Dream Meanings and More

Why do we dream and do our dreams have meanings? This is a question that has been asked for as long as man has walked the earth. The answer unfortunately is unclear and varies greatly depending on who you ask. What we do know for a fact though is that dreams are very important to your physical and mental health. Deprived of REM sleep, the phase of sleep in which you dream, humans and other mammals quickly lose the ability to think and function properly regardless of how much other sleep they are receiving.

There is a lot of scientific research that suggests that one of the most compelling reasons for dreams, especially in regards to primitive man, was to practice survival skills. When you think about it this makes a certain amount of sense. There is simply no other way to practice the skills necessary to fight a saber tooth tiger in your waking life. Therefore, just as a martial artists practices until the movements become reflex, your dreams may allow you to practice stressful situations until your response is automatic. So while you may remember only a small fraction of your dreams, the body does not need to remember for the reflexes to kick in.

There are many real life examples that back up this theory as well. Often times after a stressful situation or near death experience survivors will state that they felt like they were in a dream-like state. Often they act without thought, reflexively, to a situation that they have never encountered in their waking life. Most often these reflexive actions are the difference between life and death. Now you could chalk those up to having good instincts, or being lucky, but the effects of spending a third of your lifetime sleeping and practicing for survival situations may be the true meanings of these events.

The final question, if you choose to accept this theory, is what effect does this have on dream meanings? After considering this for a while I am confident that this fits right in with what we have all seen and experienced about dreams and their meanings. If one of the purposes of dreams is to prepare you for the waking world then that only stresses the importance of fully understanding your dream meanings. The human brain is incredible and can retain much more information subconsciously than you could ever possibly be aware of. Dreams are the medium from which your subconscious can communicate the survival skills you need.

As man has adapted and progressed for most of us the possibility of facing a life or death situation has dramatically decreased. This has not changed the survival impact of our dreams. We still dream about life or death situations, but we also dream about social situations, situations at work, and situations with the family. All of these dreams prepare us to survive and thrive in our waking lives. However the primal aspect of man still lingers in our subconscious and that has made deciphering our dream meanings more difficult as time progresses. We are finding that while our dreams adapt to our daily lives often the meanings and symbolism remains the same.

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