Dreams and Meanings

I don’t think I’ve had a spiritually meaningful dream in my life.

Well, let me qualify that just a little. I’m sure I’ve had dreams psychiatrists would call meaningful in that they revealed truths about my subconscious preoccupations, some of which are surely spiritual. I wouldn’t argue with the experts about the contents of my cranium either; it seems logical to me that when you have the same dream dozens of times, surely something is consistently on your mind that you haven’t resolved to your own satisfaction.

But personal messages from God in my sleep? Not a one.

Anonymous Asks (87)

“Are our dreams from God?”

There are all kinds of theories about what dreams are, what they mean, and the purpose they serve for human beings. One theory is that dreams are our brains attempting to derive meaning from meaningless stimuli, attempting to create order out of chaos. Sigmund Freud saw them as a window into the unconscious. Psychologist Rosalind Cartwright says dreams “help us process new, emotionally important information and add it to our conceptual memory system”. Sleep scientist Robert Stickgold says there is “precious little on which dream researchers agree”.

That about sums it up. From a scientific perspective, the answer is that we don’t know what purpose dreams serve, or if they mean anything at all. Where dreams are concerned, we cannot be certain about much of anything.