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1. The Elements of Dreams
2. Complexity
3. Dreams Can't Predict the Future

1. The Elements of Dreams

There are many books available, more or less in dictionary format, that attempt to tell you what individual elements of dreams might mean. They're useless. The best method of dream interpretation is to work out why certain things are in your dreams and what they mean for you.

Dreams occur mostly during REM sleep, when parts of our brain are being fired but regular pulses calm down and subdue many of our normal mental processes. We dream a lot, we just don't remember them because our brain suppresses the system that would otherwise interpret our perceptions.

The perceptions in dreams come largely from free association. Our brain thinks it is receiving inputs, hearing things, feeling things, seeing things, when in reality they're residue thoughts, stray neurones and an over-sensitive nervous system. Our nerves, especially in our eyes, fire off all the time. Our brain tries to interpret what these false stimuli mean. In reality, they're not there. The interesting part comes in analysing the way in which your brain interprets the incoming data.

Often what occurs in our dreams is what is on our minds during the previous days. The more urgently something presses on our minds, the most affect it has on our dreams. But it's not always simple. Anxiety, or general emotions, will translate into things in your dreams. This is one area where dictionaries of dreams try to help. They will state that, for example, dreaming of ants is to be dreaming about productivity at work. This is simply because as most people associate ants with busy activity, if you have work-related thoughts in your head, your brain might find the association with ants. Once the concept of "ants" is invoked during a dream, some of the interpretive mechanisms in your brain will deduce that the (meaningless) input coming from your senses could be ants.

Because our brains whirl round, sending thoughts around the limbic system, once an idea is there it will stay for a while. Our brains try to make patterns; so once the random sensory input has been associated with ants (sticking to our example), then it will continue to interpret some of the input as ants. Our brain therefore inserts objects and chances into the frames of our mind, and strings them all together with a narrative. Such is the nature of our unregulated consciousness working with free associations.

So, YOU have to figure out why your brain has certain things on its mind, and what the general emotions in your dream are. No-one else knows for sure why you have the associations that you have in your dreams. This is common sense subjectivism! This common sense approach to dream interpretation is not new:

“The most comprehensive work on dreams to come to us from the ancient times are the five books of dream interpretation written by Artemidorus who lived in Italy in the second century. He held a sophisticated view of dream interpretation believing that the same dream could have a different meaning depending on the character and circumstances of the individual dreamer.”

"The Origin of Dreams" by Joseph Griffin (1997)₁

Dream content relates to real-life events over the previous days plus portions of what is on your mind at the time.

“Environmental circumstances influence dream content. Dreams reported after awakenings by investigators in the home have more aggressive, friendly, sexual, or success-and-failure elements than those reported in the laboratory; but in both cases most are duller than would be supposed. Anxiety-provoking films seen prior to sleep can lead to dreams containing related themes. Events occurring around the sleeper during dreams are often incorporated, so that, for example, the words 'Robert, Robert, Robert' spoken to a sleeper led to his reporting a dream about a 'distorted rabbit'.”

"The Oxford Companion to The Mind" by Richard L. Gregory (1987)

He continues to state that "the dreams of one individual are different from those of another: dreams this reflect both day-to-day psychological variations and enduring individual traits."

2. Complexity

Don't be tempted to make things too complex or convoluted whilst looking for meanings. Only take things one step! Only look for deeper meanings that make emotional sense to you: Your brain will not come up with stuff that is alien to you. Sometimes meanings are plainly obvious. If you dream of your partner being dishonest; don't look too far for a potential meaning! It means you're concerned about her being dishonest! It means you have dishonesty on your mind for some reason; it could be your own dishonesty or your mistrust of her. You could, if we want to add one level of complexity, say that you're consciously, or subconsciously, concerned that you don't feel you trust her enough (or vica-versa).

3. Dreams Can't Predict the Future

There are problems about the idea that some dreams predict the future. The first problem is what skeptical thinkers call selection bias, where by ignoring masses of data, you mislead yourself into accepting an erroneous theory at the expense of a more mundane explanation:

“We often hear of stories citing examples of dreams that came true. This would seem to suggest a power of the mind that goes beyond known physical capabilities. However, in this case, a strong selection process is taking place whereby all the millions of dreams that do not come true are simply ignored. Unless otherwise demonstrated, a plausible explanation that must first be ruled out is that the reported dream came true by chance selection out of many that had no such dramatic outcome.”

"God, the Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist"
Victor J. Stenger (2007)₂

Secondly, dream diaries. These are used in sleep studies to record all dreams. When sleep diaries are used, none of the dreams that are written down turn out to predict the future. This means that there is something retrospective about the way we interpret dreams. In other words, when something happens during our day, we subconsciously re-interpret a previous dream in a way that makes it seem like it predicted what just happened. This active memory manipulation is simply part of the normal way the human brain works as it engages in pattern-recognition instincts, however, when applied to dreams our inbuilt cognitive methodology leads us to falsely interpret events, leading us to fantastic conclusions. When dreams are tested, by writing all of them down every morning, we soon find that our ability to re-interpret them to fit later events disappears.

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