Dreams: What They Are and What They Mean

I’m one of those dreamers who’ve searched high and low to discover the exact definition of a dream. My search led me to the door step of neuroscience which defines dreams as “merely electrical brain impulses that pull random thoughts and imagery from the memory”. That definition didn’t quite resonate with what I’ve experienced within my dreams. I had to turn to the ancient world in order to discover what a dream actually is.

Dreams are much more than random electrical brain impulses. Dreams, at their core, are mystery and one of the best examples of eternity we have direct access to. They are also stories, adventures, and journeys. Dreams are also multilayered messages that communicate by use of metaphorical stories written in disappearing ink.

Although this definition is more satisfying, it still lacks the precise essence of what a dream truly is. I’m going to need more than one short paragraph to share what I’ve discovered in my search to define a dream.

The Mystery of Dreams

At their core dreams are mysterious. This is the reason a dream can be running through your mind hours, even days after you have it. It also explains why you can wake up from a dream on a different morning with no specific memory of what you dreamed but you know you’ve dreamed.

Dreams are one of life’s great mysteries, but it’s important to know they are mysteries that can be solved.

For centuries risk takers have travelled the earth in search of the next great discovery. Some have even risked it all to to traverse across oceans, and go into space. We humans are born with an irresistible and persistent drive to solve mysteries, whether their on the other side of the world or within our own minds and hearts.

Many dreams are the beginning of a conversation, which is another layer of mystery. The purpose of some dreams is to lead you to ask for more; more information, more dreams, more revelation. These dreams are easy to miss because most dreamers initially want to know what their dream symbols mean. Nothing else. If they can’t figure it out within the first few minutes after waking up they move on with their lives and miss an invitation to a journey. Dreams don’t present intrigue for the sake of intrigue, they’re trying to draw you in to pursue deeper meaning.

One of the quickest ways to discover meaning in a dream is to apply the Principle of Simplicity.

Equitis Bic

What Are Dreams

Here’s the modern explanation of what a dream is. When you fall asleep your brain is recovering from the day’s activities. It’s creating and storing memories and washing away neurotoxins. As you enter REM sleep your brain starts to become more active, similar to when you’re awake. It seems logical to think dreams are a product of the subconscious. Are dreams subconscious, tho? Maybe a better question would be are dreams only subconscious?

An ancient wise man once wrote “I sleep but my heart is awake.” Evidence of this can be found in emotionally charged dreams. Here’s an example.

I’ve been having this really weird dream two days in a row. There’s always some girl I end up kissing. When I kiss her my emotions are really strong. It feels right and honest. I can’t even accurately describe what I feel. When I wake up I had the exact same feeling I had in the dream. The emotions themselves are really sweet, but when I wake up I realize it was only a dream and I’m really sad.

This dream is engaging the dreamer’s emotions even though they are asleep. The emotions, especially romantic emotions, are attributed to a person’s heart. With so much emphasis being put on the dreamer’s brain as the origin of dreams, it’s worth noting the dreamer’s heart has more to do with dreams like this than their brains.

Are Dreams Real?

Dreams are by their very nature unlimited and eternal, but are they real?

You can do anything in a dream: fly, breathe underwater, time travel. Absolutely nothing is impossible. These mysterious devices can whisk us off anywhere to anytime because dreams play out in another time and another place. But is that other time and place real?

To answer that question let’s look at what dreamers bring back with them from their dreams. Fear, joy, encouragement, sadness and a plethora of other emotions can follow the dreamer out of the dream. Are those emotions real? Some dreamers have dreamed a part of their body got healed in a dream. When they wake up the notice they can move or do something else that otherwise denotes that part of their body has received healing. Was their healing real?

Truth is, only the dreamer knows for sure. Think back to the emotions you’ve brought back with you from a dream. Have you dreamed you were in love and found that intense feeling of love followed you into waking life. Only you can know if that love was real or not. It would be really great if there were a scientific test to determine if dreams are real or not. Unfortunately we’re stuck with our own little experiments. Think back to what you’ve brought back with you from your dreams. There must be some emotion or experience where you were shown something in a dream that actually happened in waking life.

Every dreamer I’ve talked to has referred to their waking life as their ‘real life’. If something is brought back from a dream place of mysterious wonder into your real life, by your own admission doesn’t it make what happened in your dreams real?

Why Do I Dream

In order to discover the full answer to the question of why do I dream, we’ve got to take a closer look at what causes you to dream. Jennifer Butler, a sleep medicine physician at Piedmont offers this explanation.

“The scientific community are split on the function of dreams or if they mean anything. One theory of why we dream is the Activation-synthesis hypothesis. This theory suggests dreams are caused by brain stem activation during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and stimulation of the limbic system (emotional motor system).”

Although this is only one theory of where dreams may come from, it falls short in addressing the nature of dreams.

I don’t know nearly as much about the brain as a sleep medicine physician, but I have delved deep into my own dream study. I searched out and have read many ancient texts and I’ve discovered the ancient Assyrians, Egyptians, and ancient Hebraic peoples all worked from a set of principles to help them understand their dreams. They all attributed the source of dreams as the gods speaking to them. Divine intervention was a widely accepted idea when it comes to dreams and their source because the kings of the ancient world all needed guidance in their kingly duties. When they applied their principles to dreams they began to get solid answers.

If dreams are as divinely inspired as the ancients believed, then dreams are a higher level of communication. Many times dreams reveal a higher perspective and deeper insight into life situations we all face. It’s often difficult to achieve this higher perspective on our own, and dreams communicate to us in such a way that we’re able to gain a different way of looking at things.

Inner Dreams

A second source of your dreams are your own desires. Many times we want something or someone so badly we cause ourselves to dream about it. These are commonly called should dreams. Here’s an example of a should dream.

In my dream I was walking down the street in front of a series of shop windows filled with shoes when I saw a pair of shoes I’d been wanting to buy in real life for a really long time. I could never afford the shoes but in my dream I figured out a way where I could. I bought the shoes and when I put them on and walked home in them everything just felt better. The sun was brighter, all the colors around me seemed to flash and jump out at me, and people paid attention to me like never before. Then I woke up.

This dream can be identified as a soul dream because the dreamer allows themselves permission to do what they aren’t allowed to do their waking life.

Demonic Dreams

The third source of dreams is the demonic. Demonic dreams often look like grotesque tormenting nightmaresthrt abandon you sleep paralysis. They don’t always look like this, however. When you’re not actively encountering grotesque monsters within a demonic dream, you’ll encounter fear in some other way. Fear is a sure identifier of demonic dreams no matter what they look like on the surface.

Many dreamers have told me dreams in which everything appeared consistent with a positive dream. There was plenty of light, they were in a pleasant place, and everything appeared to be normal. They they began to have a feeling they just couldn’t shake. Something was off but they couldn’t quite identify it. Things slowly changed and they soon found themselves at the mercy of a terrifying nightmare.

You may be wondering why demonic dreams happen. To be frank, the great majority happen because the dreamer has allowed access to their lives through entertainment, unforgiveness, or a number of other subtle ways they’re unaware of.

Making Sense of the Origins of Dreams

Once you know where your dream originates you can begin to get answers to the question of why you had the dream. Knowing the origin of your dreams is vital if you want to understand anything about your dreams such as meaning or application.

If your dream is demonically inspired you were given the dream as a means of torment. You can get meaning from tormenting nightmares because they often tell you the problem in the first scene and offer a solution to that problem in the last scene. When you understand this it will help you move past nightmarish experiences.

Divine revelation dreams are given to reveal to you what is impossible to know otherwise for the purpose of encouragement, help and direction. One of the reasons you dream is to be a receiver of divine communication. The thing about it is that it doesn’t always seem like divine communication.

When you have a dream that reveals an inner desire, that dream will show you where you are at in life, or your current condition.

Two Types of Dreams and What They Mean

Precognitive Dreams

You dream these dreams to be shown future events. Precognition dreams can be metaphorical or literal, but one thing’s for sure, they’ll happen. How do you know you’ve had a precognition dream? Most dreamers don’t know until they experience the events of the dream. This doesn’t mean you can’t know you’ve had a precognition dream when you immediately wake up from one, but it doesn’t happen to most dreamers.

Here’s an example of experiencing a dream in waking life that unfolds exactly the way they saw it.

A few years back I got into a pretty bad car crash. My injuries were nothing too serious just a few broken bones and stitches in my forehead. My car, however, was totaled and I was really shaken up.

The weird thing is, I had a dream a year or so prior in which I experienced the car crash in 1st person. I’ve read a little bit about precognitive dreams but from my short research nothing I’ve seen really matches up to my experience.

When I say I dreamt my car crash, I dreamt it to a T. My outfit, what I was doing prior to the crash, the exact sequence of events. EVERYTHING that happened in the dream, every detail was exactly the same. It was like deja vu, except it was in a dream.

I remember after I had the dream I was nervous to drive/extra careful for several months because of how real it felt. At the time of the crash, I realized immediately that I had already lived this before, except in a dream. I knew exactly what was going to happen, and it did, the EXACT same as it had happened in my dream.

Such is the way of precognitive dreams.

Healing Dreams

You dream these dreams to experience healing within a dream or to be given a heads up that you’re being prepared to experience healing. In my case, I was given a sex dream as a precognitive healing dream.

One night I woke up after having a dream that I was having sex with a woman I didn’t know very well and wasn’t at all attracted to. We were in what looked like an inner chamber of a castle — there was stone everywhere.

I was quite perplexed by this dream and kind of weirded out. As I thought about this dream and worked through it but didn’t get much of anywhere for quite awhile. I had this dreaming early December and by the time the next summer rolled around I decided to call a close friend to ask for help. We’d teamed up lots of time prior to this and I trust her to see what I sometimes can miss in my own dreams.

She said she’d thought of sex as the deepest physical connection two humans can have and that reminded her of healing. We talked this concept out and went about our lives. I didn’t find out this sex dream was foretelling my healing for another 6 months or so. By the time the following December arrived my inner emotional healing had began and amazingly enough, the friend I called to help me understand the dream the one who proclaimed it was a healing dream, played a big part in that emotional healing I’d been needing for a long time.

My healing began as a result of an uncomfortable sex dream and is still going on to this day. I suspect it will last for many more years to come. What are dreams and what do they mean? That night I dreamt because I needed healing. It was just as if a Dreamgiver had seen me in my pitiful state and sent life changing help disguised within the mystery of a dream.

EB