agrote - I had a recurring dream about a place we used to live. Each time it was the same basic dream with only a few alterations. Always the same outcome which was not getting caught doing something, which I won't go into (and no, it wasn't sexual.)
I never really associated it to anything in my awake life - I just figured it was because I missed the old house.
Then something major happened in my life. One night shortly after that, I had the same dream....but it had a different ending.
I never had that dream again.
Sounds like fun, good for you.
happycat wrote:agrote wrote:Sounds like fun, good for you.
What I'm saying is that it all became clear to me what my dream meant and it had nothing to do with missing the old house. It was a metaphor that my mind was using to get a point across.
That's your interpretation of it, but how do you know that you aren't weaving a web of meaning where there just isn't one? I could make up a fictional dream now and deliberately make it incoherent and meaningless, and I could tell you that it's a real dream that I just had recently. And I bet you'd be able to tell me what it 'means'.
Re: Trivial pursuit and human extinction
coberst wrote:Trivial pursuit and human extinction
I was awakened last night by a loud knocking on my door.
Fortunately the knocking was not reality but was a dream.
When I "heard" the knocking I sat upright in bed with my heart racing and immediately tried to determine if what I had heard was the real world rather than a dream. I assume such things happen to everyone; such things have happened to me before.
I was unable to go back to sleep. Instead my mind led me into contemplations that have resulted in my preparing this posting thus ending my attempt on going back to sleep.
I am retired and have been using my free time for the last several years studying the human condition. I have been trying to comprehend why humans do the absurd things we do and if there is some way to change the direction our civilization is heading. As part of this effort I have been engaged in several of these Internet discussion forums writing my thoughts about our human propensity to self-destruct.
Circumstances this summer have led me into becoming a bricklayer for the first time in my life. I needed to build a small brick wall in my front yard and I have been engrossed in this project for many weeks.
When I look back on my bricklaying efforts I recognize that I have tranquilized myself with trivia. For many weeks I have narrowed the focus of my intellectual interests to the follies of amateur bricklaying. The loud knocking was my unconscious awakening me from my holiday of trivia. My mind was willing to focus upon the trivia just as before it was focused on the important. But a sense of guilt drives my intellectual activity back to more important matters.
Have you experienced the difficulty sometimes of separating dream from reality?
Yes.
Quote:
Do you think that such things as hearing a loud knocking is our unconscious sending us a message?
Yes.
Humans create meaning. Meaning is something very subjective. I do not know if meaning can be judged as true or false. I think that psychology determines that dreams are significant of the unconscious. I guess such a hypothesis can be judged as to being true or false. As I understand the matter those who might know judge it to be true.
happycat wrote:After the event that I connected to the dreams, I never had the dream again. I can't control what and when I dream, so what would you say the explanation is for that?
I have no idea, but I can't see that it really needs an explanation. I had a dream two nights ago, and then last night I had a different dream. What's the explanation for that?
happycat wrote:It was a recurring dream....I had it many many times over a ten year span.
I'm done. 
What's your point??? I feel sick every morning when I wake up. Does that mean my unconscious is trying to tell me something, or does it mean I have acid reflux?
reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. - einstein
there's an issue of balance to consider, we have (at least) two lives to tend. one is at night, the other during the day. one allows us to make up our own stories, and we learn from that. the other allows us to walk through a story that we haven't made up, and we learn from that too.
the trick is to learn from both, and also to guess which is which. i would still argue that contemplating the human condition is something everyone should do now and then, at least. also the animal condition, the plant condition, and the condition of anything else you can think of, including your dreams.
