Dreams have deeper significance than simply metabolic function. They used to say that a “rare bit” of cheese could result in crazy dreams. While it is true that sometimes your diet can influence the electrical impulses in your mind during sleep, owing to the way in which digestion works, and other minute but impacting factors, thought also enters into the equation.
What you’ve seen in a given day can impact your dreams. Emotional trauma can especially impact your dreams. Fears, worries, hopes, desires, hate, love, and the whole gamut of human emotion leave marks on the brain. These marks impact thinking at the subconscious level. In terms of dreams, there are many ways this can be expressed.
https://pixabay.com/photos/animal-gorilla-ape-primate-3346192/
Common Dreams
Here’s an example of a dream many people often have, and which you yourself may experience. Sometimes during the course of “normal” activities in the “dream” world, your teeth will fall out. Or perhaps they turn to a feeling like fingernails growing out of your mouth, or even hair. This is a common kind of dream related to anxiety, and fear of future situations over which you have no control.
Or what about the dream where you wreck the only car you have to get to and from work? Maybe you perform in front of people. Many performers will dream they get on stage and can’t remember any lines. These may appropriately be called nightmares, but a closer look at them can reveal things about your psyche.
Possible Dream Meanings
If you’re dreaming in anxious colors, it could mean you’ve got a fear of an upcoming event, or your present situation in terms of finances. Maybe your present fears have to do with an uncertain future. Regardless, bad dreams often have at root bad emotions. Fear, hatred, self-loathing and other such conditions will often result in strange dreams.
Now it’s important not to put too much weight in any one interpretation of a dream from any psychological or psychiatric group, no matter how well-tenured. Because dream content isn’t intrinsically quantifiable, any interpretation naturally stems from some level of assumption. Even the best appraisals of a dream can’t give you a 100% accurate picture of its meaning.
That said, some groups can do better than others, and any information of this kind you encounter may well be worth taking into advisement. As technology has mapped the brain, dream influence and interpretation has become increasingly quantifiable. There is still much which is intangible about it, but psychological realities are more clear than perhaps they’ve been.
Still, when it comes to general understanding of people, what you dream may play a big part in helping you understand the status of your mental health. Grief is often necessary and natural; but when you grieve, where your mind is at may not be healthy; especially for an extended period in which habits develop. Sometimes you’ve got lingering grief subtly impacting your day-to-day, and only visible through analysis of recurring dreams.
https://pixabay.com/photos/dark-spooky-scary-man-fear-1720324/
Taking What Control Can Be Had In Your Dreams
Groups like Taileaters specialize in encouraging lucid dream experiences and helping you to more effectively utilize this human ability. It can take discipline, but it can be done.
Dreams have abstract qualities which may not have anything to do with mental health; then again, sometimes they can be revelatory. Consider the instance when a person dreams an abstraction which is an experienced reality in the future, accompanied with a mild flavor of deja vu.
What is the mental explanation for that? So learn how to think about dreams, and explore new means of deferring those which result from mental distress; but don’t let yourself become too enamored of modern dream interpretation services. There’s a balance!
Mandy X
Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash
Author: Mandy Kloppers
Mandy is a qualified therapist who treats depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, trauma, and many other types of mental health issues. She provides online therapy around the world for those needing support and also provides relationship counselling.
