One sheep...Two sheep...Three sheep

I have always been fascinated by dreams, it began as a kid when I was a Lucid Dreamer, the interest continued when I was studying Wicca and of course spiked when studying Psychology. I love my dreams they are significant to me, they serve an important purpose.

People have different ideas on the purpose of dreams, a common one being that the symbols or images in dreams represents lessons or significant themes in ones life. This was one of Freud's techniques, dream interpretation is something he is remembered for. Teeth falling out means that there is something that that person needs to say, for example. Dream dictionaries are used for dream interpretation, I once had one until I realised that this is not something I agree with. The way I see it, in a nutshell, is that it makes no sense that a symbol represents something universally. Dreams are only a creation of ones subconscious mind, therefore, the symbol would have to have entered into the conscious mind for it to be able to represent something that the subconscious is trying express. That being said, if that symbol is known to the person as meaning such and such and then they dream of it, it can therefore be interpret to have meaning. But for someone to dream about a duck and then to have to look up in their book what the duck represents, it is illogical in my opinion, how did the duck get in the mind for that purpose without any prior knowledge of it's meaning, unless it becomes a matter of spiritual forces.

Another idea around dreaming is that they can be a spiritual experience; someone passed can speak to you in dreams or dreams can make sound predictions about future occurrences through dreaming. This too is not something I subscribe to, although I will say I don't deny the possibility of this being true as well as the existence of a spiritual plane in general (another topic for another day).

So enough about what I don't think the purpose of dreams are and onto what belief I do hold, which is generally Psychology's stance (taking some of Frued's ideas as valid and putting some in the outdated box). Dreams are used by the subconscious mind to sort through and organise in a orderly fashion what was seen, heard, thought etc. in waking consciousness to make strong memories and links in the brain, blah blah blah. This is kind of a behind the scenes process, something that is done by the little guys who work hard to make sure the show runs smoothly but aren't noticed or appreciated...but without this process - Dang!

Another purpose to dreams that is more noticeable, right from waking to day to day existence is the use of dreaming to release stress and tension. To work through concerns and worries that are either to distressing or immoral to work through consciously (sleep with your mum and kill your dad kind of stuff) or ones that there are just not enough time in the day to deal with. A perfect example of something that would be too distressing or immoral for me to do consciously is eating meat (some might not see it as morally wrong as killing mum and sleeping with dad :-p). When I first went vegetarian my body had withdraws but it knew I couldn't eat meat so instead I woud dream of it, regularily, and still get a sense of satisfaction from it, after all, Freud says we require the satisfaction of killing and sex in life! So you'll also find when you ain't getting 'some' and not just sex but intamacy, companionship, etc. you'll dream of those experiences. And to touch on the second point; using dreams as a way of dealing with concerns that their just aren't enough time in the day to deal with consciously. I have reoccouring dreams around my main worries in life which pop up when that life issue is particularily prominent. When I am worrying about Uni I dream that I am back in year 12 and have my English and English Lit exams coming up and I haven't even read any of the books yet! When I am stressing about work, I dream that I can't make it into work for whatever reason but I don't call Alice to tell her I won't be in! And last night, I dreamt that certain friends of mine were abandoning and harming me, in the most random, odd and dream-like ways, because that is a worrying topic on my mind as of late.

I also dream random and bizarre things, just for funsies! And, oh boy, it really is random and bizarre! Which of course makes perfect sense during the dream and when you wake you can't help but ask 'wtf?!' I will attempt to describe a bit of last night's dream, which motivated me to make this post on waking. Walking through the city, we discovered that K. Rudd had paid a shit load of money in a brighten and excite the city kind of initiative. It is difficult to empathise the strangeness and truly bizarre feel to it, but basically there were a whole lot of large cartoon characters made of clay walking the city. We were wandering the city pointing, 'omg! It's Freddo Frog!'...'look! the Queen of Hearts!' We decided to go find where these were coming from, we found a shack and inside there was a man creating these incredible creatures out of clay and sending them out into the world. I mentioned to him that he must get paid a lot in this job, he said he did, 40 grand a year. I thought, that's not much. "For 45 mins a week work" he continued. I tried to work out how much that was an hour in my dream but failed, I just worked it out now for funsies, that's about $1025 an hour! This man then made us all our own clay cartoon characters to take home, I got Disney's Winnie the Pooh!