What do you think of dreams?

I think they are images, emotions, and thoughts that are in our brain and occur during sleep. That’s it.

If someone wants to add meaning to them, that’s fine, but you better have evidence if you’re going to ascribe that belief to everyone else and dreams as a whole.

I think it’s just a fun ride while it lasts.

I believe it’s my psyche working things out while I sleep.

All of the above.

It is true that often it is our subconscious sending us symbolic messages, areas we are in fear or denial of, repressed material, places that need healing and work on an emotional/spiritual level.

It is also true that, sometimes, it is just the brains/minds way of filtering overload out and creating imagery from fragmented bits of our daily travels.

I have had one psychic dream come true, literally the very next day. It was uncanny and I can offer no explanation. This was a random dream about a helicopter crash and someone I knew called me the next day to say they witnessed a helicopter crash over the ocean!

My dream exactly! A helicopter flying over the coastline and crashing into the water!

You decide. Coincidence or telepathy?

A giant playground unencumbered by all those tiresome “laws” of physics and propriety. Great fun, and I’m sure they’ve well prepared me for the inevitable day when I find myself pant-less in public

I nearly always like the dreams that I remember. Some make sense others are more muddled but they usually have a pleasant emotion associated with them. I have had one dream that came true many years ago but I have never forgotten it. It was about a small stream flowing by our house. There was no stream anywhere near but the following evening after torrential rain flood water began pouring round the side of our house for the first and only time. Odd!

They are really dreamy!

I like @Coloma‘s answer, for the most part they are ways for the psyche to digest emotional experiences. The dream stuff is borrowed from ‘real’ life accoding to one’s emotional experience of those people/things, and a dream lexicon is developed to express what needs to be processed.
And on the other hand, who knows how, some dreams can be prescient, and foretell an event in the future.

I know there are some folks on fluther who go ape-shit at such a claim and insist no such thing is possible and it is all ‘recognition bias’, i.e. you notice dreams that coincide with a real event but ignore dreams that don’t. Well, that happens plenty but there are some dreams that are too specific and too exact to be waved off that way and you won’t convince me they’re not prescient.

Random firings from the brain that our brains weave together into stories.

I think they’re sleepy time fiction.
I can’t remember the last dream I had, maybe I don’t have any.

@dabbler

Exactly. I am both mystic and skeptic, but, I remain open to all possibility.
I have’t gone around claiming to be psychic from that one experience, however, it was waaay to right on to pass it off as mere coincidence. ;-)

I won’t claim to be psychic either, but I will claim to occasionally have prescient dreams. I also won’t claim that I can tell in advance what dreams are prescient, and most of mine are completely inconsequential anyway. But they are very vividly detailed and fun to experience. For years I wrote my dreams down so when the ‘real life’ moment happened and that 20 second slice of life went by with exactly the identical details that were in the dream, I could go back and verify for myself that I didn’t make it up.
There was one that made a big difference for me though and I was glad I acted on it.

They come from your brain and therefore don’t contain any information that your brain isn’t, at some level, aware of. That’s what I think.

@Mariah Lots of levels in there. ‘Mind/consciousness” or “brain” ?

@dabbler I personally believe mind/consciousness/brain are essentially synonymous (see @Rarebear’s view expressed in this post if you’re curious.)

I think that dreaming uses parts of the brain not accessable us when conscious, this is what I mean by “at some level.” We may not be consciously aware of something, but if we’re subconsciously aware of it, it may turn up in our dreams. But if we don’t know about something at all, I do not believe it is possible to dream about it. So I don’t believe that dreams can tell you somebody else’s thoughts (besides what you have inferred from things they say or do), the future (besides your suspicions of what’s to come), knowledge you’ve never studied, or anything like that. That implies something “magical” about dreams, and I personally don’t subscribe to that kind of thinking.

I’ve been haunted by some pretty freaky dreams before: A truck drove off a dock into the lake at night and giant spiders came out and started attacking my dogs and I had to watch. Then one of them jumped on my face and that was it.
And this goblin/alien creature haunted our school and I had to escape from it in a stairwell.
I tend to remember my bad dreams best, for some reason. Either that or they are just plain weird or humiliating.

No. They’re just random images created by your brain sorting out the day’s events, and maybe with some wishful thinking and/or fears of upcoming events thrown in.

Mine are usually pretty good. I like it best when I can fly or move 3 inches off the ground. I don’t walk down stairs, I glide in the air just above the stairs. Mine are pretty easy to figure out and are most often about personal insecurities or fears or else disguised re-hashed events.

Let me see. In answering your 5 questions in order: No, no, no, no, and no.

Nothing prophetic or supernatural about them at all. They’re jut the brain working through the things it’s been thinking about.

I have not read anything about dreams or dream interpretation, but based on my own personal experiences, I think dreams are just random parts of the brain activating, creating images and stories, before running it thru the part of the brain that tries to understand.

Take a pinch of your daily activities, a dash of the movie you watched before sleep, sprincle on some fears and desires, and you have your self a dream.

Dreams are attempts by the subconscious to integrate experience into its existing data, or an attempt to make a type of sense of random neurons firing.

Random firings of the brain? You people are so dull. The brain is only a physical engine, it is operated by the mind, which in turn has its own task master.

Dreams have something important to tell us, but those who only think in terms of random firings will never be inclined to put the pieces together and view the big picture.

A kitten, only hours old, may be seen dreaming of running and catching prey, yet the physical eyes have yet to see, and the brain has no experience or stimulation to draw from.

I wish I had the supernatural power to read the minds of kittens and know what they’re dreaming about :-p

Dreams are dreams. The may mean something and they may mean nothing.
I dream vividly and there is usually some meaning I can tie it to. I had a very odd one this morning that was tied to an activity Wednesday night.
They are usually a reflection of something you are feeling and projected into the dream. But then again, not always.
Reality is a much better guide.

Nothing prophetic or supernatural or particularly meaningful. They may be expressions of the subconscious; they are often surreal. Many times I can “decode” my dreams and figure out which elements in the dream came from real life experiences; they’re usually highly distorted forms of real experiences. Many dreams I’ve had show things I want but can’t happen.

But last night I had a dream that there was a small tornado outside my window and inside it was a squirrel spinning round and round until it became a tiger and my friend went outside to look at it and he got locked out…and then I woke up. I…don’t even know where to begin. I know the tiger came from reading about the wild animal massacre in Ohio, but…that’s about it. :P

I don’t believe that dreams have meanings per se, but I do kinda think that they are symbolism, like @Coloma says. Like a byproduct of your life, how you feel at a given time, and whatnot. It’s really hard to explain though, I was never able to. Probably because I don’t understand what you’re supposed to do with said symbolism, if anything at all. Maybe like a reminder, but if that’s the case, that’s fucked the hell up…like right now, I’m all into Viking history and movies. Maybe I’ll dream about some Viking related thing. (I remmeber having crazy dreams in my so called self proclaimed Satanist days in which I was at my ’‘prime’’ as a Goth, because it was a hectic period in my life) But what’s that supposed to remind me? Why is telling me things I already know? I hardly think I was supposed to derive much out of it. Perhaps dreams are nothing but dumb shadows. Shadows aren’t anything but some effect that has to do with light, or very little of it. Anyone know what I mean?
Just confusing myself now haha.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft included in his mythos a whole ’‘dreamscape’’. According to that, when you dream, you go and exist into an alternate universe. I own a book with a whole map of that world, along with its regions and inhabitants. My dad subscribed to that, and he’d show me places on that map where he’d been in his dreams. I always loved that idea, even though I don’t believe it. I have many dreams where the locations reoccur, (a cathedral that moves through time anc changes shape, a forest clearing, zombie invasion and Silent Hill)
So it’s fun to imagine it’s actually all real when I,m there, (and after I wake up) but as far as I believe, dreams are pretty much just your brain setting itself up and sending you something to do while it’s doing that. I heard somewhere that dreams happen as they do so as not to fuck you up while you sleep by sending you things that are ’‘familiar’’, but don’t quote me.
Either way, it’s all cool though. Deep sleep dreams, late afternoon nap dreams…even that fucked up shit I experience when I sniff paint thinner. XD

Nothing. Dreams mean nothing. They are just dreams. It’s like writing a fictional story.

@HungryGuy You only have to have your eyes open wide enough to see their faces and paws while they sleep.

If I was able to read their minds, as you say, that would be, as you say, their minds—and certainly not their brains.

To say that dreams are just dreams, or to say they mean nothing, or are only random firings does a great disservice to mankind in a most disrespectful manner, for man is so much more than his physical presence or bodily function.