meaning of dreams essay

Essays About Dreams In Life: 14 Examples And Topic Ideas

Dreams in life are necessary; if you are writing essays about dreams in life, you can read these essay examples and topic ideas to get started.

Everyone has a dream – a big one or even a small one. Even the most successful people had dreams before becoming who they are today. Having a dream is like having a purpose in life; you will start working hard to reach your dream and never lose interest in life.

Without hard work, you can never turn a dream into a reality; it will only remain a desire. Level up your essay writing skills by reading our essays about dreams in life examples and prompts and start writing an inspiring essay today!

Writing About Dreams: A Guide

Essays about dreams in life: example essays, 1. chase your dreams: the best advice i ever got by michelle colon-johnson, 2. my dream, my future by deborah massey, 3. the pursuit of dreams by christine nishiyama, 4. my dreams and ambitions by kathy benson, 5. turning big dreams into reality by shyam gokarn, 6. my hopes and dreams by celia robinson, 7. always pursue your dreams – no matter what happens by steve bloom, 8. why do we dream by james roland, 9. bad dreams by eli goldstone, 10. why your brain needs to dream by matthew walker, 11. dreams by hedy marks, 12. do dreams really mean anything by david b. feldman, 13. how to control your dreams by serena alagappan, 14. the sunday essay: my dreams on antidepressants by ashleigh young, essays about dreams in life essay topics, 1. what is a dream, 2. what are your dreams in life, 3. why are dreams important in life, 4. what are the reasons for a person to dream big, 5. what do you think about dreams in life vs. short-term sacrifice, 6. what is the purpose of dreaming, 7. why are dreams so strange and vivid, 8. why do dreams feel so real, 9. why are dreams so hard to remember, 10. do dreams mean anything, what is a dream short essay, how can i write my dream in life.

Writing about dreams is an excellent topic for essays, brainstorming new topic ideas for fiction stories, or just as a creative outlet. We all have dreams, whether in our sleep, during the day, or even while walking on a sunny day. Some of the best ways to begin writing about a topic are by reading examples and using a helpful prompt to get started. Check out our guide to writing about dreams and begin mastering the art of writing today!

“Everyone has the ability to dream, but not everyone has the willingness to truly chase their dreams. When people aren’t living their dreams they often have limited belief systems. They believe that their current circumstances and/or surroundings are keeping them from achieving the things they want to do in life.”

In her essay, author Michelle Colon-Johnson encourages her readers to develop a mindset that will let them chase their dreams. So, you have to visualize your dream, manifest it, and start your journey towards it! Check out these essays about dreams and sleep .

“At the time when I have my job and something to make them feel so proud of me, I would like to give them the best life. I would like to make them feel comfortable and see sweet smiles on their faces. This is really the one I like to achieve in my life; mountains of words can’t explain how much I love and appreciate them.”

Author Deborah Massey’s essay talks about her dreams and everything she wanted to achieve and accomplish in her life. She also tells us that we must live our values, pursue our dreams, and follow our passions for the best future.

“Fast-forward 5+ years, and my first published book is coming out this May with Scholastic. And now, let me tell you the truth: I don’t feel any different. I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity, proud of the work I’ve done, and excited for the book’s release. But on a fundamental level, I feel the same.”

In her essay, author Christine Nishiyama shares what she felt when she first achieved one of her goals in life. She says that with this mindset, you will never feel the satisfaction of achieving your goal or the fulfillment of reaching your dream. Instead, she believes that what fulfills people is the pursuit of their dreams in life.

“My dream is to become a good plastic surgeon and day after day it has transformed into an ambition which I want to move towards. I do not want to be famous, but just good enough to have my own clinic and work for a very successful hospital. Many people think that becoming a doctor is difficult, and I know that takes many years of preparation, but anyone can achieve it if they have determination.”

Author Kathy Benson’s essay narrates her life – all the things and struggles she has been through in pursuing her dreams in life. Yet, no matter how hard the situation gets, she always convinces herself not to give up, hoping her dreams will come true one day. She believes that with determination and commitment, anyone can achieve their dreams and goals in life. 

“I have always been a big dreamer and involved in acting upon it. Though, many times I failed, I continued to dream big and act. As long as I recollect, I always had such wild visions and fantasies of thinking, planning, and acting to achieve great things in life. But, as anyone can observe, there are many people, who think and work in that aspect.”

In his essay, author Shyam Gokarn explains why having a big dream is very important in a person’s life. However, he believes that the problem with some people is that they never hold tight to their dreams, even if they can turn them into reality. As a result, they tend to easily give up on their dreams and even stop trying instead of persevering through the pain and anguish of another failure.

“When I was younger, I’ve always had a fairytale-like dream about my future. To marry my prince, have a Fairy Godmother, be a princess… But now, all of that has changed. I’ve realized how hard life is now; that life cannot be like a fairy tale. What you want can’t happen just like that.”

Celia Robinson’s essay talks about her dream since she was a child. Unfortunately, as we grow old, there’s no “Fairy Godmother” that would help us when things get tough. Everyone wants to succeed in the future, but we have to work hard to achieve our dreams and goals.

“Take writing for example. I’ve wanted to be a professional writer since I was a little boy, but I was too scared that I wouldn’t be any good at it. But several years ago I started pursuing this dream despite knowing how difficult it might be. I fully realize I may not make it, but I’m completely fine with that. At least I tried which is more than most people can say.”

In his essay, author Steve Bloom encourages his readers always to pursue their dreams no matter what happens. He asks, “Would you rather pursue them and fail or never try?”. He believes that it’s always better to try and fail than look back and wonder what might have been. Stop thinking that failure or success is the only end goal for pursuing your dreams. Instead, think of it as a long journey where all the experiences you get along the way are just as important as reaching the end goal.

“Dreams are hallucinations that occur during certain stages of sleep. They’re strongest during REM sleep, or the rapid eye movement stage, when you may be less likely to recall your dream. Much is known about the role of sleep in regulating our metabolism, blood pressure, brain function, and other aspects of health. But it’s been harder for researchers to explain the role of dreams. When you’re awake, your thoughts have a certain logic to them. When you sleep, your brain is still active, but your thoughts or dreams often make little or no sense.”

Author James Roland’s essay explains the purpose of having dreams and the factors that can influence our dreams. He also mentioned some of the reasons that cause nightmares. Debra Sullivan, a nurse educator, medically reviews his essay. Sullivan’s expertise includes cardiology, psoriasis/dermatology, pediatrics, and alternative medicine. For more, you can also see these articles about sleep .

“The first time I experienced sleep paralysis and recognised it for what it was I was a student. I had been taking MDMA and listening to Django Reinhardt. My memories of that time are mainly of taking drugs and listening to Django Reinhardt. When I woke up I was in my paralysed body. I was there, inside it. I was inside my leaden wrists, my ribcage, the thick dead roots of my hair, the bandages of skin. This time the hallucinations were auditory. I could hear someone being beaten outside my door. They were screaming for help. And I could do nothing but lie there, locked inside my body . . . whatever bit of me is not my body. That is the bit that exists, by itself, at night.”

In her essay, Author Eli Goldstone talks about her suffering from bad dreams ever since childhood. She also talks about what she feels every time she has sleep paralysis – a feeling of being conscious but unable to move.

“We often hear stories of people who’ve learned from their dreams or been inspired by them. Think of Paul McCartney’s story of how his hit song “Yesterday” came to him in a dream or of Mendeleev’s dream-inspired construction of the periodic table of elements. But, while many of us may feel that our dreams have special meaning or a useful purpose, science has been more skeptical of that claim. Instead of being harbingers of creativity or some kind of message from our unconscious, some scientists have considered dreaming to being an unintended consequence of sleep—a byproduct of evolution without benefit.”

Author Matthew Walker, a professor of psychology and neuroscience, shares some interesting facts about dreams in his essay. According to research, dreaming is more than just a byproduct of sleep; it also serves essential functions in our well-being. 

“Dreams are basically stories and images that our mind creates while we sleep. They can be vivid. They can make you feel happy, sad, or scared. And they may seem confusing or perfectly rational. Dreams can happen at any time during sleep. But you have your most vivid dreams during a phase called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, when your brain is most active. Some experts say we dream at least four to six times a night.”

In his essay, Author Hedy Marks discusses everything we need to know about dreams in detail – from defining a dream to tips that may help us remember our dreams. Hedy Marks is an Assistant Managing Editor at WebMD , and Carol DerSarkissian, a board-certified emergency physician, medically reviews his essay.

“Regardless of whether dreams foretell the future, allow us to commune with the divine, or simply provide a better understanding of ourselves, the process of analyzing them has always been highly symbolic. To understand the meaning of dreams, we must interpret them as if they were written in a secret code. A quick search of an online dream dictionary will tell you that haunted houses symbolize “unfinished emotional business,” dimly lit lamps mean you’re “feeling overwhelmed by emotional issues,” a feast indicates “a lack of balance in your life,” and garages symbolize a feeling of “lacking direction or guidance in achieving your goals.” 

Author David B. Feldman, an author, speaker, and professor of counseling psychology, believes that dreams may not mean anything, but they tell us something about our emotions. In other words, if you’ve been suffering from a series of bad dreams, it could be worth checking in with yourself to see how you’ve been feeling and perhaps consider whether there’s anything you can do to improve your mood.

“Ever wish you could ice skate across a winter sky, catching crumbs of gingerbread, like flakes of snow, on your tongue? How about conquering a monster in a nightmare, bouncing between mountain peaks, walking through walls, or reading minds? Have you ever longed to hold the hand of someone you loved and lost? If you want to fulfill your fantasies, or even face your fears, you might want to try taking some control of your dreams (try being the operative). People practiced in lucid dreaming—the phenomenon of being aware that you are dreaming while you are asleep—claim that the experience allows adventure, self-discovery, and euphoric joy.”

In her essay, Author Serena Alagappan talks about lucid dreams – a type of dream where a person becomes conscious during a dream. She also talked about ways to control our dreams, such as keeping a journal, reciting mantras before bed, and believing we can. However, not everyone will be able to control their dreams because the levels of lucidity and control differ significantly between individuals.

“There was a period of six months when I tried to go off my medication – a slowly unfolding disaster – and I’d thought my dreams might settle down. Instead, they grew more deranged. Even now I think of the dream in which I was using a cigarette lighter to melt my own father, who had assumed the form of a large candle. I’ve since learned that, apart from more research being needed, this was probably a case of “REM rebound”. When you stop taking the medication, you’ll likely get a lot more REM sleep than you were getting before. In simple terms, your brain goes on a dreaming frenzy, amping up the detail.”

Author Ashleigh Young’s essay informs us how some medications, such as antidepressants, affect our dreams based on her own life experience. She said, “I’ve tried not to dwell too much on my dreams. Yes, they are vivid and sometimes truly gruesome, full of chaotic, unfathomable violence, but weird nights seemed a reasonable price to pay for the bearable days that SSRIs have helped me to have.” 

In simple terms, a dream is a cherished aspiration, ambition, or ideal; is it the same as your goal in life? In your essay, explore this topic and state your opinion about what the word “dream” means to you.

This is an excellent topic for your statement or “about me” essay. Where do you see yourself in the next ten years? Do you have a career plan? If you still haven’t thought about it, maybe it’s time to start thinking about your future.

Having dreams is very important in a person’s life; it motivates, inspires, and helps you achieve any goal that you have in mind. Without dreams, we would feel lost – having no purpose in life. Therefore, in your essay, you should be able to explain to your readers how important it is to have a dream or ambition in life. 

Dreaming big sounds great; however, it’s easier said than done. First, you’ve got to have reasons to dream big, which will motivate you to achieve your goals in life. If you’re writing an essay about dreams in life, mention why most people dare to dream big and achieve more in life. Is it about freedom, money, praise from other people, satisfaction, or something else entirely?

For example, you could watch movies, play video games, relax every night, or give up all of them to learn a complex skill – what would you choose, and why? In your essay about dreams in life, answer the question and include other examples about this topic so your readers can relate.

There are many answers to this question – one is that dreams may have an evolutionary function, testing us in scenarios crucial to our survival. Dreams may also reduce the severity of emotional trauma. On the other hand, some researchers say dreams have no purpose or meaning, while some say we need dreams for physical and mental health. Take a closer look at this topic, and include what you find in your essay.

Weird dreams could result from anxiety, stress, or sleep deprivation. So, manage your stress levels, and stick to a sleep routine to stop having weird dreams. If you wake up from a weird dream, you can fall back asleep using deep breaths or any relaxing activity. You can research other causes of weird dreams and ways to stop yourself from having them for your essay about dreams and sleep.

The same areas of the brain that are active when we learn and process information in the actual world are active when we dream, and they replay the information as we sleep. Many things we see, hear, and feel in our everyday lives appear in our dreams. If you want to write an informative essay about dreams and sleep, look into more details about this topic.

Tip: When editing for grammar, we also recommend taking the time to improve the readability score of a piece of writing before publishing or submitting it.

People may not remember what happened in their dreams. Studies show that people tend to forget their dreams due to the changing levels of acetylcholine and norepinephrine during sleep. This will be quite an exciting topic for your readers because many people can relate. That being said, research more information about this topic, and discuss it in detail in your essay. 

Although some people believe that dreams don’t mean anything, many psychologists and other experts have theorized about the deeper meaning of dreams. Therefore, your essay about dreams and sleep should delve deeper into this topic. If you’re stuck picking your next essay topic, check out our round-up of essay topics about education .

FAQS on Essays About Dreams in Life

There are many great short essays about dreams; you can write your own too! Some great examples include Do Dreams Really Mean Anything? by David B. Feldman and  Dreams by Hedy Marks.

Writing about your dreams in life is a fantastic creative outlet and can even help you plan your future. Use a prompt to get started, like “What are your dreams in life?” or “What do you aspire to be in ten years?” and begin writing without thinking too much about it. See where the pen takes you and start mapping out your future with this writing exercise.

Meet Rachael, the editor at Become a Writer Today. With years of experience in the field, she is passionate about language and dedicated to producing high-quality content that engages and informs readers. When she's not editing or writing, you can find her exploring the great outdoors, finding inspiration for her next project.

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Dreams and Dreaming

Dreams and dreaming have been discussed in diverse areas of philosophy ranging from epistemology to ethics, ontology, and more recently philosophy of mind and cognitive science. This entry provides an overview of major themes in the philosophy of sleep and dreaming, with a focus on Western analytic philosophy, and discusses relevant scientific findings.

1.1 Cartesian dream skepticism

1.2 earlier discussions of dream skepticism and why descartes’ version is special, 1.3 dreaming and other skeptical scenarios, 1.4 descartes’ solution to the dream problem and real-world dreams, 2.1 are dreams experiences, 2.2 dreams as instantaneous memory insertions, 2.3 empirical evidence on the question of dream experience, 2.4 dreams and hallucinations, 2.5 dreams and illusions, 2.6 dreams as imaginative experiences, 2.7 dreaming and waking mind wandering, 2.8 the problem of dream belief, 3.1 dreaming as a model system and test case for consciousness research, 3.2 dreams, psychosis, and delusions, 3.3 beyond dreams: dreamless sleep experience and the concepts of sleep, waking, and consciousness, 4. dreaming and the self, 5. immorality and moral responsibility in dreams, 6.1 the meaning of dreams, 6.2 the functions of dreaming, 7. conclusions, other internet resources, related entries, 1. dreams and epistemology.

Dream skepticism has traditionally been the most famous and widely discussed philosophical problem raised by dreaming (see Williams 1978; Stroud 1984). In the Meditations , Descartes uses dreams to motivate skepticism about sensory-based beliefs about the external world and his own bodily existence. He notes that sensory experience can also lead us astray in commonplace sensory illusions such as seeing things as too big or small. But he does not think such cases justify general doubts about the reliability of sensory perception: by taking a closer look at an object seen under suboptimal conditions, we can easily avoid deception. By contrast, dreams suggest that even in a seemingly best-case scenario of sensory perception (Stroud 1984), deception is possible. Even the realistic experience of sitting dressed by the fire and looking at a piece of paper in one’s hands (Descartes 1641: I.5) is something that can, and according to Descartes often does, occur in a dream.

There are different ways of construing the dream argument. A strong reading is that Descartes is trapped in a lifelong dream and none of his experiences have ever been caused by external objects (the Always Dreaming Doubt ; see Newman 2019). A weaker reading is that he is just sometimes dreaming but cannot rule out at any given moment that he is dreaming right now (the Now Dreaming Doubt ; see Newman 2019). This is still epistemologically worrisome: even though some of his sensory-based beliefs might be true, he cannot determine which these are unless he can rule out that he is dreaming. Doubt is thus cast on all of his beliefs, making sensory-based knowledge slip out of reach.

Cartesian-style skeptical arguments have the following form (quoted from Klein 2015):

• If I know that p , then there are no genuine grounds for doubting that p .
• U is a genuine ground for doubting that p .
• Therefore, I do not know that p .

If we apply this to the case of dreaming, we get:

• If I know that I am sitting dressed by the fire, then there are no genuine grounds for doubting that I am really sitting dressed by the fire.
• If I were now dreaming, this would be a genuine ground for doubting that I am sitting dressed by the fire: in dreams, I have often had the realistic experience of sitting dressed by the fire when I was actually lying undressed in bed!
• Therefore, I do not know that I am now sitting dressed by the fire.

Importantly, both strong and weak versions of the dream argument cast doubt only on sensory-based beliefs, but leave other beliefs unscathed. According to Descartes, that 2+3=5 or that a square has no more than 4 sides is knowable even if he is now dreaming:

although, in truth, I should be dreaming, the rule still holds that all which is clearly presented to my intellect is indisputably true. (Descartes 1641: V.15)

By Descartes’ lights, dreams do not undermine our ability to engage in the project of pure, rational enquiry (Frankfurt 1970; but see Broughton 2002).

Dream arguments have been a staple of philosophical skepticism since antiquity and were so well known that in his objections to the Meditations , Hobbes (1641) criticized Descartes for not having come up with a more original argument. Yet, Descartes’ version of the problem, more than any other, has left its mark on the philosophical discussion.

Earlier versions tended to touch upon dreams just briefly and discuss them alongside other examples of sensory deception. For example, in the Theaetetus (157e), Plato has Socrates discuss a defect in perception that is common to

dreams and diseases, including insanity, and everything else that is said to cause illusions of sight and hearing and the other senses.

This leads to the conclusion that knowledge cannot be defined through perception.

Dreams also appear in the canon of standard skeptical arguments used by the Pyrrhonists. Again, dreams and sleep are just one of several conditions (including illness, joy, and sorrow) that cast doubt on the trusthworthiness of sensory perception (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers; Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism) .

Augustine ( Against the Academics ; Confessions) thought the dream problem could be contained, arguing that in retrospect, we can distinguish both dreams and illusions from actual perception (Matthew 2005: chapter 8). And Montaigne ( The Apology for Raymond Sebond ) noted that wakefulness itself teems with reveries and illusions, which he thought were even more epistemologically worrisome than nocturnal dreams.

Descartes devoted much more space to the discussion of dreaming and cast it as a unique epistemological threat distinct from both waking illusions and evil genius or brain-in-a-vat-style arguments. His claim that he has often been deceived by his dreams implies he also saw dreaming as a real-world (rather than merely hypothetical) threat.

This is further highlighted by the intimate, first-person style of the Meditations . Their narrator is supposed to exemplify everyone’s epistemic situation, illustrating the typical defects of the human mind. Readers are further drawn in by Descartes’ strategy of moving from commonsense examples towards more sophisticated philosophical claims (Frankfurt 1970). For example, Descartes builds up towards dream skepticism by first considering familiar cases of sensory illusions and then deceptively realistic dreams.

Finally, much attention has been devoted to several dreams Descartes reportedly had as a young man. Some believe these dreams embodied theoretical doubts he developed in the Discourse and Meditations (Baillet 1691; Leibniz 1880: IV; Cole 1992; Keefer 1996). Hacking (2001:252) suggests that for Descartes, dream skepticism was not just a philosophical conundrum but a source of genuine doubt. There is also some discussion about the dream reports’ authenticity (Freud 1940; Cole 1992; Clarke 2006; Browne 1977).

In the Meditations , after discussing the dream argument, Descartes raises the possibility of an omnipotent evil genius determined to deceive us even in our most basic beliefs. Contrary to dream deception, Descartes emphasizes that the evil genius hypothesis is a mere fiction. Still, it radicalizes the dream doubt in two respects. One, where the dream argument left the knowability of certain general truths intact, these are cast in doubt by the evil genius hypothesis . Two, where the dream argument, at least on the weaker reading, involves just temporary deception, the evil genius has us permanently deceived.

One modernized version, the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment, says that if evil scientists placed your brain in a vat and stimulated it just right, your conscious experience would be exactly the same as if you were still an ordinary, embodied human being (Putnam 1981). In the Matrix -trilogy (Chalmers 2005), Matrixers live unbeknownst to themselves in a computer simulation. Unlike the brain-in-a-vat , they have bodies that are kept alive in pods, and flaws in the simulation allow some of them to bend its rules to their advantage.

Unlike dream deception, which is often cast as a regularly recurring actuality (cf. Windt 2011), brain-in-a-vat-style arguments are often thought to be merely logically or nomologically possible. However, there might be good reasons for thinking that we actually live in a computer simulation (Bostrom 2003), and if we lend some credence to radical skeptical scenarios, this may have consequences for how we act (Schwitzgebel 2017).

Even purely hypothetical skeptical scenarios may enhance their psychological force by capitalizing on the analogy with dreams. Clark (2005) argues that the Matrix contains elements of “industrial-strength deception” in which both sensory experience and intellectual functioning are exactly the same as in standard wake-states, whereas other aspects are more similar to the compromised reasoning and bizarre shifts that are the hallmark of dreams.

At the end of the Sixth Meditation , Descartes suggests a solution to the dream problem that is tied to a reassessment of what it is like to dream. Contrary to his remarks in the First Meditation , he notes that dreams are only rarely connected to waking memories and are often discontinuous, as when dream characters suddenly appear or disappear. He then introduces the coherence test:

But when I perceive objects with regard to which I can distinctly determine both the place whence they come, and that in which they are, and the time at which they appear to me, and when, without interruption, I can connect the perception I have of them with the whole of the other parts of my life, I am perfectly sure that what I thus perceive occurs while I am awake and not during sleep. (Meditation VI. 24)

For all practical purposes, he has now found a mark by which dreaming and waking can be distinguished (cf. Meditation I.7), and even if the coherence test is not fail-safe, the threat of dream deception has been averted.

Descartes’ remarks about the discontinuous and ad hoc nature of many dreams are backed up by empirical work on dream bizarreness (see Hobson 1988; Revonsuo & Salmivalli 1995). Still, many of his critics were not convinced this helped his case against the skeptic. Even if Descartes’ revised phenomenological description characterizes most dreams, one might occasionally merely dream of successfully performing the test (Hobbes 1641), and in some dreams, one might seem to have a clear and distinct idea but this impression is false (Bourdin 1641). Both the coherence test and the criterion of clarity and distinctness would then be unreliable.

How considerations of empirical plausibility impact the dream argument continues to be a matter of debate. Grundmann (2002) appeals to scientific dream research to introduce an introspective criterion: when we introspectively notice that we are able to engage in critical reflection, we have good reason to think that we are awake and not dreaming. However, this assumes critical reasoning to be uniformly absent in dreams. If attempts at critical reasoning do occur in dreams and if they generally tend to be corrupted, the introspective criterion might again be problematic (Windt 2011, 2015a). There are also cases in which even after awakening, people mistake what was in fact a dream for reality (Wamsley et al. 2014). At least in certain situations and for some people, dream deception might be a genuine cause of concern (Windt 2015a).

2. The ontology of dreams

In what follows, the term “conscious experience” is used as an umbrella term for the occurrence of sensations, thoughts, impressions, emotions etc. in dreams (cf. Dennett 1976). These are all phenomenal states: there is something it is like to be in these states for the subject of experience (cf. Nagel 1974). To ask about dream experience is to ask whether it is like something to dream while dreaming, and whether what it is like is similar to (or relevantly different from) corresponding waking experiences.

Cartesian dream skepticism depends on a seemingly innocent background assumption: that dreams are conscious experiences. If this is false, then dreams are not deceptive experiences during sleep and we cannot be deceived, while dreaming, about anything at all. Whether dreams are experiences is a major question for the ontology of dreams and closely bound up with dream skepticism.

The most famous argument denying that dreams are experiences was formulated by Norman Malcolm (1956, 1959). Today, his position is commonly rejected as implausible. Still, it set the tone for the analysis of dreaming as a target phenomenon for philosophy of mind.

For Malcolm, the denial of dream experience followed from the conceptual analysis of sleep: “if a person is in any state of consciousness it logically follows that he is not sound asleep” (Malcolm 1956: 21). Following some remarks of Wittgenstein’s (1953: 184; see Chihara 1965 for discussion), Malcolm claimed

the concept of dreaming is derived, not from dreaming, but from descriptions of dreams, i.e., from the familiar phenomenon that we call “telling a dream”. (Malcolm 1959:55)

Malcolm argued that retrospective dream reports are the sole criterion for determining whether a dream occurred and there is no independent way of verifying dream reports. While first-person, past-tense psychological statements (such as “I felt afraid”) can at least in principle be verified by independent observations (but see Canfield 1961; Siegler 1967; Schröder 1997), he argued dream reports (such as “in my dream, I felt afraid”) are governed by different grammars and merely superficially resemble waking reports. In particular, he denied dream reports imply the occurrence of experiences (such as thoughts, feelings, or judgements) in sleep:

If a man had certain thoughts and feelings in a dream it no more follows that he had those thoughts and feelings while asleep, than it follows from his having climbed a mountain in a dream that he climbed a mountain while asleep. (Malcolm 1959/1962: 51–52)

What exactly Malcolm means by “conscious experience” is unclear. Sometimes he seems to be saying that conscious experience is conceptually tied to wakefulness (Malcolm 1956); other times he claims that terms such as mental activity or conscious experience are vague and it is senseless to apply them to sleep and dreams (Malcolm 1959: 52).

Malcolm’s analysis of dreaming has been criticized as assuming an overly strict form of verificationism and a naïve view of language and conceptual change. A particularly counterintuitive consequence of his view is that there can be no observational evidence for the occurrence of dreams in sleep aside from dream reports. This includes behavioral evidence such as sleepwalking or sleeptalking, which he thought showed the person was partially awake; as he also thought dreams occur in sound sleep, such sleep behaviors were largely irrelevant to the investigation of dreaming proper. He also claimed adopting a physiological criterion of dreaming (such as EEG measures of brain activity during sleep) would change the concept of dreaming, which he argued was tied exclusively to dream reporting. This claim was particularly radical as it explicitly targeted the discovery of REM sleep and its association with dreaming (Dement & Kleitman 1957), which is commonly regarded as the beginning of the science of sleep and dreaming. Malcolm’s position was that the very project of a science of dreaming was misguided.

Contra Malcolm, most assume that justification does not depend on strict criteria with the help of which the truth of a statement can be determined with absolute certainty, but “on appeals to the simplicity, plausibility, and predictive adequacy of an explanatory system as a whole” (Chihara & Fodor 1965: 197). In this view, behavioral and/or physiological evidence can be used to verify dream reports (Ayer 1960) and the alleged principled difference between dream reports and other first-person, past-tense psychological sentences (Siegler 1967; Schröder 1997) disappears.

Putnam noted that Malcolm’s analysis of the concept of dreaming relies on the dubious idea that philosophers have access to deep conceptual truths that are hidden to laypeople:

the lexicographer would undoubtedly perceive the logical (or semantical) connection between being a pediatrician and being a doctor, but he would miss the allegedly “logical” character of the connection between dreams and waking impressions. […] this “depth grammar” kind of analyticity (or “logical dependence”) does not exist. (Putnam 1962 [1986]: 306)

Nagel argued that even if one accepts Malcolm’s analysis of the concept of dreaming,

it is a mistake to invest the demonstration that it is impossible to have experiences while asleep with more import than it has. It is an observation about our use of the word “experience”, and no more. It does not imply that nothing goes on in our minds while we dream. (Nagel 1959: 114)

Whether dream thoughts, feelings or beliefs should count as real instances of their kind now becomes an open question, and in any case there is no conceptual contradiction involved in saying one has experiences while asleep and dreaming.

To ask about dream experience is also to ask whether there is something it is like to dream during sleep as opposed to there just being something it is like to remember dreaming after awakening. Dennett’s (1976, 1979) cassette theory says dreams are the product of instantaneous memory insertion at the moment of the awakening, as if a cassette with pre-scripted dreams had been inserted into memory, ready for replay. Dennett claims the cassette theory and the view that dreams are experiences can deal equally well with empirical evidence for instance on the relationship between dreaming and REM sleep. The cassette theory is preferable because it is more parsimonious, positing only an unconscious dream composition process rather than an additional conscious presentation process in sleep. For Dennett, the important point is that it is impossible to distinguish between the two rival theories based on dream recall; the question of dream experience should be settled by independent empirical evidence.

While Dennett shares Malcolm’s skepticism about dream experience, this latter claim is diametrically opposed to Malcolm’s rejection of a science of dreaming. For Dennett, the unreliability of dream recall also is not unique, but exemplifies a broader problem with memory reports: we generally cannot use retrospective recall to distinguish conscious experience from memory insertion (Dennett 1991; see also Emmett 1978).

An earlier and much discussed (Binz 1878; Goblot 1896; Freud 1899; Hall 1981; Kramer 2007:22–24) version of Dennett’s cassette theory goes back to Maury’s (1861) description of a long and complex dream about the French revolution that culminated in his execution at the guillotine, at which point Maury suddenly awoke to find that the headboard had fallen on his neck. Because the dream seemed to systematically build up to this dramatic conclusion, which in turn coincided with a sudden external event, he suggested that such cases were best explained as instantaneous memory insertions experienced at the moment of awakening. Similarly, Gregory (1916) described dreams are psychical explosions occurring at the moment of awakening.

The trustworthiness of dream reports continues to be contentious. Rosen (2013) argues that dream reports are often fabricated and fail to accurately describe experiences occurring during sleep. By contrast, Windt (2013, 2015a) argues that dream reports can at least under certain conditions (such as in laboratory studies, when dreams are reported immediately after awakening by trained participants) be regarded as trustworthy sources of evidence with respect to previous experience during sleep.

Unlike Malcolm, many believe that whether dreams are experiences is an empirical question; and unlike Dennett, the predominant view is that the empirical evidence does indeed support this claim (Flanagan 2000; Metzinger 2003; Revonsuo 2006; Rosen 2013; Windt 2013, 2015a).

A first reason for thinking that dreams are experiences during sleep is the relationship between dreaming and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Researchers in the 1950s discovered that sleep is not a uniform state of rest and passivity, but there is a sleep architecture involving different stages of sleep that is relatively stable both within and across individuals (Aserinsky & Kleitman 1953, 1955; Dement & Kleitman 1957). Following sleep onset, periods of non-REM (or NREM) sleep including slow wave sleep (so called because of the presence of characteristic slow-wave, high-voltage EEG activity) are followed by periods of high-frequency, low-voltage activity during REM sleep. EEG measures from REM sleep strongly resemble waking EEG. REM sleep is additionally characterized by rapid eye movements and a near-complete loss of muscle tone (Dement 1999: 27–50; Jouvet 1999).

The alignment between conscious experience on the one hand and wake-like brain activity and muscular paralysis on the other hand would seem to support the experiential status of dreams as well as explain the outward passivity that typically accompanies them. Reports of dreaming are in fact much more frequent following REM (81.9%) than NREM sleep awakenings (43%; Nielsen 2000). REM reports tend to be more elaborate, vivid, and emotionally intense, whereas NREM reports tend to be more thought-like, confused, non-progressive, and repetitive (Hobson et al. 2000). These differences led to the idea that REM sleep is an objective marker of dreaming (Dement & Kleitman 1957; Hobson 1988: 154).

Attempts to identify dreaming with mental activity during REM sleep have not, however, been successful, and many now hold that dreams can occur in all stages of sleep (e.g., Antrobus 1990; Foulkes 1993b; Solms 1997, 2000; Domhoff 2003; Nemeth & Fazekas 2018). In recent years there has been renewed interest in NREM sleep for the study of dreaming (Noreika et al. 2009; Siclari et al. 2013, 2017). This suggests the inference from the physiology of REM sleep to the phenomenology of dreaming is not straightforward.

A second line of evidence comes from lucid dreams, or dreams in which one knows one is dreaming and often has some level of dream control (Voss et al. 2013; Voss & Hobson 2015; Baird et al. 2019). The term lucid dreaming was coined by van Eeden (1913), but Aristotle ( On Dreams ) already noted that one can sometimes be aware while dreaming that one is dreaming.

Scientific evidence that lucid dreaming is real and a genuine sleep phenomenon comes from laboratory studies (Hearne 1978; LaBerge et al. 1981) showing lucid dreamers can use specific, pre-arranged patterns of eye movements (e.g., right-left-right-left) to signal in real-time that they are now lucid and engaging in dream experiments. These signals are clearly identifiable on the EOG and suggest a correspondence between dream-eye movements and real-eye movements (as predicted by the so-called scanning hypothesis ; see Dement & Kleitman 1957; Leclair-Visonneau et al. 2010). Retrospective reports confirm that the dreamer really was lucid and signalled lucidity (Dresler et al. 2012; Stumbrys et al. 2014).

Signal-verified lucid dreams have been used to study muscular activity accompanying body movements in dreams (Erlacher et al. 2003; Dresler et al. 2011), for advanced EEG analysis of brain activity during lucid dreaming (Voss et al. 2009), and imaging studies (Dresler et al. 2011, 2012). Eye signals can also be used to measure the duration of different activities performed in lucid dreams; contrary to the cassette theory, lucid dreams have temporal extension and certain dream actions even seem to take slightly longer than in waking (Erlacher et al. 2014). There have also been attempts to induce lucidity through non-invasive electrical stimulation during sleep (Stumbrys et al. 2013; Voss et al. 2014). The combination of signal-verified lucid dreaming with volitional control over dream content, retrospective report, and objective sleep measures has been proposed to provide controlled conditions for the study of conscious experience in sleep and a new methodology for investigating the relationship between conscious experience and neurophysiological processes (Baird et al.2019).

A third line of evidence (Revonsuo 2006: 77) comes from dream-enactment behavior (Nielsen et al. 2009), most prominently in patients with REM-sleep behavior disorder (RBD; Schenck & Mahowald 1996; Schenck 2005; Leclair-Visonneau et al. 2010). Due to a loss of the muscular atonia that accompanies REM sleep in healthy subjects, these patients show complex, seemingly goal-directed outward behaviors such as running or fighting off an attacker during REM sleep. Retrospective dream reports often match these behaviors, suggesting that patients literally act out their dreams during sleep.

While persuasive, these lines of evidence might not satisfy skeptics about dream experience. They might worry that results from lucid dreaming and dream enactment do not generalize to ordinary, non-lucid dreams; they might also construe alternative explanations that do not require conscious experience in sleep. There are also methodological concerns, for instance about how closely sleep-behaviors actually match dream experience. A key issue is that to support the experiential status of dreams, evidence from sleep polysomnography, signal verified lucid dreams, or sleep behavior requires convergence with retrospective dream reports. This means trusting dream reports is built into any attempt to empirically resolve the question of dream experience – which then invites the familiar skeptical concerns. Again, an anti-skeptical strategy may be to appeal to explanatory considerations. In this view, the convergence of dream reports and objective polysomnographic or behavioral observations is best explained by the assumption that dreams are experiences in sleep, and this assumption is strengthened by further incoming findings. This strategy places dream reports at the center of scientific dream research while avoiding the contentious claim that their trustworthiness, and with it the experiential status of dreams, can be demonstrated conclusively by independent empirical means (Windt 2013, 2015a).

Even where philosophers agree dreams are experiences, they often disagree on how exactly to characterize dreaming relative to wake-state psychological terms. Often, questions about the ontology of dreaming intersect with epistemological issues. Increasingly, they also incorporate empirical findings.

The standard view is that dreams have the same phenomenal character as waking perception in that they seemingly put us in contact with mind-independent objects, yet no such object is actually being perceived. This means dreams count as hallucinations in the philosophical sense (Crane & French 2017; Macpherson 2013). Even if, in a particularly realistic dream, my visual experience was exactly as it would be if I were awake (I could see my bedroom, my hands on the bed sheets, etc.), as long as my eyes were closed during the episode, I would not, literally, be seeing anything.

There is some controversy in the psychological literature about whether dreams should be regarded as hallucinations. Some believe the term hallucination should be reserved for clinical contexts and wake-state pathologies (Aleman & Larøi 2008: 17; but see ffytche 2007; ffytche et al. 2010).

The view that dreams involve hallucinations is implicit in Descartes’ assumption that even when dreaming,

it is certain that I seem to see light, hear a noise, and feel heat; this cannot be false, and this is what in me is properly called perceiving ( sentire ). (Descartes 1641: II.9)

It also lies at the heart of Aristotle’s ( On Dreams ) assumption that dreams result from the movements of the sensory organs that continue even after the original stimulus has ceased. He believed that in the silence of sleep, these residual movements result in vivid sensory imagery that is subjectively indistinguishable from genuine perception (see also Dreisbach 2000; Barbera 2008).

The assumption of phenomenological equivalence between dream and waking experience can also be found in Berkeley’s (1710: I.18) idealist claim that the existence of external bodies is not necessary for the production of vivid, wake-like perceptual experience. Similarly, Russell defended sense-data theory by noting that in dreams,

I have all the experiences that I seem to have; it is only things outside my mind that are not as I believe them to be while I am dreaming. (Russell 1948: 149–150)

Elsewhere, he argued dreams and waking life

must be treated with equal respect; it is only by some reality not merely sensible that dreams can be condemned. (Russell 1914: 69)

Hume was less clear on this matter, proposing that dreams occupy an intermediate position between vivid and largely non-voluntary sensory impressions and ideas, or “the faint images of previous impressions in thinking and reasoning” (Hume 1739: 1.1.1.1). On the one hand, as mere creatures of the mind, Hume wanted to categorize dreams as ideas. On the other hand, he acknowledged that in sleep, “our ideas can approach the vivacity of sensory impressions” (Hume 1739: 1.1.1.1). Dreams do not fit comfortably into Hume’s attempt to draw a dichotomous distinction between impressions, including perception, and ideas, including sensory imagination (Ryle 1949; Waxman 1994; Broughton 2006).

Phenomenologists often focus not so much on the quality of dream imagery as on the overall character of experience, noting that dreams are experienced as reality; as in waking perception, we simply feel present in a world. This also sets dreams apart from waking fantasy and daydreams (Husserl 1904/1905; Uslar 1964; Conrad 1968; Globus 1987: 89.

At its strongest, the hallucination view claims that dreaming and waking experience are identical in both the quality of sensory imagery and their overall, self-in-a-world structure (Revonsuo 2006: 84). This claim is central to the virtual reality metaphor , according to which consciousness itself is dreamlike and waking perception a kind of online hallucination modulated by the senses (Llinás & Ribary 1994; Llinás & Paré 1991; Revonsuo 2006; Metzinger 2003, 2009).

This seems to be empirically supported. Neuroimaging studies (Dang-Vu et al. 2007; Nir & Tononi 2010; Desseilles et al. 2011) show that the predominance of visual and motor imagery as well as strong emotions in dreams is paralleled by high activation of the corresponding brain areas in REM sleep, which may exceed waking; at the same time, the cognitive deficits often thought to characterize dreams such as the loss of self-awareness, the absence of critical thinking, delusional reasoning, and mnemonic deficits fit in well with the comparative deactivation of frontal areas (Hobson et al. 2000). Hobson (1988, Hobson et al. 2000) has argued that the vivid, hallucinatory character of dreaming results from the fact that in REM sleep, the visual and motor areas are activated in the same way as in waking perception, the sole difference being dreams’ dependence on internal signal generation. Horikawa and colleagues (2013) used neuroimaging data from sleep onset to predict the types of objects described in mentation reports, which they took to support the perceptual equivalence between dreaming and waking.

Generally, versions of the hallucination view that suggest dreams replicate all aspects of waking perception are too vague to be informative. Especially for subtle perceptual activities (such as visual search), we might not know enough about dream phenomenology to make any strong claims (Nielsen 2010). Specifying points of similarity leads to a more informative and precise, but likely also more nuanced view. Dreams are heterogeneous, and some might be more perception-like while others resemble imagination (Windt 2015a). There might also be differences between or even within specific types of imagery. For example, visual imagery might be quite different from touch sensations, which tend to be rare in dreams (Hobson 1988). Visual dream imagery might overall resemble waking perception but lack color saturation, background detail and focus (Rechtschaffen & Buchignani, 1992). Classifying dreams as either hallucinatory or imaginative is further complicated by the fact that there is strong overlap in cortical activity associated with both visual imagery and perception (Zeidman & Maguire, 2016). This means even a strong overlap in cortical activity between, say, visual dream imagery and visual perception does not necessarily set dreaming apart from waking imagination.

This is also true for evidence on eye movements in dreams. LaBerge and colleagues (2018) recently showed that eye tracking of objects is smooth in lucid dreaming and perceiving, but not in imagining. Drawing from this evidence, Rosen (forthcoming) suggests many dreams mimic the phenomenology of interacting with a stable world, including eye movements and visual search. Others argue we should not analogize dream imagery to mind-independent, scannable objects and that eye movements might instead be implicated in the generation of dream imagery (Windt 2018).

Another way to make sense of the claim that dreaming has the same phenomenal character as waking perception is to say some kinds of dream imagery are illusory: they involve misperception of an external object as having different properties than it actually has (cf. Smith 2002; Crane & French 2017). The illusion view disagrees with the hallucination view on whether dreams have a contemporaneous external stimulus source.

The illusion view has fallen out of favor but has a long history. The Ancients believed dreams have bodily sources. This idea underlies the practice of using dreams to diagnose illness, as practiced in the shrines at Epidaurus (Galen On Diagnosis in Dreams ; van de Castle 1994). Aristotle ( On Dreams ) thought some dreams are caused by indigestion, and Hobbes adopted this view, claiming different kinds of dreams could be traced to different bodily sensations. For instance, “lying cold breedeth Dreams of Feare, and raiseth the thought and Image of some fearfull object” (Hobbes 1651: 91).

Appeals to the bodily sources of dreaming became especially popular in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries. Many believed specific dream themes such as flying were linked to sleeping position (Macnish 1838; Scherner 1861; Vold 1910/1912; Ellis 1911) and realizing, in sleep, that one’s feet are not touching the ground (Bergson 1914).

There were also attempts to explain the phenomenology of dreaming by appealing to the absence of outward movement. The lack of appropriate feedback and of movement and touch sensations was thought to cause dreams of being unable to move (Bradley 1894) or of trying but failing to do something (Gregory 1918).

Some proponents of the “ Leibreiztheorie ” (or somatic-stimulus theory) of dreaming attempted to go beyond anecdotal observations to conduct controlled experiments. Weygandt (1893) investigated the influence of various factors including breathing, blood circulation, temperature changes, urge to urinate, sleeping position, and visual or auditory stimulation during sleep on dream content (see Schredl 2010 for details). Singer (1924) proposed experiments on stimulus incorporation in dreams can inform claims on the ontology of dreaming: If dreams are sensations, a particular auditory stimulus should increase the frequency of dreams in nearby sleepers as well as the frequency of sound in their dreams, and it should decrease the range of quality and intensity of these dreams, making them overall more similar and predictable.

Newer studies provide evidence for the incorporation of external stimuli in dreams, including light flashes, sounds, sprays of water applied to the skin (Dement & Wolpert 1958), thermal (Baldridge 1966), electrical (Koulack 1969), and verbal stimuli (Berger 1963; Breger et al. 1971; Hoelscher et al., 1981), as well as blood pressure cuff stimulation on the leg (Nielsen et al. 1995; Sauvageau et al. 1998).

Muscular activity also often leaves its mark on dreams. It occurs throughout sleep but is especially frequent in REM sleep, mostly in the form of twitching but occasionally also in the form of larger, seemingly goal-directed movements (Blumberg 2010; Blumberg & Plumeau 2016). The relation between outward and dream movements is complex: in some cases, outward movements might mirror dream movements, while in others, sensory feedback might prompt dream imagery (Windt 2018).

Generally, it seems external and bodily stimuli can be related to varying degrees to dream and sleep onset imagery (Nielsen 2017; Windt 2018; Windt et al. 2016). Some of these cases appear to fit the concept of illusion, as in when the sound of the alarm clock is experienced, in a dream, as a siren, or when blood pressure cuff inflation on the leg leads to dreams of wearing strange shoes (Windt 2018; for these and other examples, see Nielsen et al. 1995). In other cases, such as when blood pressure cuff stimulation on the leg prompts a dream of seeing someone else’s leg being run over, describing this as illusory misperception might be less straightforward.

Saying that dreams can be prompted by external stimuli and that in some cases these are best described as illusions is different from the stronger claim, sometimes advanced by historical proponents of somatic-stimulus theory, that dreams generally are caused by external or bodily stimuli. As an example of the stronger claim, consider Wundt’s proposal that the

ideas which arise in dreams come, at least to a great extent, from sensations, especially from those of the general sense, and are therefore mostly illusions of fancy, probably only seldom pure memory ideas which hence become hallucinations. (Wundt 1896: 179)

This claim is likely too strong. It is also likely that appeals to external or bodily stimuli on their own cannot fully explain dream imagery, including when and how external stimuli are incorporated in dreams. Sensory incorporation in dreams is often hard to predict and indirect; associated imagery seems related not just to stimulus intensity, but also to short- and long term memories. A full explanation of dream content additionally has to take the cognitive and memory sources of dreaming into account (Windt 2018; Nielsen 2017; cf. Silberer 1919).

The most important rival to the hallucination view is that dreams are imaginative experiences (Liao & Gendler 2019; Thomas 2014). This can mean dream imagery involves imaginings rather than percepts (including hallucinations or illusions; McGinn 2004), that dream beliefs are imaginative and not real beliefs (Sosa 2007), or both (Ichikawa 2008, 2009). An important advantage is that by assimilating dreams to commonplace mental states such as waking fantasy and daydreaming, rather than a rare and often pathological occurrence such as hallucinations, it provides a more unified account of mental life (Stone 1984). However, the reasons for adopting the imagination view are diverse, and dreams have been proposed to resemble imaginings and differ from perception along a number of dimensions (e.g. McGinn 2004, 2005a,b; Thomas 2014). This issue is complicated by the fact that there is little agreement on the definition of imagination and its relation to perception (Kind 2013).

One way is to deny dreams involve presence or the feeling of being in a world, which many believe is central to waking perception. Imagination theorists compare the sense in which we feel present in our dreams to cognitive absorption, as when we are lost in a novel, film, or vivid daydream (Sartre 1940; McGinn 2004; but see Hering 1947; Globus 1987). Some argue that reflexive consciousness or meta-awareness (as in lucid dreams) interrupts cognitive absorption and terminates the ongoing dream (Sartre 1940), essentially denying lucid dreams are possible.

Another issue is whether dreams are subject to the will (Ichikawa 2009). Imagination is often characterized as active and under our control (Wittgenstein 1967: 621, 633), involving “a special effort of the mind” (Descartes 1641: VI, 2), whereas perception is passive. Because dreams just seem to happen to us without being under voluntary control, they present an important challenge for the imagination view. Ichikawa (2009) argues lucid control dreams show dreams are generally subject to the will even where they are not under deliberate control.

Dreams are widely described as more indeterminate than waking perception (James 1890: 47; Stone 1984). In scientific dream research, vagueness is regarded as one of three main subtypes of bizarreness (Hobson 1988; Revonsuo & Salmivalli 1995). An example are dream characters who are identified not by their behavior or looks, but by just knowing (Kahn et al. 2000, 2002; Revonsuo & Tarkko 2002). Dreams are also attention-dependent and lack foreground-background structure (Thompson 2014); while it is tempting to construe the dream world as rich in detail, there is no more to dreams than meets the eye, and many think dream experience is exhausted by what is the focus of selective attention (Hunter 1983; Thompson 2014).

Indeterminacy is also related to the question of whether we dream in color or in black and white. Based on a review of historical and recent studies, Schwitzgebel (2002, 2011) argues there has been a shift in theories on dream color that coincides with the rise first of black-and-white and then color television. He argues it is unlikely that dreams themselves changed from colored to black and white and back to colored, proposing that a change in opinion is a more plausible explanation. Maybe dreams were either black and white or colored all along; or maybe they are indeterminate with respect to color, as may be the case for imagined or fictional objects; were this the case, it would strengthen the imagination view (Ichikawa 2009). Schwitzgebel’s main point is that reports of colored dreaming are unreliable and our opinions about dreams can be mistaken (but see Windt 2013, 2015a). This relates to Schwitzgebel’s (2011; Hurlburt & Schwitzgebel 2007) general skepticism about the reliability of introspection.

The issue of dream color has led to a number of follow-up studies (Schwitzgebel 2003; Schwitzgebel et al. 2006; Murzyn 2008; Schredl et al. 2008; Hoss 2010). They suggest most people dream in color and a small percentage describe grayscale or even mixed dreams (Murzyn 2008) or dreams involving moderate color saturation (Rechtschaffen and Buchignani 1992). Indeterminacy is rarely reported.

The imagination view has consequences for Cartesian dream skepticism. If dream pain does not feel like real pain, there is a fail-safe way to determine whether one is now dreaming: one need only pinch oneself (Nelson 1966; Stone 1984; but see Hodges & Carter 1969; Kantor 1970). As Locke put it,

if our dreamer pleases to try, whether the glowing heat of a glass furnace, be barely a wandering imagination in a drowsy man’s fancy, by putting his hand into it, he may perhaps be wakened into a certainty greater than he could wish, that it is something more than bare imagination. (Locke 1689: IV.XI.8)

If dreaming feels different from waking, this raises the question why we tend to describe dreams in the same terms as waking perception. Maybe this is because most people haven’t thought about these matters and they would find the imagination view plausible if they considered it (Ichikawa 2009). Or maybe

it is just because we all know that dreams are throughout un like waking experiences that we can safely use ordinary expressions in the narration of them. (Austin 1962: 42)

Some authors classify dreams as imaginings while acknowledging they feel like perceiving. For example, Hobbes describes dreams as “the imaginations of them that sleep” (Hobbes 1651: 90), and imagination as a “ decaying sense ” (Hobbes 1651: 88). Yet he also uses the concepts of imagination and fancy to describe perception and argues “their appearance to us is Fancy, the same waking, that dreaming” (Hobbes 1651: 86).

In the scientific literature, the imagination view is complemented by cognitive theories. Foulkes (1978: 5) describes dreaming as a form of thinking with its own grammar and syntax, but allows that dream imagery is sufficently perception-like to deceive us. Domhoff’s neurocognitive model of dreaming (2001, 2003) emphasizes the dependence of dreaming on visuospatial skills and on a network including the association areas of the forebrain. The theory draws from findings on the partial or global cessation of dreaming following brain lesions (cf. Solms 1997, 2000), evidence that dreaming develops gradually and in tandem with visuospatial skills in children (Foulkes 1993a, 1999; but see Resnick et al. 1994), and results from dream content analysis supporting the continuity of dreaming with waking concerns and memories (the so-called continuity hypothesis ; see Domhoff 2001, 2003; Schredl & Hofmann 2003; Schredl 2006; see also Nir & Tononi 2010).

A number of researchers have begun to consider dreaming in the context of theories of mind wandering. Mind wandering is frequent in waking and involves spontaneous thoughts that unfold dynamically and are only weakly constrained by ongoing tasks and environmental demands (Schooler et al. 2011; Smallwood & Schooler 2015; Christoff et al. 2016). Based on phenomenological and neurophysiological similarities, dreams have been proposed to be an intensified form of waking mind wandering (Pace-Schott 2007, 2013; Domhoff 2011; Wamsley 2013; Fox et al. 2013). This basic idea seems to have been anticipated by Leibniz, who noted that the spontaneous formation of visions in dreams surpasses the capacity of our waking imagination (Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters , Vol. I, 177–178).

The analogy between dreams and waking mind wandering has been discussed in the context of cognitive agency. Metzinger (2013a,b, 2015) describes dreams and waking mind wandering as involving a cyclically recurring loss of mental autonomy, or the ability to deliberately control one’s conscious thought processes. Dreams and waking mind wandering are not mental actions but unintentional mental behaviors, comparable to subpersonal processes such as breathing or heartbeat. Because dreaming and waking mind wandering make up a the majority of our conscious mental lives, he argues that cognitive agency and mental autonomy are the exception, not the rule.

This raises the question of how to make sense of lucid control dreams, which involve both meta-awareness and agency. Windt and Voss (2018) argue that in such cases, spontaneous processes including imagery formation co-exist alongside more deliberate, top-down control; they also argue metacognitive insight and control themselves can have spontaneous elements. This suggests spontaneity and control are not opposites, but a more complex account is needed. Possibly, certain dreams and instances of waking mind wandering can be both spontaneous and agentive.

The analogy with mind wandering might help move forward the debate on the ontology of dreaming. In this debate, a common assumption is that dreams can be categorized as either hallucinatory or imaginative. Yet the application of these terms to dreams quickly runs into counterexamples and it is unclear they are mutually exclusive. One option is pluralism (Rosen 2018b), in which some aspects of dreaming are hallucinatory, others imaginative, and yet again others illusory. Another is that dreams are sui generis, combining aspects associated with wake states such as hallucinating, imagining, or perceiving in a novel manner without mimicking them completely. Windt (2015a) proposes that mind wandering, which describes a range of mental states loosely characterized by their spontaneous and dynamic character, might be particularly suitable for the characterization of dreaming precisely because that term leaves open more specific questions on the phenomenology of dreaming, allowing for variation in control, determinacy, and so on. This might be a good starting point for describing what is unique about dreaming while also acknowledging continuities across sleep-wake states and capitalizing on the strengths of the hallucination, illusion, imagination, and cognitive views.

The second strand of the imagination view argues that dream beliefs are not real beliefs, but propositional imaginings. This may or may not be combined with the claim that dream imagery is imaginative rather than perceptual (Sosa 2007; Ichikawa 2009).

Denying that dream beliefs have the status of real beliefs only makes sense before the background of a specific account of what beliefs are and how they are distinguished from other mental states such as delusions or propositional imaginings. For instance, Ichikawa (2009) argues that if we follow interpretationist or dispositionalist accounts of belief, dream beliefs fall short of real beliefs. He claims dream beliefs lack connection with perceptual experience and fail to motivate actions; consequently, they do not have the same functional role as real beliefs. Moreover, we cannot ascribe dream beliefs to a person by observing them lying asleep in bed. Dream beliefs are often inconsistent with longstanding waking beliefs and acquired and discarded without any process of belief revision (Ichikawa 2009).

This analysis of dream beliefs has consequences for skepticism. If dream beliefs are propositional imaginings, then we do not falsely believe while dreaming that we are now awake, but only imagine that we do (Sosa 2007). It is not clear though that this protects us from deception. If dream beliefs fall short of real beliefs, this might even make the specter of dream deception more worrisome: in mistaking dream beliefs for the real thing, we would now be deceived about the status of our own mental states (Ichikawa 2008).

It is also not clear whether the same type of argument extends to mental states other than beliefs. As Lewis points out, a person might

in fact believe or realize in the course of a dream that he was dreaming, and even if we said that, in such case, he only dreamt that he was dreaming, this still leaves it possible for someone who is asleep to entertain at the time the thought that he is asleep. (Lewis 1969: 133)

Mental states other than believing such as entertaining, thinking, or minimally appraisive instances of taking for granted might be sufficient for deception (Reed 1979).

The debate about dream beliefs is paralleled by a debate about whether delusions are beliefs or imaginings (see Currie 2000; Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; McGinn 2004; Bayne & Pacherie 2005; Bortolotti 2009; Gendler 2013). Both debates might plausibly inform each other, especially as dreams are sometimes proposed to be delusional (Hobson 1999).

3. Dreaming and theories of consciousness

Dreams are a global state of consciousness in which experience arises under altered behavioral and neurophysiological conditions as compared to standard wakefulness; unlike other altered states of consciousness (such as drug-induced or deep meditative states) and pathological wake states (such as psychosis or neurological syndromes), dreams occur spontaneously and regularly in healthy subjects. For both reasons, many regard dreams as a test case for theories of consciousness or even an ideal model system for consciousness research (Churchland 1988; Revonsuo 2006).

Existing proposals differ on the phenomenology of dreaming: referring to dream bizarreness, Churchland describes dream experience as robustly different from waking, whereas Revonsuo argues dreaming is similar to waking and the purest form of experience:

the dreaming brain brings out the phenomenal level of organization in a clear and distinct form. Dreaming is phenomenality pure and simple, untouched by external physical stimulation or behavioural activity. (Revonsuo 2006: 75)

Revonsuo argues dreaming reveals the basic, state-independent structure of consciousness to be immersive: “dreaming depicts consciousness first and foremost as a subjective world- for-me ” (Revonsuo 2006: 75). This leads him to introduce the “world-simulation metaphor of consciousness”, according to which consciousness itself is essentially simulational and dreamlike. This is taken to support internalism about conscious experience.

This latter claim is also contentious. Noë (2004: 213) argues that phenomenological differences between dreaming and waking (such as greater instability of visual dream imagery) result from the lack of dynamic interaction with the environment in dreams. He proposes this shows that neural states are sufficient for dreaming but denies they are also sufficient for perceptual experience.

A possible problem for both views is their reliance on background assumptions about the phenomenology of dreaming and its disconnection from environmental stimuli and bodily sensations. Windt (2015a, 2018) argues both internalism and externalism mistakenly assume dreams to be isolated from external sensory input and own-body perception; she believes both the phenomenology of dreaming and its correlation with external stimuli are complex and variable. She argues the analysis of dreaming does not clearly support either side in the debate on internalism vs externalism (but see Rosen 2018a). Generally, in the absence of a well worked out theory of dreaming and its sleep-stage and neural correlates, proposals for using dreaming as a model system or test case run the risk of relying on an oversimplified description of the target phenomenon (Windt & Noreika 2011).

Recent accounts appealing to generative models and predictive processing (Clark 2013b; Hohwy 2013) suggest a new, unified account of perception, imagination, and dreaming. In these accounts, different mental states, including perception and action, embody different strategies of hypothesis testing and prediction error minimization. Perception is the attempt to model the hidden external causes of sensory stimuli; action involves keeping the internal model stable while changing the sensory input. Clark argues that on such a model,

systems that know how to perceive an object as a cat are thus systems that, ipso facto , are able to use a top-down cascade to bring about the kinds of activity pattern that would be characteristic of the presence of a cat. […] Perceivers like us, if this is correct, are inevitably potential dreamers and imaginers too. Moreover, they are beings who, in dreaming and imagining, are deploying many of the very same strategies and resources used in ordinary perception. (Clark 2013a: 764)

Predictive processing accounts have also been used to explain specific features of dreaming. Bizarreness has been associated with the comparative lack of external stimulus processing, implying dream imagery is relatively unconstrained by prediction errors (cf. Hobson & Friston 2012; Fletcher & Frith 2008; Bucci & Grasso 2017). Windt (2018) suggests a predictive processing account of dream imagery generation that links bodily self-experience to own-body perception and subtle motor behaviors such as twitching in REM sleep (Blumberg 2010; Blumberg & Plumeau 2016). She argues that movement sensations in dreams, in relation to REM-sleep related muscle twitching, involve a form of bodily self-sampling in which coordinated muscular activity contributes to the generation and maintenance of a body model. This is important because in predictive processing accounts neither the bodily nor the external causes of sensory inputs are known; at the same time, having an accurate body model is a prerequisite for action, requiring the system to disambiguate between self- and other generated changes to sensory inputs. Especially in early development, sleep might provide the ideal conditions for exploring one’s own body via subtle but coordinated muscular activity while processing of visual and auditory stimuli is reduced.

Dreams have also been suggested as a test case for whether phenomenal consciousness can be divorced from cognitive access (e.g., Block 2007; but see Cohen & Dennett 2011). Sebastián (2014a) argues that dreams provide empirical evidence that conscious experience can occur independently of cognitive access. This is because during (non-lucid) REM-sleep dreams, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) as the most plausible mechanism underlying cognitive access is selectively deactivated (see also Pantani et al. 2018). This would challenge theories linking conscious experience to access, such as higher-order-thought theory (Sebastián 2014b). However, both the hypoactivation of the dlPCF in REM sleep and its association with cognitive access have been debated. Fazekas and Nemeth (2018) suggest that certain kinds of cognitive access may be independent of dlPFC activation, necessitating a more complex account.

Dreaming has been suggested as a model system not just of waking consciousness in general, but also of psychotic wake states in particular. The analogy between dreaming and madness has a long philosophical history (Plato, Phaedrus ; Kant 1766; Schopenhauer 1847) and finds particularly stark expression in Hobson’s claim that “dreaming is not a model of a psychosis. It is a psychosis. It’s just a healthy one” (Hobson 1999: 44). Gottesmann (2006) proposes dreaming as a neurophysiological model of schizophrenia. There is a rich discussion on the theoretical and methodological implications of dream research for psychiatry (see Scarone et al. 2007; d’Agostino et al. 2013; see Windt & Noreika 2011 as well as the other papers in this special issue) and a number of studies have investigated differences in dream reports from schizophrenic and healthy subjects (Limosani et al. 2011a,b).

Rather than likening dreaming to waking in general or specific wake states such as psychosis, there have also been attempts to compare specific dream phenomena to wake-state delusions. Gerrans (2012, 2013, 2014) focuses on character misidentification in dreams and delusions of hyperfamiliarity (such as the Frégoli delusion, in which strangers are mistakenly identified as family members, and déjà vu ) to argue that anomalous experience and faulty reality testing both play a role in delusion formation. Rosen (2015) analyzes instances of thought insertion and of auditory hallucinations, which are key symptoms of schizophrenia, to raise broader questions about the altered sense of agency in dreams as compared to waking.

Philosophers have focused almost exclusively on dreaming, largely leaving to the side questions about dreamless sleep including whether it is uniformly unconscious. In recent years there has been a surge of interest in the possibility of dreamless sleep experience and foundational issues about the definition of sleep and waking. This has been paralleled by growing interest in dreaming in NREM sleep.

Conceptually, interest in dreamless sleep experience has been facilitated by the precise definition of dreaming offered by simulation views (Revonsuo et al. 2015). If dreams are immersive sleep experiences characterized by their here -and- now structure, it makes sense to ask whether this is true for all or just a subset of sleep-related experiences and whether non-immersive sleep experiences exist. By contrast, if dreaming is broadly identified with any conscious mentation in sleep (Pagel et al. 2001), there is no conceptual space for dreamless sleep experience.

Following Thompson's (2014, 2015) discussion of dreamless sleep in Indian and Buddhist philosophy, Windt and colleagues (2016; see also Windt 2015b) introduce a framework for different kinds of dreamless sleep experience ranging from thinking and isolated imagery, perception, or bodily sensations, where these lack integration into a scene, to minimal kinds of experience lacking imagery or specific thought contents. A possible example of minimal phenomenal experience in sleep are white dreams, where people report having had experiences during sleep but cannot remember any details. Taken at face value, some white dream reports might describe experiences that lack reportable content (Windt 2015b); others might describe forgotten dreams or dreams with degraded content (Fazekas et al. 2018). Another example are reports of witnessing dreamless sleep, as described in certain meditation practices. This state is said to involve non-conceptual awareness of sleep, again in the absence of imagery or specific thought contents, and loss of sense of self (Thompson 2014, 2015). Some schools in Buddhist philosophy explain claims of deep and dreamless sleep by saying we never fully lose consciousness in sleep (Prasad 2000, 66; and Thompson 2014, 2015).

Empirically, interest in dreamless sleep experience is paralleled by increasing interest in experiences in NREM sleep (Fazekas et al. 2018). Most researchers now accept that dreaming is not confined to REM sleep, but also occurs at sleep onset and in NREM sleep. The deeper stages of NREM sleep are particularly interesting as they involve roughly similar proportions of dreaming, unconscious sleep, and white dreams (Noreika et al. 2009: Siclari et al. 2013, 2017). In the search for the neural correlates of dreaming vs unconscious dreamless sleep, this makes comparisons within the same sleep stage possible and avoids confounds involved in comparing presumably dreamful REM sleep with presumably dreamless NREM sleep. Findings suggest that activity in the same parietal hot zone underlies dreaming in both NREM and REM sleep (Siclari et al. 2017).

Where sleep and dream research have traditionally tried to identify the sleep stage correlates of dreaming, newer research suggests local changes occurring independently of sleep stages might in fact be more relevant. Traditionally regarded as global, whole-brain phenomena, there is now increasing evidence that sleep itself is locally driven, and local changes in sleep depth might be associated with changes in sleep-related experience (Siclari & Tononi 2017; Andrillon et al. 2019). While sleep and dream research are often considered as separate fields, changes in how sleep in general and sleep stages in particular are defined appear closely associated with changes in the theoretical conception of dreaming and its empirical investigation.

Historically, discoveries about dreaming have precipitated changing conceptions of sleep (for an excellent history of the study of sleep and dreaming, see Kroker 2007). Following Aristotle ( On Sleeping and Waking ), sleep was traditionally defined in negative terms as the absence of wakefulness and perception. This is still reflected in Malcolm’s assumption that “to a person who is sound asleep, ‘dead to the world’, things cannot even seem” (Malcolm 1956: 26). With the discovery of REM sleep, sleep came to be regarded as a heterogeneous phenomenon characterized by the cyclic alteration of different sleep stages. REM sleep was now considered as “neither sleeping nor waking. It was obviously a third state of the brain, as different from sleep as sleep is from wakefulness” (Jouvet 1999: 5). The folk-psychological dichotomy between sleep and wakefulness now seemed oversimplified and empirically implausible. At the same time dreaming, which had previously been considered as an intermediate state of half-sleeping and half-waking, came to be regarded as a genuine sleep phenomenon, but narrowed to REM sleep. Today, the framework for describing dreams and other sleep-related experiences is more precise, but dreaming has also been cast adrift from REM sleep.

A closely associated issue is how to define waking. Crowther’s (2018) capacitation thesis casts waking consciousness as a state in which the individual is fully switched on to their environment, but also to their own epistemic (cf. O’Shaugnessy 2002) and agentive potential; the waking individual is empowered to act and think in certain ways, though this potential need not be actualized. By contrast, dreaming is an “imagining-of consciousness” (O’Shaughnessy 2002: 430) and consciousness is conceptually tied to wakefulness. Because in lucid dreams, the epistemic and agentive profile of waking is at least partly realized, they might, according to Crowther, be regarded as closer to waking than nonlucid dreams.

This account of waking and sleep may also have consequences for the imagination model of dreaming and dream skepticism (Soteriou 2017). As in the imagination model, dreaming would be passive and action, including cognitive agency, would be tied to waking. If dreaming nonetheless involved passive episodes of imagining oneself to be active, one would be unable to tell that one were dreaming and imagining, as this insight would require the exercise of real agency. The sceptical consequence would be that when dreaming, one would lose agency as well as the capacity to gain insight into one’s current state. Yet our ability to know we are waking when waking would be unscathed; according to Soteriou, waking would thus have an epistemic function connected to the capacity to exercise agency over our mental lives.

Finally, definitions of consciousness themselves are bound up with conceptions of sleep and dreaming. As dreaming went from a state whose experiential status was doubted to being widely recognized as a second global state of consciousness, consciousness sometimes came to be defined contrastively as that which disappears in deep, dreamless sleep and reappears in waking and dreaming (Searle 2000; Tononi 2008). In light of dreamless sleep experience, such definitions are problematic (Thompson 2014, 2015; Windt 2015b; Windt et al. 2016). Dreamless sleep experience has been proposed to be particularly relevant for understanding minimal phenomenal experience, or the conditions under which the simplest kind of conscious experience arises (Windt 2015b). The investigation of dreamless sleep might thus shed light on the transition from unconscious sleep to sleep-related experience.

We almost always have a self in dreams, though this self can sometimes be a slightly different (e.g. older or younger) version of our waking self or even a different person entirely. Dreams therefore raise interesting questions about the identity between the dream and waking self. Locke (1689) invites us to imagine two men alternating in turns between sleep and wakefulness and sharing one continuously thinking soul (Locke 1689: II.I.12). He argues that if one man retained no memory of the soul’s thoughts and perceptions while it was linked to the other man’s body, they would be distinct persons. His position is that personal identity depends on psychological continuity, including recall: in the absence of recall, as illustrated by the toy example of two people sharing one soul, continuous conscious thinking does not suffice for identity. Locke also rejects the possibility of unrecalled dreams and the idea that we dream throughout sleep, remembering only a small proportion of our dreams (Locke 1689: II.I.19).

Valberg distinguishes between the subject of the dream (i.e., the dream self) and the sleeping person who is the dreamer of the dream and recalls it upon awakening (Valberg 2007). He argues that awakening from a dream involves crossing a chasm between discrete worlds with discrete spaces and times; it does not make sense to say that “the ‘I’ at these times [is] a single individual who crosses from one world to the other” (Valberg 2007: 69). According to Valberg, this is relevant to dream skepticism because there is no simple way to make sense of the claims that it is I who emerge from a dream or that I was the victim of dream deception.

Vicarious dreams, or dreams in which the protagonist of the dream seems to be a different person from the dreamer, are particularly puzzling with respect to identity. They may even raise the question of whether the dream self has an independent existence (Rosen & Sutton 2013: 1047). Such dreams are superficially similar to cases in which we imagine being another person, but according to Rosen and Sutton require a different explanation: in the case of dreaming, the imagined person’s thoughts are not framed as diverging from one’s own and one does not retain one’s own perspective in addition to the imagined one; in nonlucid dreams, only the perspective of the dream’s protagonist is retained.

The dream self is also at the center of simulation views of dreaming, which define dreaming via its immersive, here and now character as the experience of a self in a world. This leads to further questions about the phenomenology of self-experience in dreams and how it is different from waking self-experience. Different versions of the simulation view focus on different aspects of self- and world experience in dreams, ranging from social simulation (Revonsuo et al. 2015) to the typical features of selfhood in dreams (Revonsuo 2005, 2006, Metzinger 2003, 2009) to the minimal conditions for experiencing oneself as a self in dreams and what this tells us about minimal phenomenal selfhood in general (Windt 2015a, 2018). Yet these different versions of the simulation view are largely complementary and together have forged unity in a field that was previously hampered by lack of agreement about the definition of dreaming. They also integrate the philosophy of dreaming and scientific dream research.

As so often in debates about dreaming, there is disagreement about basic phenomenological questions. Revonsuo (2005) describes self-experience including bodily experience in dreams as identical to waking, whereas Metzinger (2003, 2009; see also Windt & Metzinger 2007) argues that important layers of waking self-experience (such as autobiographical memory, agency, a stable first-person perspective, metacognitive insight, and self-knowledge) are missing in nonlucid dreams. He argues this is due to the cognitive and mnemonic deficit that characterizes nonlucid dreams (cf. Hobson et al. 2000). Windt (2015a) analyzes the range of cognitive and bodily self-experience in dreams, both of which she describes as variable. She argues that in a majority of cases, dreams are weakly phenomenally embodied states in which bodily experience is largely related to movement sensations but a detailed and integrated body representation is lacking; instead, bodily experience in dreams is largely indeterminate (for an attempt to test this empirically, see Koppehele-Gossel et al. 2016). She proposes this is because dreams are also weakly functionally embodied states, in which the specific pattern of bodily experience reflects altered processing of bodily sensations (as in the illusion view). She also analyzes instances of bodiless dreams, in which dreamers say they experienced themselves as disembodied entities, to argue that self-experience can be reduced to pure spatiotemporal-self-location (Windt 2010); she proposes these cases can help identify the conditions for the emergence of minimal phenomenal selfhood (Blanke & Metzinger 2009; see also Metzinger 2013b).

How the phenomenology of dreaming compares to waking and what to say about how the dream self relates to the waking self bears on questions about the moral status of dreams. For Augustine ( Confessions ) dreams were a cause of moral concern because of their indistinguishability from waking life. What particularly worried him about dreams of sexual acts was their vividness, as well as the feeling of pleasure and seeming acquiescence or consent on the part of the dreamer. He concluded, however, that the transition from sleep to wakefulness involves a radical chasm, enabling the dreamer to awaken with a clear conscience and absolving them from taking responsibility for their dream actions.

What exactly Augustine thought the chasm between dreaming and waking consists in allows for different interpretations (Matthews 1981). Firstly, if the dream and waking self are not identical, then waking Augustine is not morally responsible for dream-Augustine’s actions. Secondly, actions performed in dreams might be morally irrelevant because they did not really happen. And thirdly, assuming that moral responsibility requires the ability to act otherwise, dreams provide no grounds for moral concern because we cannot refrain from having certain types of dreams.

The issue of dream immorality may also present a choice point between different accounts of moral evaluation. Where internalists assume the moral status of a person’s actions is entirely determined by internal factors such as intentions and motives, externalists look beyond these to the effects of actions. Driver (2007) argues that the absurdity of dream immorality itself should count against purely internalist accounts; yet she also acknowledges this absurdity is not a necessary feature of dreams.

Central to the question of dream immorality is the status of dreams as actions rather than mere behaviors. Mullane (1965) argues that while we don’t have full control over our dreams, they are not completely involuntary either; as is the case for blushing, considerable effort is required to attain control over our dreams and in some cases they can even be considered as actions. That lucid dream control is, to some extent, a learnable skill (Stumbrys et al. 2014) lends some support to this claim.

6. The meaning of dreams and the functions of dreaming

Philosophical discussions of dreaming tend to focus on (a) dream deception and (b) questions about the ontology of dreaming, its moral status, etc., that tend to intersect with dream skepticism. By contrast, the main source of interest in dreams outside of philosophy traditionally has been dream interpretation and whether dreams are a source of knowledge and insight. Historically, the epistemic status of dreams and the use of prophetic and diagnostic dreams was not just a theoretical, but a practical problem (Barbera 2008). Different types of dreams were distinguished by their putative epistemic value. Artemidorus, for instance, used the term enhypnion to refer to dreams that merely reflect the sleeper’s current bodily or psychological state and hence do not merit further interpretation, whereas he reserved the term oneiron for meaningful and symbolic dreams of divine origin.

The practice of dream interpretation was famously attacked by Aristotle in On Prophecy in Sleep . He denied that dreams are of divine origin, but allowed that occasionally, small affections of the sensory organs as might stem from distant events that cannot be perceived in waking are perceptible in the quiet of sleep. He also believed such dreams were mostly likely to occur in dullards whose minds resemble an empty desert – an assessment that was not apt to encourage interest in dreams (Kroker 2007: 37). A similarly negative view was held by early modern philosophers who believed dreams were often the source of superstitious beliefs (Hobbes 1651; Kant 1766; Schopenhauer 1847).

In Freudian dream theory, dream interpretation once more assumed a prominent role as the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious. This was associated with claims about the psychic sources of dreaming. Freud (1899) also rejected the influence of external or bodily sources, as championed by contemporary proponents of somatic-stimulus theory.

In the neuroscience of dreaming, Hobson famously argued that dreams are the product of the random, brain-stem driven activation of the brain during sleep (Hobson 1988) and at best enable personal insights in the same way as a Rorschach test (Hobson et al. 2000). Dennett (1991) illustrates the lack of design underlying the production of dream narratives through the “party game of psychoanalysis”, which involves an aimless game of question-and-answer. In the game, players follow simple rules to jointly produce narratives that can seem symbolic and meaningful, even though no intelligent and deliberate process of narration was involved.

Even if we grant that dreams are not messages from a hidden entity in need of decoding, this does not imply that dream interpretation cannot be a personally meaningful source of insight and creativity (Hobson & Wohl 2005). Whether and under which conditions, and following which methods, dream interpretation can lead to personally significant insights is an empirical question that is only beginning to be investigated systematically (see Edwards et al. 2013).

Finally, throughout history, views on the epistemic status of dreams and the type of knowledge to be gained from dream interpretation (e.g., knowledge about the future, diagnosis of physical illness, or insights about one’s current concerns) often changed in tandem with views on the origin and sources of dreaming, which gradually moved from divine origins and external sources, via the body, to the unconscious, and finally to the brain.

Different theories on the functions of dreaming have been proposed and the debate is ongoing. An important distinction is between the functions of sleep stages and the functions of dreaming. Well-documented functions of REM sleep include thermoregulation and the development of cortical structures in birds and mammals, as well as neurotransmitter repletion, the reconstruction and maintenance of little-used brain circuits, the structural development of the brain in early developmental phases, as well as the preparation of a repertoire of reflexive or instinctive behaviors (Hobson 2009). Yet none of these functions are obviously linked to dreaming. An exception is protoconsciousness theory, in which REM sleep plays an important role in foetal development by providing a virtual world model even before the emergence of full-blown consciousness (Hobson 2009: 808) .

Numerous studies have investigated the contribution of sleep to memory consolidation, with different sleep stages promoting different types of memories (Diekelmann et al. 2009; Walker 2009). However, only a few studies have investigated the relationship between dream content and memory consolidation in sleep (for a review, see Nielsen & Stenstrom 2005). Dreams rarely involve episodic replay of waking memories (Fosse et al. 2003). The incorporation of memory sources seems to follow a specific temporal pattern in which recent memories are integrated with older but semantically related memories (Blagrove et al. 2011). Nielsen (2017) presents a model of how external and bodily stimuli on one hand and short- and long-term memories on the other hand form seemingly novel, complex, and dreamlike images at sleep onset; he proposes these microdreams shed light on the formation and sources of more complex dreams. There is also some evidence that dream imagery might be associated with memory consolidation and task performance after sleep, though this is preliminary (Wamsley & Stickgold 2009, 2010; Wamsley et al. 2010).

Prominent theories on the function of dreaming focus on bad dreams and nightmares. It has long been thought that dreaming contributes to emotional processing and that this is particularly obvious in the dreams of nightmare sufferers or in dreams following traumatic experiences (e.g., Hartmann 1998; Nielsen & Lara-Carrasco 2007; Levin & Nielsen 2009; Cartwright 2010; Perogamvros et al. 2013). Based on the high prevalence of negative emotions and threatening dream content, threat simulation theory suggests that the evolutionary function of dreaming lies in the simulation of ancestral threats and the rehearsal of threatening events and avoidance skills in dreams has an adaptive value by enhancing the individual’s chances of survival (see Revonsuo 2000; Valli 2008). A more recent proposal is social simulation theory, in which social imagery in dreams supports social cognition, bonds, and social skills. (Revonsuo et al. 2015).

An evolutionary perspective can also be fruitfully applied to specific aspects of dream phenomenology. According to the vigilance hypothesis , natural selection disfavored the occurrence of those types of sensations during sleep that would compromise vigilance (Symons 1993). Dream sounds, but also smells or pains might distract attention from the potentially dangerous surroundings of the sleeping subject, and the vigilance hypothesis predicts that they only rarely occur in dreams without causing awakening. By contrast, because most mammals sleep with their eyes closed and in an immobile position, vivid visual and movement hallucinations during sleep would not comprise vigilance and thus can occur in dreams without endangering the sleeping subject. Focusing on the stuff dreams are not made of might then be at least as important for understanding the function of dreaming as developing a positive account.

Finally, even if dreaming in general and specific types of dream content in particular were found to be strongly associated with specific cognitive functions, it would still be possible that dreams are mere epiphenomena of brain activity during sleep (Flanagan 1995, 2000). It is also possible that the function of dreams is not knowable (Springett 2019).

A particular problem for any theory on the function of dreaming is to explain why a majority of dreams are forgotten and how dreams can fulfill their putative function independently of recall. Crick and Mitchinson (1983) famously proposed that REM sleep “erases” or deletes surplus information and unnecessary memories, which would suggest that enhanced dream recall is counterproductive. Another problem is that dreaming can be lost selectively and independently of other cognitive deficits (Solms 1997, 2000).

Some of the problems that arise for theories on the functions of dreaming can be avoided if we do not assume that dreaming has a specific function, separate from the function(s) of conscious wakeful states. This depends on the broader taxonomy of dreaming in relation to wakeful states. For example, if dreaming is continuous with waking mind wandering, imagination, and/or own-body perception, we should not expect it to have a unique function, but rather to express a similar function as these wakeful states, perhaps to varying degrees. Nor should we expect dreams to have a single function; the functions of dreaming might be as varied and complex as those of consciousness, and given the complexity of the target phenomenon, the failure to pin down a single function should not be surprising (Windt 2015a).

Questions about dreaming in different areas of philosophy such as epistemology, ontology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and ethics are closely intertwined. Scientific evidence from sleep and dream research can meaningfully inform the philosophical discussion and has often done so in the past. The discussion of dreaming has also often functioned as a lens on broader questions about knowledge, morality, consciousness, and self. Long a marginalized area, the philosophy of dreaming and of sleep is central to important philosophical questions and increasingly plays an important role in interdisciplinary consciousness research, for example in the search for the neural correlates of conscious states, in conscious state taxonomies, and in research on the minimal conditions for phenomenal selfhood and conscious experience.

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• Dreams and Skepticism , PhilPapers collection.

belief | Berkeley, George | delusion | Descartes, René: epistemology | imagination | Locke, John | perception: the problem of | personal identity | personal identity: and ethics | Plato: on knowledge in the Theaetetus | sense data | skepticism | skepticism: and content externalism

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Regina Fabry and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and constructive criticism on an earlier version of this manuscript. And as always, I am greatly indebted to Stefan Pitz for his support.

Copyright © 2019 by Jennifer M. Windt < jennifer . windt @ monash . edu >

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July 26, 2011

The Science Behind Dreaming

New research sheds light on how and why we remember dreams--and what purpose they are likely to serve

By Sander van der Linden

Getty Images

For centuries people have pondered the meaning of dreams. Early civilizations thought of dreams as a medium between our earthly world and that of the gods. In fact, the Greeks and Romans were convinced that dreams had certain prophetic powers. While there has always been a great interest in the interpretation of human dreams, it wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung put forth some of the most widely-known modern theories of dreaming. Freud’s theory centred around the notion of repressed longing -- the idea that dreaming allows us to sort through unresolved, repressed wishes. Carl Jung (who studied under Freud) also believed that dreams had psychological importance, but proposed different theories about their meaning.

Since then, technological advancements have allowed for the development of other theories. One prominent neurobiological theory of dreaming is the “activation-synthesis hypothesis,” which states that dreams don’t actually mean anything: they are merely electrical brain impulses that pull random thoughts and imagery from our memories. Humans, the theory goes, construct dream stories after they wake up, in a natural attempt to make sense of it all. Yet, given the vast documentation of realistic aspects to human dreaming as well as indirect experimental evidence that other mammals such as cats also dream, evolutionary psychologists have theorized that dreaming really does serve a purpose. In particular, the “threat simulation theory” suggests that dreaming should be seen as an ancient biological defence mechanism that provided an evolutionary advantage because of  its capacity to repeatedly simulate potential threatening events – enhancing the neuro-cognitive mechanisms required for efficient threat perception and avoidance.

So, over the years, numerous theories have been put forth in an attempt to illuminate the mystery behind human dreams, but, until recently, strong tangible evidence has remained largely elusive.

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Yet, new research published in the Journal of Neuroscience provides compelling insights into the mechanisms that underlie dreaming and the strong relationship our dreams have with our memories. Cristina Marzano and her colleagues at the University of Rome have succeeded, for the first time, in explaining how humans remember their dreams. The scientists predicted the likelihood of successful dream recall based on a signature pattern of brain waves. In order to do this, the Italian research team invited 65 students to spend two consecutive nights in their research laboratory.

During the first night, the students were left to sleep, allowing them to get used to the sound-proofed and temperature-controlled rooms. During the second night the researchers measured the student’s brain waves while they slept. Our brain experiences four types of electrical brain waves: “delta,” “theta,” “alpha,” and “beta.” Each represents a different speed of oscillating electrical voltages and together they form the electroencephalography (EEG). The Italian research team used this technology to measure the participant’s brain waves during various sleep-stages. (There are five stages of sleep; most dreaming and our most intense dreams occur during the REM stage.) The students were woken at various times and asked to fill out a diary detailing whether or not they dreamt, how often they dreamt and whether they could remember the content of their dreams.

While previous studies have already indicated that people are more likely to remember their dreams when woken directly after REM sleep, the current study explains why. Those participants who exhibited more low frequency theta waves in the frontal lobes were also more likely to remember their dreams.

This finding is interesting because the increased frontal theta activity the researchers observed looks just like the successful encoding and retrieval of autobiographical memories seen while we are awake. That is, it is the same electrical oscillations in the frontal cortex that make the recollection of episodic memories (e.g., things that happened to you) possible. Thus, these findings suggest that the neurophysiological mechanisms that we employ while dreaming (and recalling dreams) are the same as when we construct and retrieve memories while we are awake.

In another recent study conducted by the same research team, the authors used the latest MRI techniques to investigate the relation between dreaming and the role of deep-brain structures. In their study, the researchers found that vivid, bizarre and emotionally intense dreams (the dreams that people usually remember) are linked to parts of the amygdala and hippocampus. While the amygdala plays a primary role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions, the hippocampus has been implicated in important memory functions, such as the consolidation of information from short-term to long-term memory.

The proposed link between our dreams and emotions is also highlighted in another recent study published by Matthew Walker and colleagues at the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at UC Berkeley, who found that a reduction in REM sleep (or less “dreaming”) influences our ability to understand complex emotions in daily life – an essential feature of human social functioning.  Scientists have also recently identified where dreaming is likely to occur in the brain.  A very rare clinical condition known as “Charcot-Wilbrand Syndrome” has been known to cause (among other neurological symptoms) loss of the ability to dream.  However, it was not until a few years ago that a patient reported to have lost her ability to dream while having virtually no other permanent neurological symptoms. The patient suffered a lesion in a part of the brain known as the right inferior lingual gyrus (located in the visual cortex). Thus, we know that dreams are generated in, or transmitted through this particular area of the brain, which is associated with visual processing, emotion and visual memories.

Taken together, these recent findings tell an important story about the underlying mechanism and possible purpose of dreaming.

Dreams seem to help us process emotions by encoding and constructing memories of them. What we see and experience in our dreams might not necessarily be real, but the emotions attached to these experiences certainly are. Our dream stories essentially try to strip the emotion out of a certain experience by creating a memory of it. This way, the emotion itself is no longer active.  This mechanism fulfils an important role because when we don’t process our emotions, especially negative ones, this increases personal worry and anxiety. In fact, severe REM sleep-deprivation is increasingly correlated to the development of mental disorders. In short, dreams help regulate traffic on that fragile bridge which connects our experiences with our emotions and memories.

Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas .

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'Throughline': The history of understanding our dreams

Ramtin Arablouei

Rund Abdelfatah

Our dreams can haunt us. Recurring dreams about failing tests or running late are a common occurrence, but what are we to make of them? And are there hidden meanings in our dreams?

Copyright © 2022 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Correction Jan. 29, 2022

In this story, we incorrectly say most of Sigmund Freud's ideas about psychology have been debunked.

Understanding Dreams

Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff

Dreams are imaginary sequences—some with clear narratives, and some without—that play out in people’s minds as they sleep. Most dreams consist of a series of images, sensations, and emotions, and range from pleasant and exciting to boring or even terrifying.

Dreams have long captured the imagination of humankind; early in recorded history, they were thought to be messages from deities or a means to predict the future. In more recent years, they have drawn the focus of psychologists, neurologists, philosophers, and biologists, all of whom continue to study dreams, what they mean, and why dreaming is necessary for humans and animals alike.

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• What We Know About Dreaming
• Understanding Common Dreams

Despite the fact that everyone is thought to dream, there remains much that we don’t understand about how dreaming occurs, how long it lasts, and the exact purpose—or purposes—that it serves. What is known, however, is that dreams appear primarily in the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) stage of sleep and are typically accompanied by high levels of brain activity and some physical movement (particularly in the eyes). Even people who never recall dreaming are thought to dream at least occasionally, but the fact that they take place during sleep means that researchers have difficulty confirming whether or not dreams actually occur.

Many researchers believe that dreaming has a purpose , but what exactly that purpose is remains an open question. Some believe it helps the brain consolidate memories and may aid learning; others believe it allows the brain to simulate threats to better protect itself in the future. More philosophical and psychodynamic theories suggest that dreams help us process difficult thoughts, emotions, and experiences in order to boost psychological well-being upon waking.

Forgetting dreams is far from uncommon. Many (if not most) dreams are forgotten, either immediately after waking or later on. Some researchers refer to immediately-forgotten dreams as “white dreams” ; some evidence suggests that as many as one-third of awakenings are associated with white dreams, and may be due to the fact that the brain does not encode memories the same way while dreaming as it does while awake.

Someone who wants to remember their dreams more often can take certain steps to do so, such as keeping a journal by their bed so they can record details from their dreams immediately upon waking.

The National Sleep Foundation estimates that in a typical 8-hour night, approximately 2 hours (at least) is spent dreaming. While dreaming is theorized to be most prevalent during REM sleep (which comprises approximately 20 percent of overall sleep time), some evidence suggests that dreaming can occur to some extent in other stages of sleep as well; if such findings are supported further, they may indicate that people dream all (or most) of the time .

Estimates range from a few seconds to up to 45 minutes; since people typically have several dreams in an evening, it’s highly likely that the length of individual dreams varies over the course of a night. Researchers have no exact way to measure how long dreams last , but they are able to estimate based on sleep stages, dream recall, and physical signs. Early in the night, dreams are thought to be shorter; the longest dreams are theorized to occur right before waking.

Yes; in fact, it’s likely more common than not. As their body and brain cycle through the different sleep stages, people typically go in and out of several different dreams. The dreams that occur right after someone drifts off are typically the shortest; dreams tend to get longer as the night progresses and the individual spends longer amounts of time in each sleep phase.

The phrase “lucid dreaming” refers to dreams in which the person recognizes that they are dreaming and feels as if they can take control of what happens in the dream. Most people are thought to experience lucid dreaming at least once in their lifetime; a smaller percentage report doing so regularly. Some evidence suggests that specific strategies such as self-suggestion (the dreamer saying to himself that he will have a lucid dream before falling asleep) may increase the odds of an individual triggering a lucid dream .

Many dreams are entirely unique. But some dream themes may be universal; indeed, multiple studies have found that people from different locations, cultures, and ethnic groups report several common dream themes. Certain dream themes may be indicative of stress or preoccupation with a particular person or event, but most experts agree that dreams don’t necessarily “mean” anything or indicate the individual’s true nature. Many people are occasionally alarmed by the content of their dreams. But it may give them comfort to know that the vast majority of people have had unpleasant or embarrassing dreams and that such dreams do not indicate any abnormality.

Some of the most common dream themes include being chased, falling, going to school, or engaging in sexual activity. Other research indicates that dreams about flying , trying to do the same thing over and over again, or spending time with someone who is dead in real life may also be common around the globe.

Whether dreams really mean anything—or whether they’re just random images cobbled together by the brain—has been debated by psychologists and neuroscientists for many years. Freud, for instance, theorized that dreams give insight into the unconscious mind and provide clues to one’s deeper self; though many modern researchers disagree with his theories, some continue to speculate that dream imagery is relevant to our day-to-day emotional states and may signal that certain thoughts are preoccupying us. Some neurologists, on the other hand, theorize that dreams are just a side effect of memory consolidation and other brain-based processes, with little to no meaning beyond that. Many lay people, however, instinctively feel as if their dreams are trying to tell them something, and the question remains up for debate in many corners of the scientific community.

Someone who is deeply stressed about work or a personal situation may very well find the same scenario popping up in their dreams. It’s no surprise, then, that some researchers believe that one potential purpose of dreams is to help the brain process stress and other difficult emotions. Stress dreams typically focus on the more mundane aspects of daily life—an upcoming deadline, for instance—but people who live through traumatic events or natural disasters (like earthquakes or the COVID-19 pandemic) also report repetitive stress dreams centering on the event.

Falling and staying asleep gets harder when we're exposed to more light, drink more, can't cool down, and suffer allergies. Here's how to mitigate these seasonal factors.

There is no doubt that people have needs. Needs matter. An unmet need will demand your attention. Needs definitely need to be met, but no one can do that meeting for you.

Lack of sleep can cause a range of problems from impaired coordination to mood swings. Yet, sometimes it is unavoidable. Here's how to cope after a sleepless night.

The most powerful model for the future of dream interpretation will be a human-AI hybrid approach.

A Personal Perspective: A daily rest time is like having a small vacation by a lake every day.

Discover the transformative power of deep rest in combating stress and unlocking vitality. Explore how simple practices like meditation and yoga can rejuvenate the mind and body.

You will discover how getting stuck in a dream can promote movement in life.

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Have you been having strange dreams lately? Here's what they might mean.

Do you have insomnia or sleep disturbances? You are not alone. CBT-I is a promising treatment for insomnia without the aid of sleep medication.

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Interpretation of Dreams Critical Essay

Freud Sigmund argues that the main reason why people dream is to protect sleep. When people go to bed, the lights are put off, and curtains are drawn there is an indication that we are moving from reality to a world of fantasy (Freud, 1953). When people go to sleep, the mind shields them from any disturbance that may be caused by temperature, light, pain and the desire to urinate among others (Freud, 1953).

In addition, the mind keeps internal stimuli in check by ensuring that some desires are not aroused. These internal stimuli include the other day’s activities, frustrations, fears, and negative emotions by formulating dreams (Freud, 1953).

Freud’s work was mainly concerned with internal stimuli. For an individual to keep on sleeping the negative emotions, unconscious desires, restricted thoughts have to be concealed in some way (Freud, 1953).

This is because if an individual is faced with negative emotions and thoughts their sleep will be disturbed forcing them to wake up. Therefore, dreams play a major role in ensuring that people are able to sleep well without internal or external disturbance (Freud, 1900). Dreams help people to satisfy desires that they were not able to meet in the conscious life, which eventually leads to a relaxed mind and good sleep.

Freud speaks about the manifest and latent meaning of a dream. Manifest meaning is what actually happens in a dream while the latent meaning is the hidden meaning that we find out when we analyze dreams.

Freud Sigmund concentrates more on the latent meaning because it gives a gateway to understanding psychology of the dreamer (Freud, 1900). He adds that the latent content of a dream overshadows the manifest content. There is always more than we see in a dream. For instance, driving a car in a dream may mean that one will be travelling soon (Boothby, 2001).

From Freud Sigmund’s dream “Irma Dream” and “Mulholland Drive”, it is clear that all dreams have some components that are not manifest, but can be understood by interpretation of the dream (Brauckhoff, 2008). Additionally, dreams give individuals the opportunity to meet desires that they are unable to meet in their conscious minds.

Irma’s dream

Irma dream is the first work of Freud where he did a self-analysis based on dreams and their latent meaning (Boothby, 2001). The dream starts with a big hall full of people where Freud sees Irma and goes to talk to her. He goes ahead to ask about how she is feeling, Irma explains that she has pains and Freud checks her to confirm (Brauckhoff, 2008). He later calls a doctor, Mr. M and his friend Otto to inspect Irma further.

However, in the dream, Mr. M looked very different from his usual self; he walked with a limp and was very pale (Brauckhoff, 2008). Freud wonders what the problem is. As he ponders about this Mr. M points, out that Irma’s conditions was because of an infection.

At this point, Freud remembers that his friend Otto had given Irma an injection earlier (Thurschwell, 2009). He feels that the injection was done carelessly probably with a not so clean needle. However, Mr. M reassures them that Irma will be fine (Brauckhoff, 2008).

The interpretation of the dream from Freud’s point of view is as follows; Freud accuses himself for being careless in handling his patients, although, in the dream he blames other people for not being careful in health matters (Thurschwell, 2009). The latent meaning is that he is not comfortable with how he handles his clients putting them in unnecessary risk (Brauckhoff, 2008).

Secondly, there is wishful thinking on Freud’s side where he tries to take away the guilt and responsibility for Irma’s sickness by blaming others. Clearly, he expels himself from the situation and uses other people’s weaknesses to take away his guilt.

Generally, Freud feels that he has not been careful enough, but he finds it difficult to take the blame (Boothby, 2001). Therefore, this dream enabled Freud to achieve his desire to avoid blame placed on him for handling his patients poorly. In addition, it allowed him to sleep peacefully forgetting his frustrations (Freud, 1953).

Mulholland Drive

The other work that has been used to emphasize on the concept of dreams based on Freud Sigmund’s interpretation of dreams is the movie “Mulholland Drive” Most critics have argued that the movie has placed much focus on the concept of dreams and not reality. Therefore, for anyone to understand the movie they need to look at it from a dream perspective (Demorest, 2005).

The movie is based on the premises that dreams have a latent meaning that connects with our day-to-day activities. From Freud’s writing Interpretations of Dreams explains that although dreams look meaningless and confusion of emotions they play a big role in explaining what people think or feel (Blencher, 2001).

Therefore, understanding dreams helps us to understand what happens in the conscious mind. In addition, Freud views dreams as a way to release mental pressure that maybe locked inside our minds.

The movie is divided, into two sections, which have a manifest and latent meaning of the dreams that characters in the movie go through (Demorest, 2005). The movie revolves around one main character Diane Selwyn who appears to have a strange dream. The movie begins with two young actresses Diane and Camilla who seek to make a name in Hollywood (Brauckhoff, 2008).

The two actresses end up in a romantic relationship which breaks when Camilla’s dream begun to take shape. Camilla was given a leading role in a movie arousing envy and jealous in Diane (Demorest, 2005).

However, Diane faces the reality at Mulholland Drive party to celebrate Camilla’s success makes her realize that Camilla has moved on. She sees her kissing another woman and Adam announces his wedding to Camilla (Demorest, 2005). This becomes hard for Diane to bear making her to contact a hit man to kill Camilla.

In reality, Diane seemed so sure of her decision to kill Camilla, however, in the dream, she seeks to undo and avoid responsibility in killing Camilla (Freud, 1953). While the second part of the movie is based on Diane’s inability to hide her failures because her parents remind her of how terrible she is. In this part, Diane meets Betty a young ambitious actress and Rita who dodges death twice on Mulholland Drive (Freud, 1953).

Firstly, Rita tried to escape from her problems by going to sleep, but she does not get sleep because nightmares would not allow her. She helps Betty rehearse for her auditions, which ends up badly when Betty is denied the lead role in the movie that she was looking forward to feature in (Freud, 1991). This leads Betty to a self-discovery journey where she seeks to find out who she is.

She ends up in Diane Selwyn’s bedroom where they find a dead body on the bed. The two women end up together as Betty tried to help Rita escape from her problems. This situation brings them closer than before and they end up making love that night (Freud, 1991).

However, their sleep is interfered with when Rita started dreaming at night. Later on Rita asks Betty to accompany her to club Silencio, which she kept mentioning in her dream (Freud, 1953). Here, Betty and Rita discover a blue box, which makes them to vanish.

This part shows how dreams are closely related to reality as explained by Freud in the Interpretations of dreams. This is because dreams can be as a result of things or people that we interact with or blocked pressure in the mind (Freud, 1991). The second, part features Diane who is disturbed by Camilla’s death who goes to sleep hoping that sleep will make her forget her problems (Freud, 1953).

However, she finds it hard to sleep because Camilla haunts her. This leads her to a state of sadness and loneliness she misses her sexual encounters with Camilla. She then goes through a moment of flashbacks recalling events that occurred before Camilla’s death (Thurschwell, 2009).

Finally, Diane finds it hard to live with her mistakes because of the hallucinations that keep recurring about Camilla and her parents (Blencher, 2001). This marks the end of her life as she seeks to run away from her dreams, which will not allow her to rest. She seems to blame her parents for her misfortunes and their faces look at her in a mocking way, which makes her to lose interest with life (Freud, 1900).

From the movie it is evident that dreams pave way for hidden emotions to be released allowing individuals to sleep well. Additionally, dreams guard sleep by granting people the wishes that they cannot have in real life. It also enables people to move away from the world of reality to that of fantasy, which is more interesting.

According to Freud Sigmund, dreams work as guardian of sleep and not its disturber because they take people to a world of fantasy. When the lights go off, curtains are closed and people go to bed dreams take over. This happens because the external stimuli are blocked. In addition, the internal stimuli such as negative emotions and thoughts are removed to ensure that the sleeper is not disturbed.

In dreams, people are able to do away with what they do not want and fantasize with what they would like to have. By so doing dreams ensure that, a good peaceful sleep is achieved. In addition, dreams show the hidden emotions and desires that people are not able to release in their conscious mind. Freud argues that interpretation of dreams is the key to understanding the human mind (Rodley, 2005).

Freud used sexual interpretation in explaining many dreams because he believed that most people who have sexual problems as children go through psychological issues as adults (Marcus, 1999).

From “Irma Dream” and “Mulholland Drive” we discover that dreams guard sleep by giving us the opportunity to live in fantasy for a while and be happy. In dreams, people can acquire what they have not managed to get in real life. Therefore, dreams are not disturbers but guardian of sleep (Rodley, 2005).

Blencher, M. (2001). The Dream Frontier . New York, NY: Routledge.

Boothby, R. (2001). Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology after Lacan . New York, NY: Rutledge.

Brauckhoff, I. (2008). Identity Construction in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive: It’ll be Just Like in the Movies – We’ll Pretend We Were Someone Else . Munchen: GRIN Verlag.

Demorest, P. (2005). Psychology’s Grand Theorists: How Personal Experiences Shape Professional Ideas . New York, NY: Routledge.

Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams . London: Hogarth Press

Freud, S. (1953). The Interpretation of Dreams and On Dreams. London: Hogarth Press.

Freud, S. (1991). The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund

Freud: (1900-1901). The interpretation of dreams . London: The Hogarth Press.

Marcus, L. (1999). Sigmund Freud’s the Interpretation of Dreams: New Interdisciplinary Essays . Hampshire: Manchester University Press.

Rodley, C. (2005). Lynch on Lynch . London: Macmillan.

Thurschwell, P. (2009). Sigmund Freud . New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.

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IvyPanda. (2023, December 14). Interpretation of Dreams. https://ivypanda.com/essays/interpretation-of-dreams/

"Interpretation of Dreams." IvyPanda , 14 Dec. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/interpretation-of-dreams/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Interpretation of Dreams'. 14 December.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Interpretation of Dreams." December 14, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/interpretation-of-dreams/.

1. IvyPanda . "Interpretation of Dreams." December 14, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/interpretation-of-dreams/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Interpretation of Dreams." December 14, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/interpretation-of-dreams/.

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The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Emily is a board-certified science editor who has worked with top digital publishing brands like Voices for Biodiversity, Study.com, GoodTherapy, Vox, and Verywell.

• Behind the Book

Historical Significance

Praise and criticism.

"The Interpretation of Dreams" was a book written by the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and published in 1899. As one of Freud's earliest books, the theories, ideas, and case studies described within "The Interpretation of Dreams" helped set the stage for psychoanalytic theory.

The book is notable because it introduced many of Freud's best-known ideas, including the notion of the unconscious mind and how it relates to the interpretation of dreams. Freud also published an abridged version of the text titled "On Dreams."

This article discusses why "The Interpretation of Dreams" is important and some of the criticisms of the text. It also covers the history of the book and the impact that it had on the field of psychology.

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Why 'The Interpretation of Dreams' Is Important

"The Interpretation of Dreams" is the classic text on dream analysis and interpretation. In it, Freud introduces many key concepts that would later become central to the theory of psychoanalysis. The book also emphasizes the role of the unconscious mind , which is one of the underlying principles of  Freudian psychology .

If you want to understand the foundations of psychoanalysis and explore Freud's theories in greater depth, then "The Interpretation of Dreams" is essential reading.

The book is widely regarded as one of Freud's most important publications. If you are interested in Sigmund Freud , the origins of psychoanalysis, or dream interpretation , this is a must-have text for your collection.

For those interested in dream research , "The Interpretation of Dreams" serves as an excellent introduction to many of Freud's major ideas. The book outlines his belief that dreams are highly symbolic, containing both overt meanings, called  manifest content , and underlying, unconscious thoughts, known as  latent content . Dreams, he suggested, are our unconscious wishes in disguise.

The History Behind the Book

When Freud started analyzing himself, he used his dreams quite frequently in the process. Always a vivid dreamer, Freud had by this time also noticed the impact of dreams on his patients, including psychotic patients whose hallucinations were similar to dreams.

Between his own experience and that of his patients, Freud concluded that dreams are almost always expressions of unfulfilled wishes.

Believing sincerely in the importance of dreams and realizing no one had written much, if anything, about the subject, Freud spent two years writing "The Interpretation of Dreams."   Originally published in German under the title  Die Traumdeutung  in 1900, initial sales of the book were slow and disappointing. It was largely ignored by the scientific community.

By 1910, Freud's other work was becoming well-known, and so "The Interpretation of Dreams" became more popular. It was translated into English and Russian in 1913 and six more languages by 1938. Seven more editions were also printed during his lifetime.

Freud based many of his ideas on his observations of his own dreams as well of those of his patients. Reaction to "The Interpretation of Dreams" was initially poor, but the book eventually grew in popularity.

Freud was an incredibly prolific writer, publishing more than 320 different books, articles, and essays. Out of this impressive body of work, Freud described "The Interpretation of Dreams" as his personal favorite as well as his most significant contribution to the understanding of human thought.

"[It] contains… the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime," he explained.

"The Interpretation of Dreams" stands as a unique and classic work in the history of psychology . No matter what you may think of Sigmund Freud’s psychological theories, the cultural impact and historical importance of this book are without question.

Freud's book left an important mark on psychology, but not all of his ideas were accepted, both then and now.

Praise for 'The Interpretation of Dreams'

Without a doubt, "The Interpretation of Dreams" is an important book. While not all of the ideas in the book have fared well, it is an interesting read for both laypersons and psychology professionals because Freud's writing is both engaging and intriguing. The case studies he describes in the book also offer an interesting glimpse into his work as a psychoanalyst.

However, there is a notable lack of scientific rigor throughout the book. Many of Freud's conclusions lack empirical support.

Many of Freud's ideas have not been substantiated by current research and aspects of his psychoanalytic theories have not fared well over time.

For example, Freud believed that dreams were a way to gain insight in the workings of the unconscious mind. However, researchers have found that the content of dreams is most often simply a reflection of waking life. People often dream about things that are on their minds, which is a reflection of conscious thoughts rather than unconscious thoughts.

In "The Interpretation of Dreams," Freud also suggested that dreams were a form of wish fulfillment. The problem is that some dreams focus on difficult topics such as trauma, punishment, or anxiety. While Freud suggested that such dreams were a way to cope with the problem rather than wish fulfillment, such dreams are more often a reflection of worries or memories than a way of coping.

While Freud believed that dreams were primarily about wish fulfillment and expressions of the unconscious, researchers today believe that dreams serve to consolidate memory and learning. The often fragmented and confusing content of dreams may be the brain's way of incorporating new information and experiences into long-term memory.

Modern research does not necessarily agree that the primary function of dreams is to reveal the contents of the unconscious. Instead, researchers believe that dreams may serve an important role in the consolidation of memory.

Despite Freud’s tendency to over-generalize, his lack of scientific evidence, his overemphasis on sex , and his frequently chauvinistic viewpoints, this seminal work remains important in the history of psychology. "The Interpretation of Dreams" marked the beginning of ​ psychoanalysis and is a fascinating text revealing Freud’s unique talent as a writer and ambitious theorist.

Grubin D.  Young Dr. Freud . Public Broadcasting Service.

PBS. Freud's book, "The Interpretation of Dreams," released 1900 . People and Discoveries.

Zhang W, Guo B. Freud's dream interpretation: A different perspective based on the self-organization theory of dreaming .  Front Psychol . 2018;9. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01553

Freud Museum London. The Interpretation of Dreams: A guide to Sigmund Freud's theory of dreams and his method for dream interpretation .

Dallas Baptist University.  Freud. Bibliography (full) .

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Psychology Discussion

Essay on dreams.

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After reading this essay you will learn about Dreams:- 1. Concept of Dream 2. Classification of Dreams 3. Functions 4. Theories 5. Dream Interpretation 6. Content 7. Dream Symbols  8. Examples 9. Anxieties.

• Anxieties in Dream

Essay # 1. Concept of Dream:

Until the first half of the 20th century, scientific study of dreams exclusively was the monopoly of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis as a method of treatment analysed dreams for uncovering the unconscious, repressed and suppressed desires of the patients which opened the avenue of successful treatment of mental patients.

But with the introduction of new experimental techniques several laboratory investigations have been conducted on dream. In this connection the experimental studies conducted by Dement and Klertmem (1957) are note worthy.

According to Blum (1969) the discovery that “dream is accompanied by rapid eye movements (REMS) recorded electrically with the eye lids closed, made it possible for experimenters to awaken subjects from periods of light sleep (when dreams typically occur) and obtain their immediate reports of what had just transpired.”

Blum further adds that many interesting facts about dreams in general have emerged from studies of this kind. For example almost all subjects dream every night, with dreaming occupying about 20 per cent of sleeping time, the dream events do not happen in a flash as commonly believed and the presence of colour is dreams is very rare.

A finding of potential dynamic significance is that persons awakened when they start to dream tend to make up for the loss of dreaming more on subsequent nights (Dement, 1960). This effect of dream deprivation indirectly supports Freud’s belief that dreams serve a necessary function in the personality.

A more recent survey on dreams by Foulkes (1964) suggests that the thought content reported by subjects when awakened during a period of rapid eye movement is much more disguised, bizarre and dramatic than thoughts elicited from awakening in prior non REM periods.

Blum (1967) states further that “the active processes of distortion during the dream phase tend to corroborate Freuds description of condensation, displacement and symbolism. The pre REM periods on the other hand seem to reflect the day residues, undisguised memories or recreations of recent events in the dreamer’s life which later get elaborated and woven into the dream fabric.

This transition seems to contradict Freud’s assertion that the dream appears from unconsciousness suddenly like fire work which takes hours to prepare but goes off in a moment.”

Blum points out “experimental investigation of day residues dates back to 1917 (Poetzl) when it was demonstrated that manifest content in dreams can be influenced by very brief exposures of unnoticed stimuli. Subjects were first shown landscapes for about 1/10 second and then asked to describe and draw what they had been.

Told subsequently to take note of any dreams that night, they returned the next day and narrated dream content related to aspects of the landscape which have not been reported in the previous session. Numerous replications and extensions of this phenomena have been carried out by Fisher and Paul (1959), Luborsky and Shevrin (1956).

Essay # 2. Classification of Dreams:

1. Dreams have been divided into different types by Klein (1928):

(a) Premonitory dreams:

Those dreams which leave for the dreamer with a feeling that the dream has some future significance.

(b) Prophetic dreams:

It is supposed to indicate directly or symbolically some future event. This prophetic dream owes its popularity largely to tradition. Once the author of this article dreamt that her mother is seriously ill and after a week it came out true.

(c) Pradromic dreams:

Pradromic dreams are prophetic in a vague way. A man dreamt of being operated for appendicitis. He was extremely distressed and wake up only to discover that there had been no operation and. he was in good health. But later on, he developed an attack which suggested a relationship between the dream content and the initial stage of appendicitis.

2. Dreams have also been classified into collective, kinesthetic and paralytic types:

(a) Collective dreams:

Collective dreams suggest instances of two or more people having the same dream at approximately the same time. Once some soldiers heard that the house in which they lived was haunted by ghosts. During sleep some of them also see this dream when there is discussion about a particular issue among some persons. Some of them may see a common dream related to this discussion. This refers to collective dream.

(b) Kinesthetic dreams:

Dreams of soaring, floating and falling have relationship with the real experience. The rise and fall of the soaring experience seems to correspond with the rise and fall of the chest in respiration. Similarly the falling dream has been attributed to changes in heart action and blood pressure, the relaxation of the voluntary musculature and to a gradual awakening from a soaring dream.

(c) Paralytic dream:

It is a type of dream where the individual is unable to move which often ends in waking with horror. It is explained by partial awakening, prior to the return of general muscular tension.

If the dream goes on without awareness of the fact that the body is not moving, there is no disturbance or no dream of paralysis but if during this period there is partial awakening to bring awareness of the relaxed condition of the body, there may be the dream of paralysis.

A person visualised a dream that his speech muscles were paralyzed. After awakening he found that he was sleeping with his mouth open and the nasal passages were stopped.

3. The third classification of dream by Klein is as follows:

(a) Dreams of the blind:

The dreams of the blind differ from the dreams of normal people. The images most frequently present in the dream context of the normal people are conspicuous by their absence in the dream content of the blind person.

Wheeler found in his blind subject that their dream corresponded to that of waking stage. When more than one sense organ is defective the images in dream are much more limited. This is described by Hellen Keller.

(b) Recurrent dreams:

Recurrent dreams are specially found in neurotics. During war years soldiers suffer so much from anxiety dreams related to terrifying war experiences that sometimes they rather want to remain awake than to experience such terrible anxiety in sleep.

Alexander (1980) has classified dreams as follows from the standpoint of the sleep disturbing stimuli:

Essay # 3. Function of Dream:

1. The function of a dream is to help rather than to disturb sleep. It also prevents the dreamer from being awakened by internal stimuli. It perfects one’s sleep.

2. Dreams satisfy many biological, physical and psychological needs of the individual. The basic physiological needs like hunger, sex and thirst are satisfied in very simple type of dreams. The hungry and thirsty subject dreams that he is eating a nice plate of food or drinking a glass of cold water or a bottle of Pepsi in summer.

This hallucinatory experience leads to temporary gratification of such needs. Likewise a person who has been separated from his sexual partner for a long time, apparently may dream that he is having sexual intercourse with her. Thus, all dreams deal with wishes which for some reason cannot be accepted into the conscious and waking stage.

3. Dreams fulfil the unsatisfied physiological needs of the indivi­dual such as desire for power prestige and recognition, security and affection etc.

4. Dreams are significant in psychoanalysis particularly for helping the analyst to uncover the unconscious processes of the individual. It is through his dreams that the analyst tries to make the patient conscious of his unconscious conflicts. Therefore it has been said that dreams are the royal road to unconscious.

5. Problem solving function of Dream:

Franz (1950) states every dream can be considered as an attempt to gratify wishes consistently with internal standards and external conditions. This might be called the problem solving function of the dream. Various cases indicate that dreams may present the solution for different intellectual problems. Various mathematical problems and puzzles in chess have been repeatedly solved in dreams.

6. Tension Relieving function of Dream:

A dream is an attempt to relieve tension caused by repression with as little conflict as possible.

A dream is an attempt of the organism to protect sleep from disturbing stimuli like thirst and hunger, from unsatisfied desires which life does not grant, illegal wishes and unpleasant works which press upon the mind or a guilt conscience. Dreams attempt to eliminate tension by imaginary gratification of the physiological need.

Essay # 4. Theories of Dream:

Certain theories of dream have been developed to explain the causes of dream:

1. Supernatural theory:

In the ancient world and even today, in some cases dreams were considered having some supernatural significance. This is mostly the prescientific view which suggests Gods and Goddesses come in dream and predict the future to the dreamer. Sometimes through dream they warn the dreamer about his dos and don’ts.

A working lady who was under severe mental trauma apprehending her transfer, visualised a dream where ‘Ma Santosi’ told her not to worry for her transfer, as nothing will happen. After only a few days she got her transfer order and subsequently it was cancelled.

2. Physiological dream theories :

The physiological dream theories maintained that dreams have no psychological significance but are the results of rudimentary activities in the brain cortex which reflect impressions of the previous day incoherently.

3. Stimulus response theory of dream:

The stimulus response theory which existed prior to Freud is based upon the associationistic stimulus response view. This theory stresses the relationship between brain changes during sleep and changes in perceptual efficiency. Some disturbing stimuli force activity into one portion of the cerebral cortex.

For example, the smoke coming from the next room when enters the nose of the sleeping person, it disturbs the activity of the cerebral cortex with corresponding changes in dream. Such a theory of dream is in the line with experimental work on the effects of sensory stimulation upon the dream content.

Stimulus response theory also recognises the role of desire as an instigator of dream. It also recognises the fact that those desires which are not satisfied in reality are satisfied in dreams. Hence the stimulus response theory also supports the kind of dream theory initiated by Freud.

4. Psychoanalytic theory of dream :

Advanced by Freud, the psychoanalytic theory of dream stands as the most valid and fundamental among all the theories of dream.

As pointed out by Franz (1950) Freud always considered his theory of dream as the best founded portion of psychoanalysis. This has been confirmed by the fact that his theory has been little changed either by himself or by his followers.

Freud’s special importance to dream theory is too obvious from his classic book “Interpretation of Dreams”. It is noteworthy that no one before Freud has advanced a comprehensive theory to explain dreams though later on some psychologists vaguely anticipated some of Freud’s views.

Freud’s theory of dreams can be divided into two parts:

(1) Wish fulfilment theory and

(2) Attempted wish fulfilment theory.

Simple wish fulfilment dreams are common in children. But adults express their wishes directly, only rarely and under unusual circumstances. Most adult dreams however appear senseless, disconnected, dis-organised fragmentary.

It not only does give direct satisfaction, but sometimes cause anxiety. But these senseless and disconnected dreams according to Freud have real meaning and can be explained psychologically.

Unlike the children, the unfulfilled wishes of the adults are checked by internal obstacles. Dreams come in disguised form and hence the difficulty in understanding them arises. For instance, a wish to kill a near one which is irrational and antisocial if is expressed in dreams directly, the conflict and fear becomes severe arousing fear and guilt.

But if the desire is disguised in dream by displacing the object of hostile impulse in someone whom the dreamer can justifiably hate, the unconscious tendency is expressed and the conflict with conscience is avoided.

The main activity of dream is to preserve sleep. But the cause of disturbed sleep is the increasing tension of unconscious excitation, owing to the action of dream censorship. The apparent absurdity of the manifest content is the result of a compromise between the repressed and the repressing forces. The manifest content is an allegorical expression of unconscious latent content.

Essay # 5. Dream Interpretation:

The interpretation of dreams is based on the deterministic assumption that everything has a cause and an effect. According to Wolman (1979) “The continuity of human mental life is established when one accepts the Freudian idea that the dream is an expression of unconscious materials”.

The dream always represents some unconscious processes which the dreamer does not know he knows and thinks he does not. Reinforced by the dream interpretation of Freud in particular, this problem of dream has got added attention.

Freud considered dream as the royal road to unconscious and his book, “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900) opened the avenues for psychoanalytic movement providing major impetus to it.

Freud never maintained as is popularly held that all concealed desires responsible for dreaming are sexual in nature. To show how false this is he calls attention to the wish fulfilment dreams dealing with the gratification of most obvious needs.

Essay # 6. Content of Dream:

In any dream there are two aspects :

(1) The Manifest content.

(2) The Latent content.

A large amount of the dream content consists of the events of the day. Thoughts prior to sleep and even postures during sleep and sounds influence dream content. Freud also viewed that besides the simple wish fulfilment dreams, more complicated forces also influence the content of dream. Dreams also represent in disguised fashion the wishes and unacceptable thoughts of the unconscious.

1. Manifest content :

Brown (1940) views that the manifest content is the content of the dream exactly as it is presented to or remembered by the dreamer. In other words the dream we actually see or what appears to us in dream is called manifest content.

The common man only knows the manifest content of a dream. In manifest content the actual desire of man is disguised to cheat the super ego and the desires never show them in real form.

In the words of Brown (1940) “This is the dream with all its bizarre associations, its quick changes and its fantastic sequences”.

2. Latent content :

This aspect deals with the actual repressed wishes which get themselves satisfied in dream. The actual repressed desires can be known by analysing the latent content of the dream by the psychoanalyst.

A common man cannot know the real implication behind the latent content of the dream. According to Brown (1940) “By the latent content of the dream is meant the underlying unconscious wish which comes into consciousness through adopting the disguise of the manifest content”.

Brown further remarks that in some dreams manifest content and latent content largely concede such as in the simple wish fulfilment dreams. In other dreams the latent content may be discovered only when one knows the life history of the individual and what he has recently been doing in real life and when one has gained the complete free association of the dreams about it.

Essay # 7. Dream Symbols:

When an attempt is made to interpret some dreams, it becomes necessary to take the help of dream symbols. Symbolism in dream is therefore a frequent tool of dream work and it is an indirect representation standing for something else. By having an idea of dream symbols, the manifest content of the dream is translated to the latent content. Otherwise, it becomes difficult to analyse a dream.

On the contrary, without knowing the dream symbols, no latent dream thoughts will be forthcoming despite every effort on the part of the dreamer to reproduce the desired material. Thus, the dream analyst has to take into note that certain facts in the manifest dreams stand as symbols to the latent dream.

In dreams, certain associations are commonly found which reveal themselves again and again in dreams experienced by different people. Thus, it is held by Freud and Jung that the unconscious uses certain symbols to indicate some very primitive and basic conceptions.

So there are certain symbols in dreams which have universal meaning i.e., appearing universally among cultures. This has been very clearly explained in Freud’s book ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ (1938).

Examples of symbols in dreams having universal meaning:

— taken from the “Interpretation of Dreams”

All elongated objects, sticks, tree trunks, umbrellas, poles, pointed and sharp weapons, knives, daggers represent the male member. Small boxes, chests, cup-boards, ovens, stoves, fire places, cavities, ships and all kinds of vessels symbolize the female organ.

A room represents generally a woman. The sexual intercourse may be expressed in climbing, mounting, dancing, riding etc. Ladders and stairs and going up and down them are symbolic representation of sexual act.

In case of a few symbols, the representation is by opposites. Such as neckline may be represented by clothes and uniforms. The dream of walking through a suite symbolizes a brothel or a harem. It is also used to represent marriage as suggested by H. Sachs. A woman’s hat may represent the male genitals. Necktie may stand for penis.

The fish, the snail, the cat, the airship, the mouse, and the snake are symbols of male members. All complicated machines and appliances are probably the genitals, as a rule the male genitals. Many of the landscapes in dreams such as bridges or wooded mountain may be taken as description of genitals. To play with or beat a little child may represent masturbation.

Castration may be represented by baldness, haircutting, the loss of teeth etc. Small animals and vermin’s represent little children. In some dreams, the genitals are represented by other parts of the body, the male member by the hand or the foot, the female genital is represented by the mouth, the ear and even the eye.

The secretions of the human body, mucus, tears, urine, semen etc., may be used in dreams interchangeably.

Active and passive homosexual dreams refer to an earlier phase as anal sadistic dreams. Dream s indicating strong unconscious guilt or dramatizing prosecutory situations help in the prognosis of obsessional states. Tension dreams are significant in cases where suicidal tendencies are suspected.

A careful analysis of the above dream symbols pointed out by Freud from his long years of experience on dream analysis in his classic book. “The Interpretations of Dreams”, indicates that since symbols have constant meaning, one can analyse dreams with symbols.

The field of mythology, anthropology, folklore, philosophy and religion contain many parallels to dream symbolism. Indeed the domain of symbolism embraces a realm far more extensive than might be inferred from the study of the phenomenon of dream alone.

Essay # 8. Examples of Dreams:

A middle aged young German businessman had severe depression accom­panied by suicidal tendency. Depression developed 18 months after his return from war as a military officer. He saw the following dream, “I am taking a walk with one of the ranking officers of the Russian army and became aware that it is the Tsar.

Suddenly a stranger appears with a sword and wants to kill the Tsar. I wish to intervene to save the Tsar, but it is too late, that Tsar is killed.

The analysis of this dream leads to the contention that both the parties promised not to shoot for one month. But one day while the Russian army was moving with the dreamer, he killed him. Here the Tsar represents little father and actually the dreamer had a hostile attitude towards his own father. Stranger here signifies the strange part of his personality which killed the Tsar.

The mechanism of projection is used because the hostile action foreign to the ego, but belonging to the unconscious part is projected over the stranger:

(2) He substituted for the father, the Tsar, a common symbol of father.

(3) In the dream he tried to save his victim. This is an example of over compensation. Instead of killing, he tried to save Tsar.

The patient had a strong Oedipus complex. As a result he regressed to the earlier stage and showed hostility towards his father.

Brown (1940) has mentioned the following dream of a young woman student in an eastern coeducational university, she dreamed “I was in New York with Bill, the young man to whom I am almost engaged.

It was a cloudy day and he was carrying an umbrella. We went for a ride on a Fifth Avenue Bus, when Bill suddenly got up and said, “I will leave you my umbrella, and you may pay the cheque. He ran out through the restaurant door and I woke up in a panic because I had no money.”

Analysis of the life situations and the free associations of the young lady indicated that the lady was having an emotional conflict regarding the young man during this period. He was begging her to become his mistress with the hope that later on they might be married.

Her family upbringing and her ambition to be a respectable married woman would not enable her to agree to the proposal of the man. They had spent a lot of time riding on Fifth Avenue buses.

The Youngman suggested that they go to the apartment of a friend of his and prepare a dinner and spend the evening there. The young woman refused to do this, because she realized that under such circumstances she would have a considerable conflict between her social ideals and her erotic wishes. It was at about this time the dream occurred.

This clearly reveals a case of wish fulfilment where sexual inter-course occurs. The significance of the big meal together is that of sexual intercourse. The umbrella symbolizes the penis.

Four years after the death of her mother a lady saw a dream that she is extremely angry with her own mother and in this extreme state of anger strangled her to death.

This dream appeared very strange to the lady as she never ever was hostile to her mother in her conscious stage. She loved and respected her mother throughout her life and never for once had any ill feeling towards her.

Analysis of the childhood experiences of the lady indicated that 35 years back, when she was a child of 7 years, one evening her mother prepared some special cake for the family, while the girl was away to play. When she returned from play, she found that her mother had forgotten to keep the share of cake for her. When asked, her mother simply replied that she has forgotten all about her.

This appeared to the small girl as if her mother did neither care for her nor loved her like her other brothers and sisters. She felt terribly neglected and depressed and so much so that this feeling of loss of love or lack of love even tempted her to commit suicide.

But somehow, she managed to stay on and subsequently, forgot all about it. It was repressed. This hostile feeling towards the mother on this day was repressed and it came up in dream after a lapse of 35 years, even long after the death of the mother.

Analysis of this dream indicates the importance of unconscious mental process in dream.

Analysing the importance of dreams in unconscious mental process and psychoanalysis, Brown (1940) has remarked “The psychoanalytic theory accounts for dreams and gives us a method to find out how dreams are related to the deep unconscious urges. In the dream these urges gain satisfaction by appearing in consciousness in a disguised form.

The disguise prevents the dream from arousing undue anxiety in the dreamer’s mind and thus protects his sleep. Sometimes of course, dreams do awaken us because the conflict is too strong. It is interesting that most of us dream every night.

Most of the material of these dreams are readily forgotten because after sleep has built up the spent energies, the ego again must face reality and so represses the dream content.” According to Wolman, “dream represents demands or wishes stemming from the unconscious.

These wishes are usually repressed demands for instinctual gratification. Often the demands arise in the preconscious and are residues of the days activities in the waking state. These demands may be related to a decision that has to be made or to a conflict that has to be resolved.

Wolman says that dreams are reaction of the mind to external or internal stimuli that acts upon the organism in sleep. In dreams the individual attributes objective reality to the imagery that forms the material of the dreams. “A dream then is a psychosis with all the absurdities, delusions and illusions of a psychosis.” (Freud)

Essay # 9. Anxieties in Dreams:

The notions of wish fulfilment with unpleasant emotions create anxiety. The repressed wish behind dream is enough to threaten to overcome the censorship and achieve undisguised wish fulfilment. The dreamer’s reaction to this internal danger is the development of anxiety. In such circumstances, frequently the dream terminates when the sleep is broken. In such dreams, the distortion if any is minimal.

Example of an anxiety dream :

A young woman dreamt that she saw a large horse of an unusual reddish hue. She is frightened at the sight of the animal and starts to run. The horse pursues her. She awakes in terror.

The horse represented a man who had affair with the lady and whose hair was exactly of the same colour as that of the horse in dream. Evidently, the horse represents the man. The man had a torrid affair with the lady who had been growing quite fond of him. She was forced to brake her engagement with the man after getting certain evidences that he was immoral and his intention towards her was not good.

However, she frankly admitted that her liking for him had been very strong but she tried to banish him from her thought. Thus, she dreamt that she saw him and he pursued her. Her fear for the horse in the dream is due to fear and anxiety of the fulfilment of her own wishes in the matter.

“In anxiety dreams, the latent dream material has undergone little change and the demands are too great to be warded off. Sometimes when the threat to the ego is very great, as it is in nightmares, the individual gives up sleep and returns to a waking stage.”

Lastly, the wish fulfilment in a painful dream may be a punishment, a fulfilment, gratifying the remarkable self punishment tendencies that exist in the mind of the man. It is no exaggeration to state that Freud’s theory of dreams is the keystone in psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Related Articles:

• Freud’s Theory of Dreams (With Criticism)| Psychology
• Freud’s Dream Analysis | Forms | Thinking | Psychology
• 3 Main Types of Dreams | Psychology
• 5 Main Mechanisms of Dream Work | Psychology

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What does it mean when you dream about someone experts weigh in.

When dreams are wildly fantastical, peppered with mythical creatures and fictional settings, you probably shrug them off as figments of an active imagination.

But when you dream about someone or something rooted in your reality, you might assign meaning to the night visions.

For instance, if you dream about a friend or loved one, you might wonder, when you dream about someone, are they thinking of you or is the nighttime cameo just a happy coincidence?

The relationship between dreams and your brain

Scientifically speaking, there's no evidence to confirm that when you dream about someone , it means they're thinking of you.

That said, the theory of Jungian Psychoanalysis and other depth psychologies 1 do suggest that the people you see in your dreams are psychological symbols created by our unconscious minds. 

"Let's say that I have a dream about my boss at work. My boss represents an emotional or psychological concept that my mind is wrestling with in the night," Lyon explains the studied concept.

"For most people, seeing your boss symbolizes ideas of power, authority, and leadership (or if you have a bad boss, repression, judgment, and criticism). By seeing my boss in my dreams, my mind is trying to figure out how I can improve my own qualities of leadership and authority in my life!"

From a spiritual perspective, while dreaming of another person doesn't necessarily mean they're thinking of you, New York City–based medium, intuitive, and dream interpreter Amanda Lieber says humans are innately telepathic and constantly sending and receiving messages to and from other people.

But while it's possible that dreaming of someone you know might be indicative of them thinking of you, Lieber tells mbg that the meaning is less romantic and more serviceable; its purpose is to help you navigate your feelings about the individual and whether or not you'd like to connect with them.

What does it mean when you dream about someone?

Experts have shared psychological meanings and spiritual implications of when a person dreams about someone they know.

Figuring out which explanation you subscribe to can be tricky because dreams are so complex, and while there are scientific studies that support or challenge different claims, more research needs to be done on the topic.

Whether you're more scientific than spiritual or vice versa, we know that everyone dreams and you're bound to dream about someone you know sometimes.

The not knowing is also what makes speculating over what it means when you dream about a specific someone so fun. 

Below, a list of common instances of dreaming of someone and what they could mean:

1. Dreaming of an ex

A common misconception about dreaming about an ex is that you miss them or want to get back together with them. This could be true (only you know how you feel about this person), but according to Lyon, dreaming about an ex can also symbolize a piece of your romantic and sexual history or a trauma or pain from the past you've yet to work through. 

"By dreaming about [an ex], your mind is trying to heal from that past pain and reviewing your past love experiences so that it can learn how to avoid the same red flags in your next romantic partner," Lyon explains. "Your mind is metaphorically reviewing the tapes like a football player who reviews a previous game so that it can learn and be better next time."

2. Dreaming about someone who's not alive

Lieber tells mbg that, from a spiritual perspective, dreams about a deceased loved one are considered "spirit visitations" and usually come bearing a divine meaning. "They're reminders that our loved ones are at peace and always with us."

From a psychological perspective, Lyon says that dreaming about a loved one who died is a way for your mind to remember the wisdom and impact they had on your life.

For example, you might dream about a grandmother or grandfather who has passed away at times when you would have normally sought out their advice. Lyon explains, "By dreaming about them, your mind may be asking you what advice they would give to help you navigate the difficult situation you currently find yourself in."

3. Dreaming of a co-worker

It depends on the context of the dream. Dream analyst Lauri Loewenberg previously told mbg that the most common co-worker dreams she hears about involve romance or intimacy.

This could mean you have a crush on your co-worker, you'd like to work with them more closely, or you admire things about them. 

4. Dreaming about someone you do not favor

Dreaming about someone you don't like might sound more nightmarish than dreamy, but Lyon said your visions might not have anything to do with the person in question.

Instead, it might represent internal struggles you have within yourself. For instance, if you dream about someone you find "full of themselves," Lyon said your mind might be trying to grapple with your own self-centeredness.

5. Dreaming about a celebrity

If you're dreaming about a celebrity in a romantic sense, Lowenberg told mbg you're likely looking for traits they possess in a partner.

But, if the celebrity sighting is more random, she prompts you to think about what you associate said celebrity with, like a song or movie. "You associate them with something relevant to your life," she explains. "They can also represent the part of you that wants recognition and applause."

6. Repeat dreams

"This is a call to action," Lieber tells mbg off the bat, stressing that if you have a dream about someone repeatedly, your subconscious will not rest until your conscious mind gets the message it's sending.

"In this case, it's important to journal about your dream and uncover its nuanced meaning so that you can move forward in a healthy way," she urges.

Note: While it's fun to explore dream interpretation and speculate over what dreaming about someone you know or who has passed could mean, Lyon warns that believing these concepts to be absolutely true could be potentially detrimental to a person's mental health. 

"It's important that we know our minds are a safe and healthy place for us to heal," Lyon says and cautions that the idea that, when you dream about someone, it means they're thinking of you, could lead to ridiculous implications if we assume them to be true. "If I dream of Taylor Swift, does that mean she is thinking about me? Of course not! She has no idea who I am!"

In other words: Take dream interpretations with a grain of salt, find the entertainment in them, and move on.

A dream is an equal parts psychological and neurological phenomenon 2 . Dream interpreter Jesse Lyon M.S., CCHt, Q.S., LMHC , defines it as a "unique altered state of consciousness" during which the prefrontal cortex of the brain rests, shutting down all of the body's sensory inputs, and the other parts of the brain remain very active processing the data that was collected in our waking hours.

"By reducing the amount of activity in the prefrontal cortex, we become less critical, judgmental, and analytical, instead allowing our mind to process our experiences, without this conscious filter getting in the way," Lyon explains. 

He goes on to specify the two core tasks the brain sets out to accomplish while you're sleeping: Create new pathways in the brain and deepen existing neural pathways. Dreams result from these processes, and dream analysis helps you understand the personal developments or challenges that are taking place to help you grow. 

The psychology behind why we dream explains why we dream on a psychological and neurological level. Dream analysis, or assigning meaning to specific kinds of dreams, aims to help us understand the work our subconscious is doing. The former is rooted in scientific findings, the latter has explanations rooted in both psychology and spirituality.

If you dream of someone, does that mean they are thinking of you?

No, when you dream about someone, it does not mean they are thinking of you. 

Why do people appear in our dreams?

Lyon puts it best when he reasons that human beings "are intensely relational creatures" and that more often than not when people appear in our dreams, it is the mind using our relationships to learn more about itself and how to grow.

What does it mean if you dream about someone?

From a psychological standpoint, Lyon explains that dreaming about someone means that the person represents "some idea or emotion that your mind is trying to process while you sleep." From a spiritual standpoint, Lieber says it's possible that dreaming about someone is indicative of them thinking of you and sending you telepathic messages, prompting you to figure out how you feel about them and whether or not you want them in your life.

The takeaway

When you dream about someone, it doesn't mean they are thinking of you.

Dreams are your mind's way of absorbing and understanding the information it's fed throughout the day, so when you dream of someone you know, a celebrity you like, or even someone you loathe, it has less to do with the actual person and more the connection said person has to you and your personal growth. 

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36875230/
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27569701/

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The Meaning of Dreams: Personal Informative Speech

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Published: Jul 3, 2023

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Informative Speech About Dreams: “The Hidden Meaning of Dreams”

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Sigmund Freud Dream Theory

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Freud (1900) considered dreams to be the royal road to the unconscious as it is in dreams that the ego’s defenses are lowered so that some of the repressed material comes through to awareness, albeit in distorted form.

Dreams perform important functions for the unconscious mind and serve as valuable clues to how the unconscious mind operates.

On 24 July 1895, Freud had his own dream to form the basis of his theory. He had been worried about a patient, Irma, who was not doing as well in treatment as he had hoped. Freud, in fact, blamed himself for this and was feeling guilty.

Freud dreamed that he met Irma at a party and examined her.  He then saw a chemical formula for a drug that another doctor had given Irma flash before his eyes and realized that her condition was caused by a dirty syringe used by the other doctor. Freud’s guilt was thus relieved.

Freud interpreted this dream as wish fulfillment. He had wished that Irma’s poor condition was not his fault and the dream had fulfilled this wish by informing him that another doctor was at fault. Based on this dream, Freud (1900) proposed that a major function of dreams was the fulfillment of wishes.

Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams

The Interpretation of Dreams is a seminal work by Sigmund Freud, published in 1899, that introduced his theory of psychoanalysis and dream interpretation. Here’s a summary of its key points:

• Introduction of Psychoanalysis : This book is where Freud first introduced his theory of psychoanalysis . This was a revolutionary approach to understanding the human mind and behavior, focusing on the role of the unconscious mind, which was largely ignored or underestimated by other theories of the time. The Interpretation of Dreams introduced key concepts of psychoanalysis such as the Oedipus complex , and free association.
• Dreams as Psychological Insight : Freud proposed that dreams could provide valuable insight into an individual’s unconscious desires and conflicts. This was a novel idea, as dreams were often dismissed as meaningless or were interpreted in a more mystical or religious context.
• Dreams as Wish Fulfillment : Freud proposed that dreams are a form of “wish fulfillment”. They represent the unconscious desires, thoughts, and motivations that our conscious mind represses. This concept has influenced not only the field of psychology but also literature, art, and popular culture.
• Manifest and Latent Content : Freud distinguished between the manifest content of a dream (what we remember upon waking) and the latent content (the hidden psychological meaning). The manifest content is often a distorted version of the wish that the dreamer’s mind tries to fulfill, while the latent content is the underlying wish itself.
• Dream Work : The process by which the unconscious mind alters the true meaning of a dream into something less disturbing is known as “dream work”. This includes mechanisms like displacement (shifting emotional significance from one object to another), condensation (combining several ideas into one), and symbolization (representing an action or idea through symbols).
• Free Association : Freud used a technique called free association to uncover the latent content of dreams. In this process, a person says whatever comes to mind to a dream’s elements, leading to insights about the unconscious wishes the dream represents.

Latent Content as the Hidden Meaning of Your Dreams

Latent content in dreams, a concept introduced by Sigmund Freud in his psychoanalytic theory, refers to the hidden, symbolic, and unconscious meanings or themes behind the events of a dream.

This contrasts the manifest content, which is the actual storyline or events that occur in the dream as the dreamer remembers them.

Freud believed that the latent content of a dream is often related to unconscious desires, wishes, and conflicts. These are thoughts and feelings that are so troubling or unacceptable that the conscious mind represses them. However, they can emerge in a disguised form in our dreams.

The latent content is not directly observable because it is often coded or symbolized in the dream’s manifest content. For example, a dream about losing teeth might have a latent content related to anxiety about aging or fear of losing power or control (though interpretations can vary greatly depending on the individual).

How the Mind Censors Latent Content

Sigmund Freud proposed that the mind uses a process called “dream work” to censor or disguise the latent content of a dream. The latent content, which represents our unconscious wishes and desires, is often disturbing or socially unacceptable.

The purpose of dreamwork is to transform the forbidden wish into a non-threatening form, thus reducing anxiety and allowing us to continue sleeping.

Dreamwork involves the process of condensation, displacement, and secondary elaboration:

• Displacement : This involves shifting the emotional significance from an important object to a less important one. Displacement takes place when we transform the person or object we are really concerned about to someone else. For example, one of Freud’s patients was extremely resentful of his sister-in-law and used to refer to her as a dog, dreaming of strangling a small white dog. Freud interpreted this as representing his wish to kill his sister-in-law.  If the patient would have really dreamed of killing his sister-in-law, he would have felt guilty. The unconscious mind transformed her into a dog to protect him.
• Condensation : This is the process of combining several ideas or people into a single dream object or event. For example, a dream about a man may be a dream about both one’s father and one’s lover. A dream about a house might be the condensation of worries about security as well as worries about one’s appearance to the rest of the world.
• Symbolization : This is the representation of a repressed idea or wish through symbols. For example, a dream about climbing a ladder might symbolize ambition or a desire for success.
• Secondary Elaboration : Secondary elaboration occurs when the unconscious mind strings together wish-fulfilling images in a logical order of events, further obscuring the latent content.  It can involve adding details or creating a storyline that connects the different elements of the dream. According to Freud, this is why the manifest content of dreams can be in the form of believable events.

These mechanisms work together to transform the latent content into the manifest content, allowing the dreamer to remain asleep and unaware of the disturbing or unacceptable thoughts and desires expressed in the dream.

However, through techniques like free association and dream analysis, Freud believed that it was possible to uncover the latent content and gain insight into the unconscious mind .

Psychoanalytic Dream Interpretation

Sigmund Freud developed several techniques to uncover the latent content of dreams, which he believed represented the unconscious desires and conflicts of the dreamer. Here are the main techniques:

Free-Association

Freud used a technique called free association to uncover the latent content of dreams. In this process, a person says whatever comes to mind in relation to each element of the dream, without censoring or judging their thoughts.

In free association, the individual is encouraged to share any thoughts that come to mind about each element of the dream, no matter how random or unconnected they may seem.

The idea is that these associations can lead to insights into the unconscious wishes or conflicts that the dream represents.

Transference

Transference is a process where the feelings and desires that the individual has towards significant people in their life are transferred onto the therapist.

Observing these transference patterns can provide clues about the latent content of the individual’s dreams.

Dream Analysis

This involves a detailed examination of the dream’s content. The analyst and the individual work together to explore the dream’s manifest content (the actual events of the dream) and try to understand what these might symbolize in terms of the dreamer’s unconscious desires or conflicts (the latent content).

Symbol Interpretation

In Freud’s later work on dreams, he explored the possibility of universal symbols in dreams . Some of these were sexual, including poles, guns, and swords representing the penis and horse riding and dancing representing sexual intercourse.

For example, Freud suggested that dreams of flying might represent sexual desire, while dreams of losing teeth might represent anxiety about aging.

However, he also emphasized that the meaning of symbols can vary greatly between individuals, and that the individual’s associations are the most important factor in interpretation.

However, Freud was cautious about symbols and stated that general symbols are more personal rather than universal. A person cannot interpret what the manifest content of a dream symbolizes without knowing about the person’s circumstances.

“Dream dictionaries”, which are still popular now, were a source of irritation to Freud. In an amusing example of the limitations of universal symbols, one of Freud’s patients, after dreaming about holding a wriggling fish, said to him “that’s a Freudian symbol – it must be a penis!”

Freud explored further, and it turned out that the woman’s mother, who was a passionate astrologer and a Pisces, was on the patient’s mind because she disapproved of her daughter being in analysis. It seems more plausible, as Freud suggested, that the fish represented the patient’s mother rather than a penis!

Consideration of Repression

Freud believed that repressed desires and conflicts often emerge in dreams, so understanding what the individual might be repressing can help to interpret the dream’s latent content.

Freud, S., & Strachey, J. (1900).  The interpretation of dreams  (Vol. 4, p. 5). Allen & Unwin.

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What it means to dream about flying, according to an expert

Were you soaring in your dreams recently? Dreams of flying are considered among the most exhilarating.

They also pack an emotional significance. Dreams about flying represent freedom, expansion and higher dimensions of consciousness.  

As a lucid dream teacher and the author of The Alchemy of Your Dreams , I help people come to insights about recurrent patterns and symbols that pop up in their dreams, like dreams of flying.

Read on for a few possible explanations of your miles-high dreaming.

I dreamed I was flying. What does that mean?

Dreams of flying are symbolic of freedom, liberation and empowerment. They can represent a desire to break free from limitations or constraints in your waking life.

Flying dreams may also indicate a need to take a step back in order to gain a different perspective on your current circumstances.

This dream may reflect a need for self-reflection, as if you are observing yourself from an outside point of view. What is the higher perspective of your life?

Overall, this dream may be encouraging you to explore new possibilities, embrace your independence and gain a fresh outlook on life. It's saying, "Feel good, to reach high and go for it!"

Or, the dream is a reflection of the fact that you are already doing these things in your life.

I dreamed I was flying like a bird and felt totally free until I saw other birds. What does that mean?

This dream may be altering you to how you feel about intimate or familial relationships. The fact that you felt free in the dream when you were independent is the key message here. Ask yourself: "Am I ready to be in a relationship? Is it better to be single for the time being?"

Take some time to consider your partnerships, friendships and any sort of relational pattern. It is not really about other people but how you feel about connecting to other people.

I dreamed I was flying in a plane to a good destination. What does that mean?

This dream is a sign that you are moving in a positive direction in your waking life. You are the pilot, in control of your actions and decisions.

The fact that you were headed towards a good destination shows that your life is unfolding in a way you like. The dream may be telling you to simply keep doing what you are doing and enjoy the ride.

I dreamed I was flying over water. What does that mean?

Within dream symbolism, water is thought to represent our subconscious feelings , emotions and beliefs. In this case, you are flying high above the depths of your subconscious mind.

This dream may be alerting you to the fact that you are avoiding how you feel, or alternatively that you are taking an observer role in your life.

Self-reflection is important, as you don’t want to get so high up in the clouds that you lose sight of what is happening at a ground level. Pay attention to your foundations and your relationships. Ask yourself: am I in my life or watching it happen? 

You don’t want to end up in a situation where you are disconnected from your inner world. Journaling and practices like art therapy could help you to reconnect with your subconscious.

I dreamed I was flying away from danger and woke up a stressed. What does that mean?

This dream is alerting you to the fact that you either need to move away from anything dangerous or threatening in your life, or that you are already doing so and should keep going.

The "threat" or "danger" could be a relationship, job, place or anything that makes you feel uneasy.

The main thing to do here is to ask yourself: What makes me feel unsafe? Then look to see what you can actively do about the situation. This dream is telling you that you have the ability to rise above the situation.

I dreamed I was flying and could see myself lying in my bed. What does that mean?

This dream scenario may be telling you to leave behind challenges and obstacles in your waking life. Or, you may need to address any actions or behaviors that have caused you to lie in the metaphoric bed you’ve made.

Did you look peaceful sleeping in your bed? What were you doing? If you can answer those questions, you will likely get to the root of your subconscious motivators and emotions.

I dreamed that I was flying and went to my old hometown. What does this dream mean?  

This dream may indicate that you are now ready to face your past and to see it from a higher perspective, via flying. This dream suggests a willingness to embrace growth and change.

Reflect on your emotions and thoughts surrounding your old home and childhood and consider how those feelings may be surfacing in your current life. Is there something that is happening in your life right now that feels like an echo from the past?

If so, your dream may be telling you to view things from a higher point of view. In other words, don’t fall into repetitive patterns.

I dreamed that I was flying a spaceship in a futuristic place. What does that mean?  

This dream may indicate a desire for progress and adventure.

Flying can symbolize freedom, ambition, and a desire for exploration or escape, and the spaceship may represent a vehicle for transformation or advancement in your life.

The futuristic setting may suggest a forward-thinking mindset or a sense of anticipation for future possibilities.

I dreamed I was happily flying and then all of a sudden, I started to fall and could not stop. I woke up sweating. What does that mean?

Symbolically, flying offers us a sense of freedom and freedom while being in control.

However, the sudden change in your dream may suggest a fear of losing control or a sense of vulnerability in your waking life. It could be related to a situation where you feel overwhelmed, uncertain or like things are spinning out of control.

This dream may be asking you to address any areas in your life where you may be struggling to maintain control or a sense of stability.

Be honest with yourself and seek to understand any behaviors that need to be brought back into balance. Moderation here may be the answer.

I dreamed I was flying and then all of a sudden, a strange dream figure grabbed my hand. We flew together. I wasn’t afraid — it just felt surprising. What does that mean?

The sudden appearance of a strange dream figure could symbolize a part of yourself that you're not familiar with. This is a new aspect of yourself that you are coming into contact with because you are flying high or want to be.

Oftentimes, in order to reach goals and take a leap toward a bright future, we are required to get uncomfortable. This dream represents this kind of leap.

The strange dream figure that grabs your hand shows you that you will have the support and be able to fly forward. That support could be internalized or come from the outside world.

Although the surprise may have initially caught you off guard, the lack of fear in the dream indicates a willingness to embrace change and explore the unknown.

This dream could also be a reflection of your openness to new experiences and a subconscious encouragement to move forward confidently. You are opening yourself up to help along the way — help that you may not be accustomed to just yet.

I dreamed that I flew to another planet where I met another life form. What does that mean?

Flying to another planet and meeting another life form in your dream can symbolize a desire for exploration, new experiences and a sense of curiosity. It may suggest that you are seeking different perspectives or looking for something beyond your current reality.

This dream could also indicate a desire for connection or a longing to discover new aspects of yourself or the world around you.

It may be worth exploring these feelings of curiosity in your waking life and finding ways to satisfy them, whether through travel, learning or engaging in new activities.

More dream meanings

• What it means to dream about water, from waves to waterfalls
• Snake dreams meaning: Dream interpreter breaks down symbolism
• Why am I dreaming about babies? Allow an expert to explain
• Dreams about being pregnant: An expert explains what it could mean
• Why am I dreaming my teeth are falling out? A dream interpreter breaks it down

Athena Laz is a bestselling author and expert in the fields of dreams, spirituality, intuition, and the nature of consciousness. Her bestselling books,  The Alchemy of Your Dreams: A Modern Guide to Lucid Dreaming & Interpretation , and  The Deliberate Dreamer’s Journal  are out now, and have been translated into more than 12 languages worldwide. You can discover her work at  www.athenalaz.com , see her dream programs  here , and find her on social media:  @athena_Laz .

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