Introduction
Dreams are a communication of body mind and spirit in a symbolic communicative environmental state of being (Spence, C., Pavani, F., Maravita, A., & Holmes, N. Journal of Physiology (Paris).
Your brain, mind, and spirit while at rest “review” analyses in its own way a long-term short-term, and spirit memory. It has its background the trend of your life and the philosophy to influence it.
Since the beginning of mankind, dreams have become objects of boundless fascination and mysteries to all. These nocturnal images that we see while sleeping may arise from some source other than our ordinary mind. They contain a mixture of elements from our personal identity which we recognize as familiar along with a quality of otherness in the dream image that carries a sense of the strange and eerie. Dreams point to deeper meaning and certain rational and insightful comments on our walking situation and emotional experience. History and traditional beliefs have made us believe that dreams are messages from the spiritual realms but today we have come to believe that they are messages from a deeper source of wisdom and understanding within ourselves. Every dream is said to be a message from some deeper unconscious self to the more conscious everyday part of oneself expressed in a language that needs to e learned and understood.
Dreams have been called the royal roads to conscious meaning that they would be a window to the soul.
The dreams you can’t forget
Dreams that one cannot forget are known as lucid dreams, in the sense of mental clarity (Driver, J., & Spence, C. (2000). Multisensory perception: Beyond modularity and convergence). Lucidity usually begins in the middle of a dream when the dreamer realizes that the experience is not occurring in physical reality but it is a dream.
Such dreams would include flying or meeting with deceased persons. Some people attain this lucidity without notifying any particular clue in the dream, they just suddenly realize that they are dreaming.
A minority of lucid dreams are a result of a returning to sleep directly from awakening reflective consciousness.
The basic definition of a lucid dream is nothing other than becoming aware that you are dreaming but the quality of lucidity can vary greatly when lucidity is at s high level, you are aware that everything experienced in the dream is occurring in the mind, and that it is not a real danger and that you are sleeping in bed and you will awaken shortly. In low-level lucidity, you are aware to a certain extent that you are dreaming perhaps to fly or alter what you are doing but not enough to realize that the people are representations, or that you can suffer no physical damage, or that you are actually in bed.
Dreams are said to be like opening a door to the rest of the mind, all of one’s friends, fears, phobias, hopes, wishes, good times, and bad times are there. All accumulated wisdom and insight of the species and culture is stored there for your explanations and this is done in the ancient mind than in the logical mind.
Everyone dreams but not all can remember what they dreamt about thus if one desires to remember his dream, he should among other things;
Pay attention
The core idea to remember your dream is to pay attention to your dream and nurture it. While awake try to think about your dream while going to sleep focus on dreaming and most important pay attention.
Try to develop a set of activities that you shall do every morning to help you remember your dream an example would be keeping a notebook beside the bed, others decide that when they get up they focus on a symbol on the wall others stare upon the sealing board while others prefer to talk it out with e regular morning companion.
Give your dream a home
Get a tool like a notebook or a journal by giving your dream home. Ritualise writing your dreams, every morning write them down before you step out of bed.
Wake up as gently as possible
The idea is to wake up from the dream when the dream is over and not when an outside alarm awakes you, hold still for a few minutes and focus attention on what your mind has seen or during the preceding time in the dream. Keep your eyes closed as long as you can still do so.
Dream memories are fragile and seem stored in your body position thus ant slight movement can disrupt your memory.
Sex, romance, and relationships
Sex has always been a big part of dreams for both men and women. There are times sex was repressed culturally and as a result individuals in their dreams might have expressed it more frequently.
Some symbols representing the virgin in dreams were things like containers, boxes, bowls, a room, or a tunnel similarly anything along or suggesting penetration would represent the penis example include knives, sticks, pencils, and nail files.
The Senio people of Malaysia had a strange interpretation of dreams when they dream of romance and sex where they believed that this was a sign of a good relationship to come or a good sexual encounter that were to be experienced (Guest. S., & Spence, C. (2003). What role does multisensory integration play in the visuotactile perception of texture? International Journal of Psychophysiology.)
They believed that a dream of romance and sex was not to be interpreted as a sign of promiscuity since it was all part of the individual.
Symbols and dreams
There are many different ways of approaching dreams as their meaning is often on many different simultaneous levels. Dreams can be viewed as a commentary of some everyday experience in situations that the dreamer is dealing with. But on a deeper level, we can explore the dream-taking place on deeper level with each image in the dream representing some psychological aspect of the dream.
Dreams can be extraordinary like trying to catch a butterfly way out of reach this would meaning you are tempting to do something way out of your reach.
When attempting to interpret an image of a dream it is always good to that each dream is the unique personal experience of the individual and that the same image may have a different meaning for different people based on their own individual experience and the context of their lives and context in which the dream occurs. It is possible to believe that only the dreamer may know the correctness of the interpretation of the dream.
There is however certain symbol in dreams that may have a universal explanation thou not certain again.
For example, a dream of a house is a common kind of dream and as usual, the dream will take place in a particular setting. This house may be a house familiar to you or a house you have never seen or even imagined going in.
Houses have been interpreted to mean what is going on in our body and mind during working life. The house may remind us of our childhood and its with its attendant feeling of belonging and alienation, security and insecurity, conflicts, and harmony. The house could be a psychological extension of our identity and physical identity in the world.
The different areas in the house may represent the different areas in our psyche. In the house, you may dream that some of the rooms are unfamiliar representing areas there are unexplored areas of potential within the personality. It may also represent exploring a new journey in our lives that we have not encountered before.
The feeling and reaction in the house and its inhabitants or contents are crucial to understanding the significance of the house in the dream, it may represent a wish to return to a time of childhood innocence or a need to move on and leave home by getting on some unfinished part of one’s life.
Conclusion
As much as it has been the belief of many that dreams come as a form of a message from the spiritual world, one should also understand that dreams could be an extension of our daily events.
On the other hand, there are some dreams that have much deeper meaning and when it comes to such it is important to try and search for an inner meaning of them.
All in all, again dreams have different meanings to different people and should never be interpreted uniformly.
Bibliography
Driver, J., & Spence, C. (2000). Multisensory perception: Beyond modularity and convergence.
Guest. S., & Spence, C. (2003). What role does multisensory integration play in the visuotactile perception of texture? International Journal of Psychophysiology.
Lloyd, D. M., Shore, D. I., Spence, C., & Calvert, G. A. (2003). Multisensory representation of limb position in human premotor cortex. Nature Neuroscience
Maravita, A., Spence, C., Sergent, C., & Driver, J. (2002). Seeing your own touched hands in a mirror modulates cross-modal interactions. Psychological Science
Soto-Faraco, S., Spence, C., Lloyd, D., & Kingstone, A. (in press). Moving multisensory research along: Motion perception across sensory modalities. Current Directions in Psychological Science.
Spence, C., Pavani, F., Maravita, A., & Holmes, N. (in press). Multisensory contributions to the 3-D representation of visuotactile per personal space in humans: Evidence from the cross modal congruency task. Journal of Physiology (Paris).