I’ve had dreams of what would happen for quite a while now, and often I’ve asked on this page or seen others asking for their own dream interpretation. Mine, more often than not, are either puns or literal meanings, but I’d still like to have other opinions on what it could mean.
Any suggestions on where to go to ask this, or is there something really obvious that I’m missing?
Dream interpretation can be a very tricky, involved topic. Sometimes the meaning of a dream is quite obvious. Sometimes it is veiled, being deeply symbolic of whatever is being expressed through the subconscious mind.
There have been many people who have studied dream expression, and how the subconscious works in relation. Freud and Jung were not the first, and are far from the last. Science has learned a great deal about how the brain works, how the mind uses dreams for its own purposes (and in my opinion, answers which can also be used to explain how the supernatural is expressed in dreams as well).
The issue comes when people attempt to assign strict definitions to dreams. This can be with dream dictionaries, giving one or two meanings for any given symbol. Often, context of the dream is considered irrelevant. A woman, to these sources, would be a symbol of good luck ahead -- even if the woman in the dream is an evil being causing you pain and suffering. Some dictionaries will insist that a candle is a phallus, regardless of how it is presented in the dream; they leave no room to interpret a candle as a source of light, guidance, or revelation -- or even as just the tool the brain chose to use in a utilitarian rather than symbolic manner.
There are a few things the brain will do with dreams. Some dreams are how the subconscious decides which memories to discard, which details to remove to compress the memory, which portions to put into deep storage (what I like to name slow-recall long-term memory). Some dreams are the subconscious trying to work out a problem, typically related to how something is affecting the person emotionally. Some dreams are the hippocampus doing some reorganization so the machine runs more smoothly. If a person has engaged in a very repetitive task, it may well end up replayed in dreams. Current worries can be expressed a myriad of ways.
An easy example could be that someone dreams about being a passenger in a car on a winding road. The ride is chaotic. The roads are curving. The driver is making poor decisions, putting everyone inside and in other cars in danger.
A dream dictionary would give definitions for car, road, and travel. The car definitions would change slightly depending on whether the person dreaming they are they driver or a passenger, but the definition would be something like, "You are in charge of where you are going!" or, "You are being taken to your goals; it is an easy ride!" Obviously, neither definition seems to fit this dream.
Someone with absolutely no knowledge of the person's life's circumstances may say they have a fear of travel, or feel like other people are influencing their life too much. They may be right or wrong.
But when the person considers what is going on in their own life, they realize that the dream is about stress at work, feeling out of control. No matter how hard they try, work keeps moving on at a fast pace in a way which is far from optimal, and despite all their efforts to make a difference, nobody is taking them seriously.
This is a very realistic representation of how a dream may be expressed about a life circumstance.
Another aspect to consider about the brain is that it can not make up faces. The subconscious saves aspects of almost every face a person passes. Facial differentiation is so deeply ingrained into our brain's hard-wiring, I have to wonder if it is genetic memory. But I digress. When people are in dreams, they may not be a direct memory, but the face is a combination of features which has been encountered at some point in the past. If the face is immediately recognizeable, it may create an instance of that person doing something completely out of their normal character; they may just be in the dream to fill a role. And if the brain cannot create a person for the right role from memory, a person may be expressed as faceless, or even as an abstract form of human shape, but not of any human color or material.
That pretty much covers the very basics of the psychological end of dreaming.
Considering the supernatural or spiritual aspects, things can start to be a bit more complicated. But from my own experience, there are some very similar aspects to the above. The visage of a once-encountered person may be used to represent an encounter. Or a 'person' may present themselves as a human form with an other-than-human head and face.
Still, the aspect of an entity may be expressed in some mundane manner within a dream. I've had entire dreams which seemed created for no other reason than to set up an encounter. It has been years, and I still have unanswered questions about these.
My own experiences with what I believe may be deities, guides, or spirits, is that they make themselves different from the rest of the dream. I've had incredibly chaotic dreams which seemed to come to a stop, when a person enters the scene or I move to a different room where a person is. They give their message, and we part by some means, and the dream continues its hectic pace. Or perhaps the dream is incredibly mundane, and this very dense character arrives, seeming to sink into the fabric of the dreamscape -- sinking in in the 4D sense, not like a sphere into a plane -- and the encounter happens.
Sometimes, however, a supernatural message is purely symbolic.
To cut this short, the point is this: Nobody can really interpret your dreams for you. They are born of or filtered through your subconscious mind, using your vast stores of very personal memories and experiences for their expression. You must be the one to figure out their meaning.
Yes: Some others might be able to give some insight. But only you can find the true answer, within yourself, whether here or in any other community.
