Why Is Searching The Internet For The Meaning Of Dreams Useless?

We can have many types of dreams: some of which we do not want to wake up and others that scare us so much that we jump startled in sweats and prefer not to remember. Dreaming of falling from a great height, falling teeth or someone chasing you are some of the types of dream meaning that are most consulted on the Internet.

Sometimes our dreams baffle us so much that we can linger for a while wondering about the meaning of these dreams and why they have arrived at that precise moment in our lives. This is due to the belief that, behind these dreams, there may be hidden internal conflicts or keys about our being that we are not able to access in a conscious way.

In fact, the meaning of dreams has aroused curiosity throughout human history, and in our digitized age, people often turn to one of the most valuable tools: the Internet. Unfortunately , in this case, the Internet will not do you much good. The meaning of dreams is much closer than you think and, probably, only you know it.

Why do we have dreams?

Dreams are a set of narratives that we experience during the REM phase of sleep and, although our sensations sometimes tell us otherwise, they usually last only a few minutes.

We need to dream to live. Science still has many questions to answer in this regard, but we do know that dreams play a fundamental role in both learning and the development of creativity, as well as in the physiological regulation and the establishment of homeostasis in our body.

On an emotional level, dreaming is our regulating valve. In dreams there are no limits or moral conscience: we can do or undo everything that we have not been able to during our lives. We can go back to the past or go to the future, exploring our desires, fears, and lesser known parts. In fact, sometimes our dreams scare us, it is not strange to imagine if we think about the absence of morality. Everything is possible in dreams.

Dreaming allows us to develop creativity, producing new solutions to old problems. This potentiality of dreams takes on special relevance if we consider the new discoveries that affirm that for our brain to recreate something or to do it is exactly the same.

That is, although the thought of eating a fruit does not satisfy our stomach, our brain has the same sensations as if we did. This leads us to think that dreams are a valuable tool to resolve many of our emotional conflicts.

Humanity has been trying to decipher the meaning of dreams since ancient times; They already dealt with this subject in Homer’s Iliad , the Old Testament or dream treatises with a premonitory nature of dreams.

The famous Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was one of the pioneering authors to work on the meaning of dreams. In 1899, Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams and began to speak of the special dream language and latent contents. For Freud, all dreams are capable of being interpreted.

Dreams have their own language (what Freud called “hieroglyphic language”): a symbolic language and, therefore, that requires an interpretation or translation to our conscious mind. For this reason, our dreams miss us and we cannot understand them once awake: it is the language of the unconscious.

Freud was not the first to speak of the unconscious, although he was the first to place it as a key element in the psychotherapy process. The unconscious, as its name suggests, contains elements not accessible to the conscious mind.

However, according to psychoanalytic theories, the contents of the unconscious can be revealed in some acts such as lapses, failed acts, jokes and dreams. For this reason, some psychotherapies have sought to know the meaning of dreams, considering them a privileged way of accessing this unconscious.

Search the meaning of dreams on the Internet

The content of our dreams puzzles and interests us and, like our ancestors, we seek answers that allow us to investigate our internal conflicts. It is then when we turned to the Internet, before we went to the popularized dream dictionaries, which brings us closer to the meaning of certain objects, environments or people. However, most of the time this will not help to decipher the meaning of dreams.

With a practical example it will surely be better understood. Imagine that two people dream of lying in the sea surrounded by water and decide to find a general meaning with the word water or sea. One of them remembers this landscape and happily recalls the summers of her childhood. The second person had a bad experience and almost drowned in the sea. Do you think the meaning of dreaming about water is the same for these two people?

The elements that appear in our dreams have a unique meaning, as unique as each of our lives and experiences. In no web page or dream dictionary you will be able to find this very personal meaning, meanings that only you know or that are hidden in your unconscious, hidden even from yourself. The answer to dreams is not outside, it is within you.

Meaning of dreams that we can look for: the archetypes

Although, dream elements have a symbolism configured by our unique history, there are certain symbols that all of us share: archetypes. The psychiatrist Carl Jung coined this term to describe all the concepts or images that human beings have stored in the collective unconscious.

To understand what elements can be stored in this collective unconscious, we can think of classic myths and stories or elements such as the figure of the mother or the hero. Regardless of the country of origin or time, these symbols are engraved and present in all cultures.

Therefore, the appearance of these elements in our dreams implies certain meanings that we all share and that we can consult. An example of this are the ascent-descent movements, symbolisms that from the myths about the ordering of the universe by Zeus are associated with the sky-light and earth-darkness respectively.

Some keys to know the meaning of dreams

How then can you access these dream contents? Some psychotherapy orientations address these issues during the intervention, but there are some guidelines that can be followed to gain insight into dream creations.

• Have something next to the bed to write down your dreams and do before you start anything else. When we wake up, we lose much of the information in these dreams. It is for this reason that many people say that they do not dream, since they are not able to remember these dreams.

• Extract the important elements of the dream : people or collages of them, places, objects, sensations … All the details that you have managed to retain are important. As Luis Cencillo said in his book Dreams and their truths , “important dream elements are not forgotten” .
• Analyze these elements. What do you associate them with? What scenes in your life do they remind you of? What do they mean to you?
• Try to integrate this information and relate it to your current vital moment to answer: what does my dream mean here and now?

As you can see, extracting the meaning of dreams is an arduous task that requires specialized training. However, as we have been able to elucidate , the answer is not found in some internet page, but in yourself. However, it must be said that the fact that it is within ourselves does not necessarily mean that it is more accessible.