A superstitious question from a non-superstitious person (details inside).

My reoccurring dreams are usually nightmares. They usually have to do with feeling abused by doctors. If they last more thana few weeks it does cauae me to start seeing a shrink to try and talk it through. I also eventually stop seeing doctors for a while.

i think dreams still count as new experience. As long as you can remember a story or anything really from a dream, you have the potential to learn or be inspired by it.

Whatever it is you’re dreaming, you’ve probably learned more about it this week than you knew/thought of last week. Maybe not much but still probably something.

There’s nothing wrong with allowing these ideas to color your waking decisions. Some people allow magic 8 balls to make pivotsl decisions for them.

I don’t let my dreams determine my choices because I don’t really have control of them. I prefer more objective reasoning when I’m making choices.
Edit:If you have been chewing on something for two weeks, you probably have an idea of what you should do, but maybe you’re not ready to make the leap to do it. Could that be the case here?

I think it’s possible that dreams can sometimes be your subconscious hashing ideas out for you in a very raw form of brainstorming. In this sense, the dream isn’t deciding something for me, it’s simply telling me things about stuff I already know. I’ve solved programming problems in my sleep that I was banging my head on the whole preceding day with no luck for example.

Oh my, I could have posted a very similar question. I have very, very vivid dreams. I often work out problems in my dreams. I have been plagued with a theme in some current dreams, and the conversations that I’m having, the people with whom I’m having the conversations, etc. are all very real and are based on real situations in my life. Of course, the total weirdness of the dreamscape is superimposed.

The conversations in the dreams are making me question whether I should consider a modified version in real life. I don’t know that I’ll act on them—and I have no superstition around this—just the knowledge that my feelings do influence my dreams very heaviligy

I take dreams seriously, but never in a superstitious way. Dreams are a reflection of my state of mind and some of the content of my life, maybe from yesterday and maybe from the deep past. As such, they are a good source of information, but only to me. Everything in your dreams is you, and no one else is qualified to interpret it. At most, other people can help you think about it.

Sometimes dreams show me anxieties that I’m not letting myself think about or work through. Sometimes they expose my true attitudes and feelings about something. Sometimes they reveal an important connection or spotlight something significant that I have been overlooking.

But this happens only through my thinking about them as honestly as possible and in light of what I know about myself. There’s very little in the way of overt symbolism (although there is often metaphor and analogy, and sometimes even verbal-visual puns), and nothing you’d find in a checkout-counter paperback on dream interpretation.

I do make use of insights that I gain from dreams. But I treat them pretty much like insights gained from other sources—an observation by a friend, for example, or applying something I read. I don’t regard dreams as prophetic or informed by any guiding power, much less as a doorway into some other realm.

Yes, after my sister died, she came to me in a dream that was incredibly vivid and undreamlike. She looked great and she said she was feeling good.

I was very relieved.

Since most decisions don’t have all that much impact on your life one way or another, it seems to me that using a dream to inform those decisions won’t make much difference. Choosing topics probably won’t have much impact on the rest of your life. You’ll learn mostly the same things no matter what topics you choose. Topics are just examples, anyway. What really matters is the underlying model of understanding, which should be pretty similar, no matter what data/topics you use to generate it.

I have never had “that” kind of dream. For example, I have never dreamt that my plane crashed just before I was scheduled to fly somewhere. I have never dreamt of a handsome guy and then met him later. I have never dreamt that I lost all of my money just before I was planning to invest. I would be curious myself to know if a dream like this would sway my decisions.

It depends. Usually my dreams will simply amplify what I was already thinking or feeling. But sometime you have to ignore it. I remember having dreams about knocking my boss out and quitting my job. That was just a fantasy dream. Its what I would’ve loved to do but I didn’t want a lawsuit and I needed my job. But it always did give me a sense of well being when I would go into work. I would remember how good it felt in my dream to knock her on her ass.

I like thinking and going over my dreams, most of them are like horror movies. But there are elements that often reoccur, that, as you say, can’t be left ignored. I mean it’s like, why would this or that keep happening? It has to mean something, in some way. Not in some lame predictions or this is the future type deal, but like @Jeruba says, some reflection of your state of mind at the moment, or how you feel in your environment or whatever. I wouldn’t know how to interpret any of it though, if it can even be accordingly interpreted.
Never acted on any of my dreams in my waking life, but I do put a lot of thought into them when it comes to how I might feel at one point or another. Or just because what I dreamt about kicked ass. :D

There does seem to be universal consensus…if that makes any sense…on some things seen in dreams. Insects represent emotional exhaustion, spiders are one’s personal take on religion, or lack thereof, tornadoes is emotional turmoil…but I can’t really take any of that seriously. But reoccurring elements do have to mean some kind of thing, whether it’s actually some display or a message, or just brain workings. Like maybe if you’re too tired and stressed out all the time, the brain can’t be arsed to generate something original each night, and just recycles to save strength, and get some rest as soon as it can. No idea, I failed med school. :D
But I never acted out on any dream. I don’t think…XD

@Symbeline, I don’t think this is true:

There does seem to be universal consensus…if that makes any sense…on some things seen in dreams.

All it takes is for one person to differ and it isn’t universal. I’ll raise my hand and differ: insects, spiders, etc., do not necessarily have any automatic symbolic meaning to me.

Just shit I read in em’ dream interpretation books. I did say that I couldn’t really take it seriously.

Oh, I see—same things in all the books. Probably they all copied the first one, and then one tossed in a little Bible reading, another something out of Native American lore or Asian fairy tales, and another some popular medieval superstitions, to justify adding another title to the market.

I always say there’s no idea so dumb that somebody won’t believe it, and no product so stupid that somebody won’t pay money for it.