Dreams: Our Minds Working At Night

Dreams. Technically we all have them when we sleep but not everyone remembers them. Some people say they have no dreams.

In my work with clients, I have found that there are some common dreams due to anxiety: falling, being chased, being naked when everyone else is clothed, and teeth falling out. These are common dreams when people are depressed and anxious.

Sigmund Freud still holds some mythical curiosity as he said that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious mind. For him symbolism in dreams (such as ladders and snakes) is important to understand.    There are dream dictionaries that offer possible interpretations. 

I do not want to neglect the accounts in the Bible where God speaks to people in dreams.  Jacob, and Solomon had dreams where God spoke to them. Every Advent and Epiphany the story is told where God spoke to Joseph in dreams to take Mary as his wife, then to get out of Bethlehem to escape Herod and then again to return from Egypt. Therefore, many consider their dreams sacred.

I had a colleague who viewed that dreams are the body’s way of working things out. The “working things out” can be complicated for those with trauma histories that have recurring night terrors. People with nightmares from trauma may benefit from seeing their physician or psychiatrist about medication.

However, when our minds are locked and focused on such negative information such as our nightmares while asleep, it produces intensely negative emotions and even physical reactions in the form of muscle strain and pain.

The so called “wet dream” when they have sexual dreams are also a product of the mind being locked on material that produces a physical result of sexual climax.

Again, dreams are our minds working at night and those thoughts produce feelings.

Dreams are not orderly thoughts. Our minds can create different looking rooms and places from different points of our lives. Different people from different times of our lives can appear together in the same dreams.

Dreams reflect what we are taking in and what we focus on during the day.

A physician, whom I went to seminary told me out of the blue that he had a dream about his own autopsy.  He also told me that when he was in med school, he would watch autopsies while eating his lunch. He also practiced as a surgeon and an emergency room physician. It drives home the point that what we take in (or worry about) during the day may affect what we dream about at night.

Strange foods and medications can affect dreams.  I attended a presentation by a psychologist in 1990, who talked about his coronary bypass surgery after a heart attack. His perspective was that his subconscious took in everything happening during the surgery while he was asleep and the pain medication gave him resulting nightmares of being attacked based on everything his subconscious had taken in (he was Freudian in this approach), so he stopped taking the pain medication, and his nightmares stopped.

I was diagnosed with a brain tumor called an acoustic neuroma in 1996 and I had surgery with some pain medication after the fact.  I was curious, if my experience was going to be like the Psychologist’s ?  It wasn't. I did not have those same kinds of nightmares, but I had some weird dreams because the pain med was a strange chemical to my body and the experience was like the episode of Gilligan’s Island in season two where Mary Ann ate mushrooms.

Everyone is different. We have some of the same kinds of dreams, but we will not dream the same things even if eat strange foods or take the same medications.  

In the end, I again emphasize that are dreams are basically our minds working at night.  We have the right to determine what if anything our dreams mean? If you find that your dreams are distressing to you, talk with a therapist, or maybe write them down in a journal and think them out.