Dream Psychology: People's Opinions Wanted

[elibol]

i would like peoples opinions on dream psychology, i will state my thoughts on the matter later though, just thought i should post this while its still on my mind!

 

[spikebrdr]

well my tohughts on this are that no one person and pyscologically define everyone else's dreams, or even one person's dream. say someone has a dream and say it sticks with them pretty well. now they go to a psycologist and decribe it to him and him defines the dream without actually experianceing anything they felt or saw in hte dream. people say that dreams depict our sub conscious desires, fears, thoughts, and what not but say someone watches themselves kill someone they love and the pyscologist depicts it as say a fear of them losing the one they love and they fell as if they are dragging them away from a good opportunity. but what if during that dream what they thought was fear was really excitment? say they dreamt about killing someone thye love out of jealousy or hate (in a loving way). you say its a sub conscious thought, but i see the thought can only be defined and explained after you know the feeling behind it. plus not all dreams could have any meaning at all. I've alwasys thought some could just be a tiny recolection of thoughts from the previous day or week just replaying, like a tiny movie. prolly dosent make much sense what i just said, kinda late and kinda tired. hope u get the jest of it...

 

[elibol]

yea man i see your point =]

there is a book i read that stated that only the person who experienced the dream can truly understand its message...

but as you said with the psychologist and the murder example, if the psychologist probes the individual further then what was 'seen', and asks about all other senses, touch, sounds, smells, and what emotions he was feeling at each event.

then getting information on what each object represented for that person, for the minds eye can reveal things that are not what they appear to be...

thus drawing a close to valid conclusion from the dream.

i think though if the person was a trained in interpreting dreams much like the psychologist that he/she could analyze his/her own dreams and draw valid conclusions, more valid than anyone else could for them...

 

[jammieg]

My own experience is that dreams make a lot of sense to me as long as I don't take them literally and as prognostications of certainty and agree that oneself is the best interpreter of their own dreams.
I had a dream that my roomate killed herself and blamed me for it, but when confirmed she had picked up some of my honest trait and it didn't work for her so she decided that hating me was the way of ridding it from herself although she didn't understand why she hated me, probably because honest people get used.

 

[spikebrdr]

i see your point also but when u say that a pyscologist could also interpret by asking about the sights, sounds, and other emotional feelings in the dream he could also miss out on a lot of the forgotten and unexplainable things. usually when someone has a dream they can only remmember certain parts of it but since they experienced the dream they still have the emotions and feelings from the entire part since they experienced it and no one else could. so what I am saying is even though soneone can be trained to decipher a dream, they can only decipher what the person is able to tell them...

 

[elibol]

true dat...

but that would also mean that the person most likely could not decipher the dream him/her self.

 

[Evo]

I think dreams are just...dreams.

Most often my dreams are epic motion pictures with a large cast of characters. They are truly like movies, with plots & subplots. I am the "director", if I do not like the way the dream is going, I simply "rewind" and change it. I am rarely in my own dreams. One of my recent dreams was about ancient Roman times, quite amazing with all of the characters and plots.

I have often wished that I could write my dreams down as they would make great stories.

Other times my dreams are rather dull. I will just be "observing" day to day life somewhere. For example, recently I was observing people in a small remote village with dirt roads. The people were going about their daily lives. I saw them shopping in the outside market, carrying baskets of goods, preparing meals, etc... I do not talk to these people and they do not seem to notice me.

I find no meaning in any of my dreams.

 

[elibol]

i think you should write your dreams down every morning if you think they would make great stories...

but you must do it right when you wake up, or your dream will fade and leave you with fragments if they are not recalled quickly enough...

so if your going to try to, keep a pen and paper close to you when you sleep, so you can start writing right when you wake up.

if you do this for a while you may develope a pattern over time from your dreams, maybe revealing some meaning to you.

a reason maybe why you may have not found meaning in your dreams is because you haven't looked for any meaning.

it seems you have very vivid and detailed dreams, most definitely worth logging. you must have the ability to easily visualize scenarios... sometimes this is from right brain dominance (left handedness).

whats interesting is i also am able to rewind and redo things in my dreams.

i feel like i get the habit from using the undo's in photoshop or flash or video games. maybe like a save point, then i revert to it whenever i do something wrong.

also a thing that scares me a lot is when i have lucid dreams... anyone have those often?

my abilities when i am lucid in my dream change depending on how i feel. sometimes the second i realize i am dreaming i can just jump up and start flying everywhere... and sometimes i can't even start a car.

i onced told one of my dream characters that i realized i was dreaming, i don't really remember what he said though... it didnt make sense to me at the time.

usually i will just force myself to wake up when i realize i am lucid dreaming, because a very unsettling emotion comes over me and i just want "out" i guess you could say =]

 

[elwestrand]

I have spiritual dreams.

Sometimes dreams are "just dreams"

Sometimes dreams are more. There are all kinds, no rule.

You know where Deja vu comes from? Okay I tell my my theory.

A moving picture? That is very strange. My dreams tend to have a minimal visual aspect. They are mostly emotional experiences. Sometimes time doesn't seem to exist in my dreams-- it is'nt like they are a movie with chronological "events." I think sometimes I have several dreams at the same time. So you "see yourself" as if from a 3rd person perspective? Some people remember in this way. I do not. In my memories, I am looking through my own eyes-- Sometimes I dream I don't have a body though. Sometimes I am just an infinitessimal speck of consciousness floating around.

 

[pocebokli]

Heyo.

Well I'm poppin in because I've had quite a few experiences with dreams. For first, I've had lucid dreams for quite a few times, and i must say for me personally, those were one of most "spiritual" experiences I've ever, well, experienced.

Other than that, I've also had a very strange experience (i don't know if it could be defined as a dream though). I was like half asleep and half awake and i had this feeling if i let it go and fall to sleep i would stop breathing. I never did let myself go to sleep (this happened about 3 or 4 times to me). But then i spoke to my roommate and he said he had experienced something similar but he just let himself go (of course he did not stop breathing at that point, that was just some odd fear i guess, although he says he also had it). At that point he said he had "out-of-body" experience, finding himself in the corner of his room looking down upon his body.

I'm curious if anyone here has had such a "dream"? And if anyone knows what that is?

 

[elibol]

i've had that happen to me as a child a couple of times. and a couple of more times when i was in turkey.

i woke up, but i could not move, or my movement was lagged, i am unsure.

i had this discomfort, it bothered me a lot that this was happening, i could not speak, but i could see...

i sort of forced myself up, and i felt myself(whatever i was at that point) rise up out of my body. there was a loud static sound like a tv with no reception.

it scared me to hell so i "went back" in, i don't know how i did this, but i just recoiled in a weird sense... i didnt rise out too far cause i was afraid i would float away and never know how to come back.

i think this is similar to what happened to you and your roommate. i have a friend of a friend that had something like this happen to him as well... regarded as an out of body experience.

im not sure what it is, but it happened to me.
elwestrand said:
"I think sometimes I have several dreams at the same time. So you "see yourself" as if from a 3rd person perspective? Some people remember in this way. I do not. In my memories, I am looking through my own eyes-- Sometimes I dream I don't have a body though. Sometimes I am just an infinitessimal speck of consciousness floating around."

very possible, i have read(link to the book) that people usually have multiple conciousness while dreaming... they are in several places at once.

since it is impossible to comprehend this in our lucid state of mind, we usually will not recall these memories...
there have been cases of the recalling of this type of experience though.

i recommend everyone that is interested in working with their dreams to check out this book:

 

[Loren Booda]

[Reposted] My ingredients to the recipe of dreams are...

1. Free association

2. Surreal metaphor

3. Emotional plasticity

...not to mention the chicks !

Et tu?

 

[Loren Booda]

My God, elibol, very much like in childhood my trying to force myself out of a nightmare having met my nemesis, now ringing in my ears, pinching on my neck, blinding haze, paralyzed like in a "lucid" dream, dissociated dream within a dream. During my last lucid (as an adult) I wanted to vomit, and had I, I would have drowned for I could not move.

 

[elibol]

damn, that sounds rough man... you wanted to vomit in your dream? what did your nemesis look like? I am curious.

well, with the outer body experience thing i had, it would start with me being half awake. i couldn't move a muscle, and i had so much trouble forcing myself out of this state. it caused me to have claustrophobic responses to the experience. the only way out of it would be to send shivers down my spine, as weird as that sounds... it worked though, if i was able to do this i woke up, but if i went back to sleep after this i would immidiately find myself in the same state.

weird huh?

sometimes when i become lucid in my dreams i force myself to wake up. this one time i was having extreme trouble forcing myself out of the dream, and eventually i woke up, got up and went to the livingroom of my house only to find i was accually on the roof of my house? i was still in the dream, when i realized this i tried forcing myself out again, and the same happened... i began to doubt that i was even dreaming, eventually i lost lucid awareness in the dream... it was one of the weirdess experiences I've ever had...

 

[Loren Booda]

Sounds very familiar.

To continue, between ~age 3 and 7 my "nemesis" was a singularity-like entity that I somehow named "Dotch." (I had picked up this imagery while staying in a cabin with knotholes in the wooden planking.) It would chase me at the end of my dream as I neared my room, which I would try to avoid, with the forementioned neurological effects. I finally reconciled this being when I realized it was vulnerable, more animal than villian.

The "lucid vomiting" occurred when I attempted to quit pot for good and change medications, as an adult. Sick for a week, and even worse hallucinations. I pray I never "party" again!

 

[elibol]

yea, I've smoked pot for a year now, and i am cutting down slowly also uncontrolably... it is causing me to have serious miscalculations based on paradox like thought patterns i fall into.

one of them for example was thinking i was dreaming when i was awake, and when that happened i tried forcing myself out of the dream. this caused me to have a big anxiety attack.

i came to my senses and realized the lack of short term memory workings was causing me to think i was dreaming. i couldn't use long term memory to back up the fact that i was lucid because i was high.

not good, i need to lay of the 'booda' ;)

 

[Loren Booda]

I saw a stoned friend shocked with 5000 volts and burned over 50% of his body. Even that wasn't enough to make me quit (just to hide the bong). Maybe it was another friend's suicide by car, attributable to LSD, that set my wheels in motion.

 

[elibol]

thats rough, i have seen no such consequence from weed in my life.

i guess it is more that i am afraid of it affecting my mental health then the fear of hurting myself in some accident because of weed.

for someone who cares for neither i would expect they smoke weed for ever =]

 

[pocebokli]

i'm just curious how did your friend manage to get in touch with 50 000 volts?

pot users are not normally SO stoned?

well i use/d pot as well so there might be a connection with lucid dreams and stuff, it's rather interesting...

there's a great site about dreams and psychoactives at www.erowid.com (or .org i don't know - and i hope I'm not interfering with political corectness of this site as we hear this phrase more and more from the other side of the atlantic, hehe)

 

[Loren Booda]

He got on a nearby train to download coal to "burn" in his fireplace. I had warned him to watch for the wires, but he soon stood up and 5,000 volts arced to his neck (on the left side, bypassing his heart, and out his foot) and ignited fumes from the tank car he was investigating - creating a "devil's Bunsen burner." Just previous we had been sitting in a tree smoking, when I happened to mention something about people burned over 50% of their body dying slowly.

A major problem I have seen with pot is the reduction of the self-protection instinct.

 

[pocebokli]

well i would call it lazyness and unawarenes:-)