Ever since I was a kid my dreams have been crazy as hell. Last night, I had a dream where I was dropping my kid off at school, but there were people on both sides of the road standing waiting for a wedding. I see the couple and nope right out. Turning around a curb, suddenly I was in a fucking baseball stadium and rows of seats cut me off. I had to get home so I got out of my car? I’m walking down the stairs when I hear “oh, there it is!” I look up where the person was pointing to the sky. I see some rocket like thing, and assumed it was fireworks. It stopped, I hear three dreaded bomb falling noise, and then it slams into a seat a few rows down from the wedding. I hit the deck because I don’t want to die. But instead of exploding it sprays enough glitter throughout the stadium I ended up with a mouth full. Then I get out of there, call my mom, explained what happened, head to their house which is now a bunker in new York City and they refuse to believe what I went through. Then I woke up.
Our definition of crazy is different.
That sounds like a typical dream: a series of disconnected memories stitched together in a random assortment.
It could also be that putting it in writing doesn’t convey the absurdity of it accurately. I’ve had wild dreams that, when retold later, sound mundane.
Your experience sounds common.
That’s the weird part - they have some stuff based on experiences, like dropping my kid off at school, and being in a baseball stadium. The missile landing looked similar to an artillery napalm round in Helldivers, but the wedding, the glitter bomb, the baseball stadium my parents in NYC, in a bunker? Yeah not exactly stuff I’m familiar with.
I remember another dream where I was being driven to school as a kid, and giant flying saucers descend from the sky and start firing green lasers into the ground. Or a time in hypnosis where I talked to an Eldritch entity consisting of an eyeball and tentacles that’s connected to all of us that is the reason we get stress headaches because we try to pull them off (yeah).
My mind is weird
dreams are a great deal more than disconnected memories stitched together in a random assortment. if you pay attention to the symbolism in the dream instead of the face value, you can get a glimpse into what you’re currently processing behind the scenes.
I don’t read into dreams that deeply. I do know that emotions and personal struggles can present themes in dreams. IE seeing a catastrophe in the dream is related to a person having anxiety about something (or similar)
possibly. my favorite lens to analyze dreams is the Jungian frame: he postulated that every figure in your dream is not an other person but a part of yourself.
I had a friend who told me she had a dream that she had a baby, and she couldn’t work out how to breast feed it and she was crying and was humiliated that she couldn’t feed the baby.
She said she thought it meant she was going to be a bad mother.
So she and I had an “almost couple” before I moved very far away and she was pretty bummed about it. she began going out to party a lot, like to these kinda gross clubs, and she’d get attention from rando guys. She’d go by herself and make out with several dudes in one outing, and there’d be more than that here and there, like getting fingered on the dance floor for example, then these guys’d disappear etc.
So I put it to her that a Jungian analysis of the baby dream is that the baby is a part of her best represented by an infant, innocent and in great need of attention and care. In the dream she was trying to care for/nourish this part of herself but was failing to actually feed the baby despite the desperate, tearful effort. She was trying to give that part of herself what it needed but was going about it wrong.
She said “yeah, I don’t know”, I think it means I think it means I’ll be a bad mother", so I said okie doke. She kept going out like that and hit a DUI checkpoint on Halloween before she quit that whole scene.
If you’re up for it, next time you have an interesting dream, try thinking in the frame that each figure is a part of yourself that would be best represented by that person. For example, if I dream about a friend who does a ton of drugs and I’m hanging out with that person a lot in the dream, I’d likely take that to mean I’m processing my recent relationship to substance use.
This for me becomes really obvious when you’re learning a new (movement) skill. For example after driving lessons or my first time skiing I spent the nights going through all the scenario’s. They also show that mice learning their way through a maze activate the same “direction” neurons in sequence of going through the maze while they dream and they think it will help in learning.
Natalie Portman, who does have an education in neuroscience, thinks dreams are just your mind getting rid of debris. That was in response to a question on her Hot Ones interview, and she didn’t seem to think it was a strong conclusion backed by broad scientific consensus or anything. Still, I found it an interesting pushback against the common idea that dreams have some deep meaning.
Your mind getting rid of debris… interesting.
I don’t know that its common, I encounter about 50/50 people thinking they’re nonsense and others getting insight from their dreams.
People, including Natalie Portman during her interview on the chicken wing youtube show Hot Ones, can have layers of motivation to dismiss their dreams as nonsense. Paying attention to the symbolism in dreams can reveal some dark and anxiety provoking truths. Or not :)
