I dream often. As a psychology major, I have been always interested in how dream works and fascinated by hearing what the other people think about their dreams. I have encountered two different types of people before; those who think dreams are just random thoughts and those ones like Carl Jung who say dreams are our unconsciousness that is trying to tell us something. I believe I am the latter one. However, the more I tried to understand what my dream means or trying to tell me, the more I got confused.
I always had hard time remembering the dream. I don’t know if it is because my dreams are not one story but rather bits pieces of different stories. Time and places are very random. I could be in Japan hanging out with my old friends and the next second I could be at the beach surfing. Nevertheless, my dreams always give me this familiar feeling that is not totally new but more somehow nostalgic. When I wake up, I know what happened in my head but I just cannot verbalize it. Once I start telling it to someone, I doubt if what I am saying is really the dream I had and I feel like it is not true anymore. One day, my friend told me to start writing down the dream right when I wake up so that I will be able to remember it more accurately. That is when I started my dream daily. I try to put into words most of the time but whenever I have hard time writing it down I draw pictures.
I recently successfully found out the meaning of one of my dreams. I had this dream fairly often where the time goes back all the way to when I was in kindergarten. Nothing really happens in the dream but it’s always lunch time. It happened last summer. I was looking at some old pictures with my mom and we came across one picture where I was having lunch with my friends in kindergarten. What I saw in our hands in the picture was cheeseburgers. That explained everything why I never ever want to eat cheeseburgers nowadays. Every time I see someone eating a cheeseburger, I never want it. I just didn’t know why because I like both cheese and burgers but not cheeseburger. I did not remember at all but my mom told me that our kindergarten provided a cheeseburger for lunch every Wednesday for all three years I went there.
There is another dream I have so often. I clearly remember what happens in the dream because it only last for a few minutes or so and the dream itself is not a pleasant one but pretty scary that I sometimes have to wake up middle of the night. The more I see that dream, the more I feel obligated to find out the meanings behind it. I always knew this is something I have to do in order to overcome the fear I have both in my dream and in reality also. I would rather spend some more time thinking about this dream and take this chance to bring back my unconsciousness to the conscious mind as a creative project that I get to do for final.
That's an interesting revelation about how you were able to figure out why you had the recurring lunch time dream. But I wonder, did those dreams stop, or do they still recur? Because like how it was pointed out by Jung in “Man and His Symbols”, once the root of a recurring dream is pinpointed, it may be able to stop (just as his did when he figured out why he had the recurring dream about the secret wing of his house).
ReplyDeleteWith my dreams, I can remember enough of them on a weekly basis, and then after that only certain recurring dreams or dreams that seemed to have left an impact on my brain remain clear in my memory. I believe most of the dreams I have try to tell me something, but it's usually hard to interpret their meanings and unless I have a dream that seems pretty serious or calls for attention in some way, I tend to continue on with my conscious life and delay finding their meanings.