What Do Your Dreams Mean?
The human brain can be hard to decipher sometimes.
This couldn’t be more true when it comes to trying to uncover the potential meanings
behind our dreams.When you go to sleep, your mind starts playing out a personalized story
in your head, one that is often abstract and full of confusing or contradicting imagery.
As strange as our dreams may be, it may surprise you to learn that a lot of the dreams people
experience actually share common threads and themes among multiple individuals.
In a 2003 study of the dreams of Canadian University Students, Tore A. Nielsen and other
researchers discovered a number of recurring themes and images that cropped up more commonly
in the participants’ dreams than others.
But what do these dream themes mean?
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In the 2003 Canadian Study, researchers distributed a questionnaire consisted of 55 questions
to Canadian Students, asking them to report on topics, subjects and experiences that they
remember having dreams about in the past.
After tallying the results, the researchers found that a significantly large number of
students reported having experienced similar dreams at one point or another.
Among both male and female students who participated in the questionnaire, over 60 percent were
able to recount dreams about being chased, dreams about falling, and dreams about being
in school or studying.
What’s more, the researchers also came to the conclusion that individual participants
in the questionnaire often had patterns of thematic throughlines that occurred throughout
multiple dreams they experienced.
For example, if you had dreams about being naked in public as well as dreams in which
you can’t find a washroom, the chances are you might be struggling with feelings of personal
embarrassment.
In this case, we see two different types of dreams that appear to be motivated and driven
by the same underlying theme or emotion.
Of course, some types of dreams aren’t as immediately apparent in their meanings as
others, and when dealing with something as strange and cryptic as the unconscious mind,
there’s always going to be a lot of room for debate, speculation and interpretation.
If you dream about falling, is that just your subconscious brain expressing your fear of
heights?
Or is there something deeper at play here?
Just for fun, let’s take a look at some of the most common dreams according to this
2003 survey, and see what experts in the field of dream analysis have to say about them.
Dreams About Falling
Have you ever had a dream in which you were falling from a great height, only to suddenly
jerk yourself awake with enough force that you practically fling yourself out of bed?
According to the 2003 questionnaire, dreams about falling were one of the most common
types of dream reported, but they could have more cause behind them than just a simple
fear of skydiving.
According to the Dream Dictionary, researchers say that the average person will have more
than 5 falling related dreams over the course of their lifetime.
So what makes this particular genre of dreaming so unusually common?
In some cases, the reason you dream about falling might actually be more biology than
psychology.
As we drift off and go to sleep after a long day, our bodies briefly enter a transitional
state between being awake and being asleep, known as the “hypnagogic state”.
When we enter this state, our brain may interpret the feeling of our muscles relaxing as the
sensation of falling, causing our bodies to violently “twitch” awake in what’s known
as a hypnagogic jerk.
According to one hypothesis, this involuntary response could be a holdover from our pre-evolutionary
days as tree-dwelling primates, when falling asleep at the wrong place or time could result
in a very real fall for our ancient ancestors.
That might not be the only possible cause for this phenomenon, however.
In her interview with the Huffington Post, Dr. Cathleen O’Connor suggests that if you
commonly experience dreams about falling, it may indicate that you’re experiencing
what feels like a loss of control in your waking life, whether it be related to work,
finances, relationships, or even your physical health.
If that is indeed the case, O’Connor goes on to suggest that rather than fight against
these falling dreams, you should instead try to embrace them.
According to O’Connor:
"If dreams of falling bring up feelings of vulnerability and fear, realize that the goal
is not to avoid them but rather to work with those dreams in your waking state to deal
with the fears around the situation so you can regain your balance."
The next time you have a dream about falling, think long and hard about what might have
triggered it.
The answer might not be as obvious as you’d expect.
Dreams About Being Chased
How often do you have nightmares in which something is chasing or pursuing you?
In the 2003 questionnaire, dreams about being chased weren’t simply among the most popular
dreams shared among participants-- they were at the very top of the list!
With dreams about being chased being such a common shared experience, there should be
an equally common experience that would trigger them when we go to sleep, right?
According to psychotherapist Richard Nicoletti, dreaming about being chased might be your
mind denoting the fact that you are trying to avoid something.
If that sounds a little on the nose, Nicoletti also says to pay attention to just what exactly
is chasing you in these dreams.
Is it a man?
A woman?
An animal?
Maybe you can’t even see what’s chasing you in your dreams; all you know is that something
is behind you that you feel a desperate need to get away from.
The nature of what’s chasing you in your dreams may be able to provide some insight
into what you’re running from in real life; whether it’s a painful memory, an uncomfortable
situation, or even your own emotions.
According to Nicoletti, a dream about being chased might be intended as a subliminal wake-up
call, a sign that it’s time for you to stop running in the real world and confront whatever
it is you’ve been trying to avoid for so long.
Dreams About School
In the United States and Canada, children and teens can expect to spend at least 11
years within the school system, so it stands to reason that the topic of education would
weigh heavily on our subconscious minds.
In addition to the 2003 survey, another study conducted in 2014 determined that dreams about
being in school ranked among the top five most frequent categories for dreaming, even
among adults who have been out of school for decades.
What’s more, people who have dreams about being back in school rarely describe it as
a positive experience: being late for class, lost in the school’s hallways or unprepared
for a quiz or test are all common occurrences that people recount in their dreams about
schooling.
So what is it about these school-related dreams that makes them persist for so long, potentially
even years and years after we’ve long since graduated?
According to Michael R. Olsen, an expert on the topic of dreams and unconscious intelligence,
dreams related to school can potentially have something to do with your own feelings of
identity.
On his blog, Olsen writes:
“Our time in school has great influence on the shaping of our personality – there
are many ‘rules’ locked in for how to think and behave, not least the ‘rules’
on how to think about ourselves.”
Olsen goes on to say that the different aspects of school life represented in the dream might
also be related to different facets of your identity.
He suggests that your relationship with teachers in your dream might reflect your current relationship
with other figures of authority, and the classmates within your school dreams could have something
to do with aspects of your personality that you might not be completely in touch with
at the moment.
Olsen strongly encourages people who experience school-related dreams to pay attention to
whatever memorable details emerge from them, and to pay attention to what age you are presented
as in your school dreams, as the dream could be representative of a specific moment or
time period in your early formative life.
Dreaming can be a strange experience, full of abstract thoughts, images and ideas that
might not always appear to make a whole lot of sense.
However, by unpacking and analyzing certain aspects of our dreams, it is possible to theorize
and develop hypothesis on what some of the imagery from our dreams could potentially
be alluding to.
And by looking at what recurring themes and aspects of dreams appear most commonly across
multiple dreamers, we can potentially hope to find a common throughline that links the
themes of these dreams together, bringing us one step closer to deciphering the overall
meaning.
If you’ve ever experienced any of the types of dreams we’ve covered here, then we hope
that this new information was able to possibly shed some insight on what your brain might
be trying to tell you.
Until next time, sweet dreams!
What do you think about the dreams we discussed here?
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