Our society has always been curious about the process of dreaming and the significance of those dreams. There are many different theories and explanations. Dreams may serve psychological purposes and help with factors such as unconscious fears, desires, or unresolved issues. Psychologist Carl Jung felt that dreams were messages from the unconscious that were meant to guide our personal growth. In terms of cognitive science and neuroscience, dreams may help with memory consolidation, emotional regulation, and problem solving. Some religions and traditions even believe that there is a spiritual or symbolic meaning associated with dreams.
When you have a dream, you’ll likely be able to derive some insight into what it means and what your dream is trying to tell you. As such, it’s critical to pay attention to recurring themes and symbols, strong emotions like joy or sadness, vivid imagery that you can’t easily forget, and changes in settings. In order to capture these themes and symbols, journaling or keeping a notebook and pen on your nightstand will help you delve further into them.
You may be wondering what might influence your dreams. There can be quite a few factors including stress, your daily experiences, emotions and psychological states, subconscious hopes, memories, and fears, medications or substances, sleep quality or stage of sleep, your diet including late night meals and snacks, and your environment. Environmental issues like noise, temperature, and smells have been known to influence what you’re dreaming about.
Many psychologists and spiritual thinkers believe that your intuition ties into your dreams. It can happen when you are faced with a major decision and have a dream involving something symbolically associated with it. You might also have a dream related to a gut instinct before you are even consciously aware of it. At the end of the day, your dreams reflect pattern recognition which is a central component of your intuition. Some believe that dreams help give a stage to your inner voice which may be drowned out while meeting everyday demands.
Everyone does dream, even if they don’t remember it. Dreaming occurs during REM sleep which all people experience, unless they have a severe disorder. Some people are just not as good at recalling their dreams as others. This could be because they wake up abruptly, experience poor sleep, or because they don’t pay that much attention to dreaming.
Dreams can happen at any sleep stage, but your most vivid dreams will occur during REM. The longest and most intense dreams will happen during the early morning hours before you wake up, so pay attention. You can glean a lot of insight from your dreams, and your recall will improve, the more you start focusing on them!