Welcome to Dream Land

Updated: Mar 28, 2021

For exactly the same reason that while you are awake you can make up stories! About things and places where you have never been.

Dreams are not magical, don’t tell the future, and aren’t sent by spirits.

Dreams are just products of our imagination.

Many think dreams have meanings and believe complete strangers can somehow interpret or explain them.

I don’t blame people for asking; dream interpretation has been around for thousands of years! And dreams can at times be REALLY strange.

Many think dreams are more than just the way your brain processes information while you’re sleeping. Dream interpretation is just part of a spiritual belief system unsupported by meaningful evidence.

When you are awake, you are, without being aware of it, constantly receiving a barrage of information, sights and sounds, feelings, etc. that go straight to the brain. At certain times while you are sleeping, it all gets sorted, filed away as memories, or discarded, resulting in your imagination going wild. The brain makes a narrative, tells stories in your sleep, stories which can be very complicated indeed but may not make any sense.

This happens mostly during the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep, which corresponds exactly as one is dreaming. It may even happen when you think you are wide awake. This is something all mammals experience.

That dreams really don’t mean anything is pretty much a fact. Welcome to Dreamland the land of dreams the place where dreams are made of.

I’m not sure what the science says, but in my own experience the things I dream often seem to be my brain’s way of synthesizing information, abstracting it to a larger landscape and applying that landscape to an ongoing aspect of a current situation.

Recently I had a dream where I was in a former house. Except it was also a little bit like my old neighbor house that was next to my family house. Except in the dream it encompassed my old house and even the whole block as well. The dreamscape thus had three places I knew — both houses and the corner store — but had created a new place from them.

I'm still wondering where my brain was going with this — although probably a reminder that my life in the old house is the past. As to the meaning behind the new creation, possibly a realization that my life is now more expansive — roomier — than it was before. (I think I just figured it all out as I wrote this!)

And when I think over the dreams vivid enough for me to remember, the people and places all seem to contain at least the seeds of familiarity. I may not know the dream person or place, there is always an aspect of them that resonates — the view out a window, the way a woman wears her hair, the creak halfway up a staircase.

Those are the clues, or ingredients, if you will, that I follow to try to interpret what my dreaming mind is cooking.

By the way, I don't always analyze what I dream. The flying dreams I just settle back and enjoy!