I love dreaming. Especially when the dream is so intense that there are residual emotions when waking.
There are times when I wake up laughing, or crying, or even jolting up in fear. I find it amazing how the brain constructs fantastic narratives to make all the elements in a dream fit together in a way that can elicit such deep feelings.
A third of our life is spent sleeping, and it’d be a waste to let that portion of our life be forgotten and unused.
When a dream seems significant enough, I tend to write it out — especially when they are nightmares. I try to see if elements in them are relevant to any recent challenges I’m facing. If not, I reference them later on when I review my notes. More often than not, elements are recurring and I can’t help but think that they mean something — enough that my brain keeps bringing them to the forefront of my mind so my consciousness experiences them again and again, at least in my sleep.
I’ve never really thought of sharing my dreams since most elements are a fabrication of my own mind, and looking for outside interpretation does not seem like there would be a good reason for it. I do find, however, that Jungian Archetypes are useful most of the time in helping me understand what certain dream elements might mean. In the same vein, I’ve realized more and more as life goes on that no problem is new and that most of what I experienced had already been experienced by someone else — maybe even already solved by someone else.
What if dreams are the same way? What if there are archetypal elements in people’s dreams that are universal — where people who face the same problems in real life dream about very similar things as a mechanism to help solve those problems. Maybe my dreams are my subconscious mind trying to convey problems that I’m not really paying much attention to. Maybe sharing them will shed light on something I need to put my more of my focus on.
That said, I’ll be writing out narratives of dreams I’ve had, and those that are still recurring.
Maybe someone might provide some insight I would not have received otherwise.
-S
The Owl & Glaive 