams (consciously realize you're dreaming) is to "train" yourself while you're awake to certain cues that arise only in dreams. Example--in dreams you can fly; if you are reading something and look away and then try to start reading again, you can't retrieve the same reading material; same goes for looking at a clock in a dream; you can think of other "impossible" things that happen in dreams.

So...During the day, look at a clock or watch off and on, then look back. same time? --> awake. Think of flying (Do not try it ). Can't do it? Awake. At some point you get trained to tell awake from dreaming.

One night, you find yourself lost in a big city, looking for, say, your hotel. You leap into the air and begin to float around the city. Lo and behold, you find your hotel by its big glowing sign. You sort of recall you can't actually fly, and have an idea this is a dream. Stress over.

You lose something valuable (Ladies, you know this one--your purse, your car?) You realize this scenario happens a lot in...dreams! You think this is a dream, and suddenly you don't care that your car is missing, because you know it isn't really missing. Stress over!

I have actually had these two lucid dream scenarios. I can't say they made any changes in my overall emotional well-being, but they were cool.

I understand what you mean. I found the concept of it to be rather cool myself. Before knowing anything about lucid dreaming, I can distinctly remember "catching" myself dreaming and trying to interject my own plan into it. However, every time this happened, I ended up waking up. It's devilishly tricky to try and do it. When I read about lucid dreaming I grasped it as the concept of what I was attempting to do on my own.

I suppose you could say my skepticism of it is mostly because I'm mad that I can't do it myself.

[june 7th]

Originally Posted by GCSTroop

I suppose you could say my skepticism of it is mostly because I'm mad that I can't do it myself.

No doubt because it's essentially impossible to do consistently over time.

[GCSTroop]

Originally Posted by june 7th

No doubt because it's essentially impossible to do consistently over time.

Well you're not going to keep me from trying.

If I could just get those Hawaiian Tropics Bikini girls to actually do something instead of drift away I'll be very happy. On second thought... Freud was right.

[esselcue]

...I have read and heard that such clear, precise and memorable dreams are "messages", and I would like to believe that in the case of my son. I have had four very distinct, clear and memorable dreams involving him since his death and in each he seemed to be assuring me that he is okay, even in death. So...maybe it's my wishful thinking but I prefer to believe he is somehow sending me that message: "Don't worry, Mom...I am okay".

[Travelling fella]

Originally Posted by MontanaGuy

For centuries people have talked about their dreams and quite often have interpreted a dream in a religious sense. I often have very intense and vivid dreams, sometimes they're the worst kind of nightmare you can imagine and sometimes I see beautiful images and hear music that is being created right out of my subconcious mind. Maybe it's because I'm a musician and I'm always thinking about music but I would give anything to be able to record music that happens spontaneously in countless dreams that I've had. The question I really have about dreams is what purpose do they serve and for those who are religious do you believe that a dream could possibly be some kind of a connection to something spiritual? Of course I'm not religious and don't believe that a dream is anything other than a function of the brain but a dream must still serve some purpose or we wouldn't have them. Religious literature from various sources often describe a dream as a kind of vision or revelation of something that is coming from God or from a spiritual realm while nonreligious sources will talk about various psychological factors that may be taking place in our subconcious and appear in the form of a dream. Do you think that dreams have any real meaning or purpose?

For me dreams are the representation of the information that has been stored into your subconscious mind, your desires, fears, attachments, etc are being projected in the screen of your mind while you sleep.

There can be messages revealed to you in the dreams, but this is because sometimes our subconscious mind perceives things that you didn't perceive conciously.

The purpose of the dreams is to release your subconscious mind and let it blow some steam, and either live some of your unfilfilled desires or to experience things that would be too traumatic for the ego while awake.

Now the spiritual explanation

When we are dreaming, the energy that is normally used in our senses, has been freed, and our bodily conciousness is lost, we inconsciously leave the physical plane and go to the astral plane (the dimension of the mind) this is also the plane where souls who have experienced the death of it's latest bodily incarnation go, and the plane where advanced yogis go in deep mediation, this is a plane that enjoys much less restrictions than the physical plane we live in, and that's the reason our dreams are sometimes so bizarre, and things that are completely against what we know as "reality" can happen, it is then that our ego free of bodily identification can take advantage of a plane with less restrictions and use it's creative energy to fulfill those desires that are stored in our consciousness, or face those problems and traumas that would be impossible while awake.

In deep sleep, an even higher plane is reached, the causal plane or ideational plane, a dimension so complex that our bodily identified egoes can't understand, this is the reason we don't remember what we were dreaming after we awake.