The 19th century parlour game What Did I Eat Last Night? was a game that DeBord regretted the demise of. It involved a player telling their dreams in a journal and an audience guessing what they had eaten the night before.
DeBord says that you might have eaten rare beef and dreamt about cows. It sounds like a blast. I would have liked to have played that game.
A growing number of professional dreamworkers use dream analysis as a therapy. He is most likely to be regaled with the blockbuster dream topics of public nakedness, being unable to find an exam room, and giving birth.
The online dream-sharing groups have seen a big growth in participation during the PAIN, which has seen many westerners wake later or without the aid of an alarm clock. It has been a busy time for people to remember and think about strange dreams.
idk is anxious on r/dreams. She said she was very panicked because she couldn't find her own penis. Freud was theorised as a stage of female psychosexual development by theorised penis envy. Freud would have something to say about that.
AlexMilo had a dream in which he discovered his testicles had been mounted on his desk as a stress ball.
Many cultures have a rich tradition of communal interpretation. The Senoi people of Malaysia use collective dream sharing as a way of confronting their anxieties, as they used to record their dreams in ancient Egypt. In Mori and Australian aboriginal traditions, dreams are used to convey messages, such as the location of a food or water. The Kichwa of Ecuador and the Chantal of Mexico use dream sharing and Medicinal Plants as a community bonding exercise. The 8th-century dream interpreter, Ibn Sirin, wrote about dreams of holy men and minarets, which were a window into religious piety.
The marginalisation of dream interpretation in Christian traditions has pushed dream-sharing practices to the fringes of the rationalist west. Antonio Zadra, professor of psychology at the University of Montreal and co-author of When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep, believes that the backlash of the 20th century marginalised dreams and any messages they might convey for our waking life. He says that dreams betrayed sexual impulses from infancy. Society rejected the idea of paying attention to our dreams because they were rejected by Freud.
Dreams reflect our internal wisdom.
The role of dream sharing has been pushed to the margins by novels and movies, which is why Professor Mark Blagrove is researching sleep and dreaming at the University ofSwansea. It could be that for the ancients dreams were tear-jerkers, or entertained or amused, much in the way that cinema does today. Dream storytellers were favored in an evolutionary sense and could have had a role in human domestication.
The 1970s was when Harvard psychiatrists proposed the activation-synthesis hypothesis. The hypothesis argued that dreams are the brain's attempt to make sense of random neuron activity that occurs during REM sleep. DeBord explains that the idea that dreams were meaningless was based on the idea that dreams were random responses to electrical activity.
Carl Jung continued the interest in sharing dreams to analyse the subconscious that was started by Freud. The role of dreams was to lead a person to their true self. Many of today's dream sharers identify with the Jungian tradition.
A 44-year-old Northern Ireland-based online dream-sharing enthusiast who prefers to be identified by his nickname OldowanKenobi, spends most of his online dream interpretation time on the sub reddit r/dreaminterpretation for its explicit Jungian approach to symbols in dreams. OldowanKenobi likes posting his own dreams, but also helping to settle forum posters' anxiety by analyzing their dream symbols in relation to their daily lives. He enjoys trying to understand the images that people write about. To see what issues they are dealing with, I check their profiles and histories on reddit. I am looking for something that the person may not be aware of yet. OldowanKenobi sees these inputs as a form of gifted therapy that is not available to many. I hope to spark a connection in someone's mind to help them with their mental health.
Charlie is a 22-year-old illustrator and r/dreams poster fromNewcastle who enjoys discussing his dreams with strangers for their "unbiased, more open minded" views. Six global enthusiasts are in a dream circle with which Sanders frequently shares his nightly dreams.
He says that he has had vivid dreams because of his epileptic condition. Nightmares, which play out in dramatic visual vignettes, and "message" dreams, which he tends to recall in greater clarity, are some of the dreams that are categorized by the themes of his day. He doesn't think of dreams as a connection with a higher power or aliens. I see them as a reflection of our own internal wisdom, which is kind of our subconscious telling our conscious mind something we're not understanding about ourselves.
One dream, and its analysis by his dream circle, helped him to have the confidence to launch his creative career and institute healthy boundaries in personal relationships. He recalls that it was like a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a tunnel of lights and colors and a voice telling him he was on a track.
The emergence of online dream-sharing forums is one example of a renewed interest in dreaming which is also seen in the arrival of dream-sharing apps such as DreamsCloud, DreamBoard and Awoken. Tree Carr, a former musician, uses South American plant medicines guayusa and calea Zacatechichi to help attendees better access the meaning of their dreams at his London dream retreats.
The rehabilitation of the importance of dreams follows a similar reappraisal of sleep seen in books such as Why We Sleep by Matt Walker and The Sleep Revolution by Arianna Huffington. After decades in which sleep analysis was seen as unscientific, neuroscience is now pointing to the importance of these unconscious hours as events of the day are played out alongside retrieved associated memories from our past and our brain "renders verdicts"
There are voices of dissent despite the growing consensus that the symbolism in dreams holds meaning. Dr Wamsley sees no evidence that dream content is more symbolic than our waking brain. She notes that dream imagery is a representation of our daily thoughts, feelings and experiences. The case for investing symbolic meaning in a dream can be made only if the content of the dream is consistent across our lives and cultures.
During the second wave of the coronaviruses in England, Dr Elaine Cloutman-Green, an infection control doctor based in London, had a dream. She had to peel a series of tiny blue quail eggs that she had to pull out of a hot water bath in order to get the results she was looking for.
Dream sharing is open to all.
Mark Blagrove launched a series of dream-sharing salons with artist Julia Lockheart, in which an in- person or online audience responds to dreamer's dreams as Lockheart captures their imagery. She agreed to be a speaker at the salon because she was not a therapy person.
She said that she was dealing with the trauma of Covid at work and the impact of home lock downs when she lost her family member. The imagery of the dream made me realize that I had been ignoring my personal anxieties around Covid as I channelled my energy into my work. She was able to combine the two sides of herself after the community asked her about the significance of the images. She is now an enthusiast for dream sharing as a simple therapeutic method that is open to all of us. She says that she now sees dreams as worth exploring, rather than just waking up and thinking.
Lockheart's painting, which depicts her at her desk next to stacks of quail eggs and a smaller closeup of her hands handling broken yolks, is a reminder that self-reflection is not an indulgence.
As a child, the therapist used to share her dreams with her father. By her teens, Moulding was looking for repeat symbols in her dreams and trying to interpret them, including a recurring dream about apatched-up crooked house.
She is a member of Dream Symbols and Interpretation, a Facebook group with 15,000 members, and she has been a moderator since 2020.
It was a dream in which a dead baby was boarded up in the walls of a house in which the walls were weeping tears, and Moulding thought, "Oh crikey, I have to do some work on myself!" The dream was a symbol of the child in me that had been walled up. She realized that she needed to address her sadness from her childhood before she moved forward in her life.
There can be drawbacks to broadcasting one's intimate thoughts online. If she thinks Dream Symbols are trying to diagnose problems from other people's dreams, she is careful to intervene. She says that we should be suspicious of anyone who says that there isn't a single meaning to others' dreams. The impulse to share our dreams with others is a permanent human thing, according to Moulding. The nucleus of the atom was first seen in a dream by the man who dreamed about Einstein's Theory of Relativity. These were people who took time to listen to their dreams.
DeBord thinks that if we all shared our dreams from the night before, we might fare better. Dreams are ephemeral things that are stored in short-term memory and are overwritten by new short-term memories when our day intervenes. We don't need to think about the raid on the fridge.
He suggests keeping a dream journal and asking others about their dreams, in order to relate to them. The inner therapist in us all is unleashed by dreams, according to DeBord. He says that you already know what your dream means as it was created by you. We need to listen.
