In your estimation....

[novapsyche]

Why do we dream? What purpose does it serve?

Do you remember your dreams?

Do you ascribe any particular meaning to your dreams? Do you have any recurring themes?

Comments

[xterminal.livejournal.com]

Why do we dream? What purpose does it serve?

It's the body's way of processing the day's images and thoughts and storing them in the proper containers.

(That's a paraphrase from Brian Lumley, but it's closer to what I believe than anything else I've read.)

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

Why do we dream? What purpose does it serve?

I think something similar to what xterminal says above. A "clearing of the cache" so to speak. I think your mind also works on problems in your sleep and sometimes will "solve" things for you in dreams. I think Einstein said he slept on problems and often had eureka moments in his dreams.

Do you remember your dreams? Sometimes, but usually just snippets or impressions. I'm most likely to remember it if it has high emotional content (scared, upset, euphoric, grossed out) or if I wake up during one or at the tale end of one and/or if I tell someone else about it immediately after I wake. I think P. has trained himself to remember dreams. He often recounts more dreams to me in one weekend than I remember having all month.

Do you ascribe any particular meaning to your dreams? Do you have any recurring themes?

I think sometimes my brain is trying to tell me something, like, "You're feeling guilty because you haven't talked to your mother in a while" or "You're more stressed out than you're admitting to yourself." I have recurring dreams, but haven't had one recently. I have variations on this one: I'm at my home church, and either the preacher or one of the congregants says something stupid or offensive to me. I get up in a huff and start leave, sometimes while speaking up, but other times, without explaining my departure. Usually in the dreams, I don't have a car, so I have to walk home.

[dionysus1999.livejournal.com]

There are a couple of major theories in neuropsychology circles. Processing of stuff that we couldn't sort out during waking hours is one idea. I think its most likely a byproduct of REM sleep and doesn't have any meaning other than what our waking brains try to piece together post-hoc.

I think for some people dream analysis is a good way to try to access parts of our thinking that aren't as obvious when we are awake.

Recurrent dreams do seem to point to places where we are stuck for some reason. I wonder if people diagnosed with obsessive complusive disorder have more recurrent dreams.

I personally don't find meaning in my dreams. They seem like crazy random jumbles most of the time. When I was a teen my dreams were mostly about sex. I haven't recalled a dream in quite a while.

(BTW, tell Comcast you will NOT be paying for the days when your service was out, they should credit you for those days)

[novapsyche.livejournal.com]

No one knows why we dream. It's one of the areas of neuroscience still under debate. We have hypotheses, and one of them is the "incorporating the day's activities/images" idea, to which I do subscribe.

But I also believe that we work out problems in our minds subconsciously, and the images in our dreams are stolen from memory and work as placeholders for these problems. I distinctly remember a dream that involved a basketball but what I was really doing was working out the dynamics of a Magic deck I'd been working on. After I woke up, I realized that dream symbols don't necessarily reference what the image might indicate.

The recurring themes in my dreams are trying to decide what to wear, and being late and/or missing the bus (usually a school bus, but sometimes a city bus). Generally the former leads to the latter.

[novapsyche.livejournal.com]

Man, I sure like the word "work".

Whatever works.

[calya.livejournal.com]

I think that dreams are the keys to unlocking out innermost selves--our desires, our thoughts, our feelings, and often our insecurities. Also, one can accomplish things in dreams that could never be done in the waking world (such as flying without the aid of technology), so dreams can be a brief escape into the world of the imagination.

When I was a child, I often had vivid and recurring dreams that I can still remember, if rather vaguely. They were filled with a cast of strange and wonderful characters. Now I can't recall my dreams as clearly as I once could. As to ascribing meaning, I sometimes do if a dream is very vivid or seems somehow important.

[blackwinterbyrd.livejournal.com]

I'm tempted to put up some new age drivel to offset the neurological bent up here so far. misfiring neurons, processing info, rem byproduct. i have read that people that don't dream develop very specific symptoms and chemical imbalances. today at least i'd like to think there is some mystery here and that it serves as a link to "the other side."
I dream to go home, dozens of homes and malls and institutions and paths through the woods and roads and cities. i dream to visit old friends and dead relatives and long ago ex lovers. i dream to visit people I've known all my life but never met awake. when I was 7 or so I used to dream to learn secrets from a witch who lived in a purple light on top of a mountain. that ended when i had a "leading a pack of feral children" dream on her mountain and we threw rocks at her stronghold. she took my nose from me and i had to beg and cry to get it back. she never taught me again, i've been back there 15 years later and she is not at home. I dream to climb lovecraft's mountians. to tunnel through rotting insulation into and out of dank basements full of old junk. to travel by flight. I dream to shop for the shiniest of shiny things. i get excited when I visit a place I had forgotten about, and sometimes I get homesick.
I dream to live the best adventure/conspiracy/fairytale stories i've never read, to have sex with strangers or perform complicated magicks and occasionally for mundane purposes of trying out feared but unlikely situations. like last night, I dreamed that my bf told me he was working until midnight instead of 6, which ruined our plans for the evening...sometimes I dream about important people saying or doing horrible things and I react to them. sometimes i kill people.
I dream and I dream and sometimes I'd like nothing better than to stay in bed and finish the story... and sometimes I do just that. i dream to wake up empowered and refreshed, or with stones of anger and shame in my stomach. I wish I remembered them all, or for longer. i wish I could explain them better or write out the plots to the more marketable ones.
theres something there, and whether its all me or something else it's vastly important and entertaining. occasionally i dream prophetically. i have a deja vu years later and i finally track it down to the juxtaposition of these several objects and circumstances that I had in a dream longish ago. I pretend that it means i am on the right path, catching up with myself, so to speak.
why do you ask?

[novapsyche.livejournal.com]

*smile* A friend and I were discussing dreams and the nature of sleep over the holiday weekend.

[ryoganox.livejournal.com]

Why do we dream? What purpose does it serve?

I dream primarily as a form of "defragging", much like a hard drive. A clean up of thoughts an ideas. Dreams are also a place where I vent and blow off the steam of the stresses I have felt through out the day/week/period of time. A sort of purge of my stress at the moment, if you will.
I also feel that Dreams are where the divine can talk to me, uninhibited and more direct than in my daily life. Where the masks we place on ourselves both protect and blind us. In the dreamstate, there is no place for masks. Just ones true being is exposed.


Do you remember your dreams?

Quite often. This is partly due to training as a younger child. I began teaching myself to lucid dream, in an attempt to understand my dreams better. One of the first steps of the training was to start to remember my dreams and write them down. I use to have a bunch written down.


Do you ascribe any particular meaning to your dreams? Do you have any recurring themes?

Much like my personal view on spirituality, my opinion on dreams is a mix of both Spirtiual and Scientific/Psychological. I feel that a majority of our dreams are simply a "defrag" at the end of the day, you are stressed about your keeping you job so you dream about either gaining money, or losing your job or some-such. Dreams are symbolic... I don't think that is the right word... metaphoric I think is better, in nature. Often the point of the stress is not immediate in the dream. But sometimes, I do feel that there is always something to be learned from ones dreams. Spiritual or not, we are a society of supressed emotions, we are not always aware of them, and often our dreams talk about these supressed emotions.

I do have one recurring dream. I have not had it for some time, but I usually have it once or twice a year at least. It so far hasn't been during any particular day or time, so I have yet to find a pattern to it.

[jdoggiedogg.livejournal.com]

(The following is purely my own belief and is not based on any solid evidence as far as I know)

I believe it has something to do with maintaining a balance between the conscious mind, the sub-conscious mind and the spirit. Dreams are a product of the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is more closely linked with a person's psychic identity and direct connection to the spiritual. Our daily lives tend to be devoted to conscious activities, and so we need to dream to balance out the needs of the spirit and the subconscious. Since Buddhist monks develop that balance in daily life, they don't need sleep.

As far as the comments about people being able to figure things out after sleeping on it, if dreaming allows you to achieve balance, then we diminish stresses which work against our being able to tap into the cosmic consciousness to discover the greater truths. As Yoda said, "You will know when you are calm, at peace, passive."