Taking your dreams seriously

Dreams have been here as long as we have. Literally! They are an integral part of our human experience. Some of us dream more and some less frequent. But we all have them.

Every one of us dreams.

But mostly we don’t really think much of them. We awake after having one and are quick to brush them off as meaningless or just plain weird. And then just go about our day without giving them much thought later on. If any.

Why do we ignore our dreams?

There are multiple historical and biological reasons to why we rather choose to ignore our dreams. One of the biological reasons is that consciousness has a natural aversion towards the unknown. Anthropologist have consistently documented a strong sense of ‘misoneism’(fear of the unknown and new) in all primitive and isolated people. When they encounter something new. Their initial reaction is always to respond with either fear or hostility.

Besides that, consciousness as far as we know it is also still a very new thing. We could say it is still in kind of its experimental ‘beta stage’. So this fear of the new might not even be such a bad thing. And In contrast to what we believe, our consciousness might also not even be all that robust as we think it is. Have you ever seen an DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) classification book? Those books are huge! This alone shows that there are a lot of things that can go wrong within our own psyche.

So why care about your dreams?

So if our consciousness is averse to things we do not understand and our psyche also seems to be fragile. Then why should we ever take up an interest into our own dreams!? Our dreams most of the times are odd, strange and unknown. we can’t really seem to make much sense of them most of the time.

One good reason for paying more attention to your dreams is that we sleep for about 30% of our lives. And a good portion of that time spent sleeping is reserved for dreaming. So in fact we spend quite a substantial amount of our life dreaming. So Given this fact alone, that we do it all the time. Is maybe enough reason to pay a little more attention to them.

Observing your dreams in different ways might be very beneficial in helping you deal with some of the problems you can be faced with in your life. But how can we start doing this? Instead of looking at our dreams at face value to looking at our dreams from a different perspective?

As we hold a pen in our hand and tilt it’s angle to see other sides of it. In the same way we can look at our dreams from different angles and in doing so might reveal things that were hidden from us before. Doing this might even be a helpful tool in coming to understand what it is that’s bothering you or what it is that you really want in your daily life.

The ‘problem’ of focus

Our world is complex and there is a lot things going on at the same time. And our brain can only process so much information at once. What we see mostly is what we focus on. As we change our focus we stop seeing what we stopped focussing on. Doctor Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris demonstrated this in various experiments. One of these experiments even became very famous.(Some of you might already be familiar with the experiment, try it below if you have never seen or done it before. It takes less then a minute)