How Dreams Can Help You Figure Out Your Life
Do You Pay Attention to Your Unconscious Mind?
Did you know that what you are dreaming about can give you clues about your life? Do you ever wake up and think what your dreams mean?
Sometimes it’s not what you think. Sometimes your mind is trying to tell you important advice about your life.
Dreaming is our unconscious mind figuring out everything that happens during our waking hours. Most people dream for about two hours every night. They can last between 5-20 minutes but most of them stay with us for longer. Dreams can include images, ideas, emotions and sensations from our conscious life. Everyone dreams at night, but we don’t always remember what they were when we wake up.
As a trauma survivor, my dreams are often fragmented and horrifying. I know why they keep returning because it’s my brain trying to figure out my past. If I’ve had a bad day, it’s followed by a nightmare, and I deal with them in therapy.
I don’t always have nightmares, and I have learnt to pay attention to my dreams – especially the good ones. I relish the mornings when I wake up with a warm glow in my body instead of feeling petrified with fear. It’s a much easier transition into my day. This is the life of someone living with Complex PTSD. There is usually so much negativity to overcome even before I get out of bed. These are the moments survivors don’t talk about. The transition between unconscious and conscious mind.
Etymology (The origin of dreams)
In old English, the word dream was used to describe “music” or “joy.” At that time the word was unrelated to sleeping brain activities. Later on, in the 13th century the word dream was used to describe a series of emotions, images or thoughts that happened during sleep.
The Content Analysis of Dreams Study
Professor Calvin Springer Hall studied and collected 50,000 dream reports in 1966, at Western Reserve University, Ohio. He published The Content Analysis of Dreams with Robert Van de Castle, highlighting a coding system to study 1,000 dream reports of college students. The publication showed that people from different parts of the world had similar dreams. Hall’s studies of dreams revealed that the most common dream is anxiety. Other dreams covered a range of emotions such as anger, fear, abandonment, joy and happiness. Interestingly, negative dreams were more prevalent than positive ones.
The imagery that we have in dreams of objects and locations often blends. They reflect our experiences and memories. Conversations in dreams can become exaggerated and morph into strange situations. Stories can evolve into comprehensive worlds with new thoughts, ideas and experiences never felt before. Hall’s complete dream reports were made available to the public by his protégé William Dornhoff in the mid-1990’s. Hall’s work is still being cited today.
American author and psychologist, Deirdre Barrett published a study after the Covid Pandemic. She used over 15,000 dream reports in her analysis, and they covered illness, fear and death up to four times more than dreams before the pandemic.
The study of dreams is popular, and many articles have been written since Sigmund Freud who founded psychoanalysis in the early 1900’s.
I find the analysis of dreams fascinating because I can delve deeper into what my mind is telling me about myself.
Search for dream interpretation or dream Dictionary in your browser.
What do your dreams tell you about your life?
You might be surprised by your own brain.
My name is Lizzy. I’m a trauma survivor, a wife, a mom, a teacher, and an author.
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Here are a few links to my top articles:
How To Explain Complex PTSD To Loved Ones
https://medium.com/illumination/how-to-explain-complex-ptsd-to-loved-ones-769f81d437ab
A Search for Identity
https://medium.com/beyond-lines/a-search-for-identity-893df7c970c2
Dealing With Flashbacks
https://medium.com/illumination/dealing-with-flashbacks-1b8c0d94c19d
The Knock on the Door that Changed My World
https://medium.com/illumination/the-knock-on-the-door-that-changed-my-world-ff126c8c07cf
About the Creator
Elizabeth Woods
My name is Lizzy and I'm an author, elementary school teacher and an MFA creative writing student. I write emotion-filled fiction narratives for people who have no voice like trauma survivors. This is my website: elizabethwoodsauthor.com
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