Do dreams have meanings?

I think so! I always look up my dreams. I had a dream with two totally different things in it. Looked it up, and weirdly enough, they go together. Being in a flood, and being in a bowling alley, bowling.

To dream that you are in a flood, represents your need to release some sexual desires.

Alternatively, bowling and bowling alleys may also be a metaphor for sexual conquest. Consider all the sexual innuendos that are at play in the bowling alley. The pin deck is symbolic of the womb or vagina (as is with with any dark receptacle like caves, bowls, containers, etc.) The pins and bowling balls, can be viewed as masculine symbols.

I don’t know. How can you tell? You can interpret a dream any way you like, and then make that happen, or not happen. There’s no way to verify dreams, either (no one else can get inside your head).

All I know is that some dreams are crazy, and it can be a lot of fun trying to make sense out of them. I think that the interpretation of dreams has meaning. That’s where we tell ourselves the stories we think are important. The dream is just an excuse to think about it.

Yes but they may have a million different interpretations. I tend to go by how they make me feel rather than try to guess the meaning. I can’t make heads or tales why I am in the 1st grade again taking an exam that I’m not prepared for naked. While an elephant is outside the window and Sarah Palin is telling me to sit up straight.

Yes, I think so. Some are just more difficult to decipher than others.

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. I never interpret my dreams because I don’t really care what they mean, plus they’re so crazy that I’m not sure I want to know. I do enjoy remembering and describing some of my crazier dreams, just not interpreting them.

They have the meaning you put into them.

If you have a situation and the dream applies, you’ve put a meaning on it just by making the correlation! Now, whether or not the dream comes true is up to you.

Nah.

I think it’s just your brain processing and sorting things out, and it produces weird expressions and fluctuations in your subconscious. Things you’re worried or thinking about get mixed in with other, random, pointless stuff and end with you being chased by a car that looks like your uncle, in a field of marshmallows.

so, in other words, not really.

well a theory is that dreams are your mind’s way of working things out and processing information – like a review of things. sometimes they pertain to your actual life, and sometimes it’s just a random collaboration of things. so yeah, they mean something in that there are probably a few elements of your dream that you’ve thought about/dealt with consciously, but meaning something deeper? i don’t know. perhaps. i mean, it’s the subconscious. maybe it’s giving you hints or solutions. i do hold onto the notion that dreams can tell you things, even if the idea is unrealistic and silly ;p

Other than the obvious dreams that are about something that is troubling you in real life (eg you are in love with someone and then dream about them, or you have trouble at work and have a nightmare with your boss in it), most dreams actually don’t mean anything at all. There are exceptions however, and I have seen some really weird dreams, whose significance I found out later. I cannot explain how they happen, but they do.

It seems pointless to try and look up the meaning of dreams, or even to try to interpret them. They are offshoots of your subconscious, and as such they are highly individualized. Think of the broad range of sexual fetishes, which vary from shoes to fuzzy handcuffs, and just about anything else. I very much doubt that these quirks, which are about as direct a link to the oddness of the subconscious as you can find while awake, suddenly vanish in dreams to the point that they can be generalized in a book. Similarly, I would surmise that there is little to be gained from trying to interpret your dreams. It’s your subconscious, after all, and trying to translate that into the very deliberate world of words is not going to work well- symbolism is a particularly clumsy means of doing that, because symbols are generally quite explicit forms of communication, and few people think like that on an instinctive level. From a sort of scientific point of view, the most tenable connections are going to be those between areas governed by parts of the brain that operate together during waking hours. So, perhaps if you were really horny one time you went bowling, there would be an association between those two experiences, but I doubt that your subconscious will abstract to the point of connecting bowling with sex unless that is a relationship that you had not only thought of before, but had somehow felt so deeply that it moved beyond the- arbitrarily defined, of course- bounds of the conscious mind.

I love it when people tell me they can interpret other people’s dreams. Of course they can’t really, as dreams are as individual as we are. Those are the people that I feed a very long line of made up BS just to see what they come up with. It is a lot of fun, and a good way to pass a few minutes with these self-proclaimed know-it-alls. It’s not as much fun as messing with the minds of the people that call themselves psychics, but hey, you don’t run into them very often, either.

Mine are so straight-forward. I always end up just laughing when other people try to “interpret” mine, because it’s like my subconscious doesn’t have the same level of creativity other peoples’ seem to. For example, if one day I want to wear my favorite belt and I can’t find it, I’m likely to have a dream where I do find it. Or if someone gets angry with me, and I don’t know how to fix it, I’ll have a dream where they forgive me. There’s nothing to interpret, it’s just what it is, nothing else…

Dreams are weird….and sometimes creepy. Or is it just me? :P

I believe they do have meanings yes… whether we can decipher them is another thing…there are some obvious dream interpretations aren’t there and those dreams where you just know what they are telling you, because they are pertinent to you.

I have re-occuring travel dreams… generally at airports, train stations, bus stations – I’m generally not on the transport itself… I used to think this meant I was resisting some inner/ spiritual journey that I needed to take… but having now taken some personal journeys, physical and spiritual, I’m not so sure…maybe there’s something I’m still missing…

I also have toilet dreams, naked dreams, water dreams (of pools, sea etc) and so I do have themes, but i think they all have to be taken in their own individual context…complicated stuff me thinks…but unfortunately I just don’t have to the time to study them :( would love to though

i’ve always liked the answer an old tibetan rinpoche gave: “you liked it? it’s true? you didn’t like it? don’t worry, means nothing!” he was cracking up as he answered. tibetans as a rule have a great sense of humor. practical too ; )

oops “you liked it? it’s true! didn’t like? don’t worry—no meaning!” punctuation, punctuation.