There are a lot of different ways to think about dreams. Random neural energy in your head at night, message from beyond…
I heard once that there are different levels of dreams.
- There are everyday dreams that are just processing the events of your day,
- there are dreams that are messages from your unconscious trying to communicate to your conscious mind,
- and there are dreams that come from something greater than yourself with outside wisdom.
I find this idea to be useful. I occasionally have everyday dreams. I have a lot of messages from my unconscious mind. I don’t know if there is any great being/s outside of us who are trying to communicate with us, but it is certainly a cultural idea present in the Bible. Whatever your take on the third level, I do think dreams can be very useful to us with no mystical beliefs necessary.
We have a verbal, analytical part of our brains that can break information into parts, and we have a non-verbal, visual part of our brain that is more symbolic and looks at patterns. I think that dreams are one way for the symbolic side of our brain to speak to us. I don’t think this is a mystical phenomena although it can feel pretty magical.
Why do we need to send a message to ourselves?
We can only be consciously aware of a certain amount of stimuli at any one time. If I am reading, I might not be aware of how my left foot feels. The information we aren’t aware of is still coming into our brain. Maybe that is why our sub/super conscious is so good at seeing patterns. It gets so much information!
Because of how our brains work, we are UN conscious of so much of the stimuli that we experience. Our ability to filter information is so useful and important. People who can’t filter information are barely functional. (I think autism might be an example of not being able to filter info.) So, dreams might be a way for our unconscious to show us the bigger picture, all the things we missed during the day.
We talk, make things, dance, write… dreaming is just one more way for ourself to express. The fascinating thing about dreams is that we don’t consciously make them up. That makes them a really valuable way to find out more about the part of ourselves we don’t know as well. Isn’t it weird and fascinating that our own selves can be a mystery to us?
So, and in conclusion, I highly recommend continuing to dream. Go hence forth, and sleep.
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