Dreams Have Symbolic Meaning

This week’s myth was on research showing that dreams have symbolic meaning. This psychological belief goes all the way back to Freud, who stated that dream interpretation was not universal, even though he treated it like it was. I was most surprised to learn that this belief actually stems from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. I knew it wasn’t a new belief, but I did not know that belief was over a hundred years old. This myth has persisted because we believe in a subconscious self, and we want to believe that we can understand said subconscious self. We want to believe that dreams have meaning, we assign labels and meaning to almost everything. Humans love to categorize things, including dreams. This kind of reminds me of the handwriting …show more content…
Dreams mean nothing, we simply have to have reasons for everything because we are human. Dreams are simply the result of your brain testing things in your sleep. Your brain will pull important things that happened to you from your day, and the theme of the dream might be based off of what emotion dominated your day. That is all. No hidden meaning. It does not reveal something about yourself that you do not know. Believing that it does is bad because if you decide to pack up and move across the nation because the symbolic meaning in your dream said you should, it can have disastrous consequences. My uncle did that. I do not remember what exactly his dream was about, but it meant that he should move from Las Vegas to somewhere that had a coast, he ultimately decided on Oregon. So they sold their house, quit their jobs, and bought a house on the coast of Oregon, and they are struggling to make the house payment and pay their bills because neither of them can find a decent job. If you ask my uncle how its going, he will tell you its not going good but his dream said moving to Oregon was the better solution so it would be worse if he was still living in Las Vegas, running his business while his partner ran a blood bank, living in their nice house, that was already paid off. To me, that is foolish. But he believes so strongly that his dream predicted doom if he stayed. The worst part of this situation is that I do not believe it would be possible to get him to believe otherwise, even if you showed him the research behind it. The other reason this myth is bad is that again, everyone interprets things differently. This myth will never die because everyone wants to believe that dreams have symbolic meaning, and you are more likely to remember the one time a dream actually could have meant something that it predicted about