Do you consider dream interpretations woo?

[Moochie]

A good psychiatrist can almost certainly use knowledge of a patient to interpret dreams of that patient assuming the patient remembers and reports accurately those dreams. I have done that a couple of times (kind of showing off/fing around) and in both cases the persons agreed my interpretation made a lot of sense to them. It helped a lot that I knew about the situations that they were undergoing at each of the times.

What Fritz Perls did in his therapy wasn't dream interpretation. By having clients role-play everything in their dream, and have conversations with the things in a dream, whether animate or inanimate, and having the client role-play dialogs between the things in their dream, the clients would gradually create the (emotional) meaning of their dream for themselves. No woo involved. And certainly no third-party "interpretation." Perls often referred to dreams as "unfinished business" -- the unfinished business of the client's life, not anyone else's. The role-playing served as a way for the client to externalize the feelings represented by the imagery of their dream.

IMO the very thought of someone "interpreting" a dream for someone else smacks of pure woo.


M.

 

[roger]

As I posted the last time you raised Perls, I could do exactly the same thing with a Shakespeare play.

Which I consider evidence that role playing (and theatrical performance is part of Gestalt theory) helps you sort out your problems, not dreams.

 

[Starthinker]

My wife used to swear up and down that flying in a dream meant you were homosexual.

 

[quarky]

I used to dream about losing teeth.

It came true 50 years later.

 

[Quinn]

There is no scientific proof that dreams can predict and foretell the future. Yes, many people have had dreams that eventually came true afterwards. This can be explained in how we unconsciously gather little information here and there and when you have a dream, it puts together all this unconscious information before you are consciously able to do so.

It can also be explained by the fact that when you dream about enough stuff, some of it will eventually happen.

 

[sg1985]

It can also be explained by the fact that when you dream about enough stuff, some of it will eventually happen.

In my last dream a vendor at a carnival sold me a basket of super cheesy cheese fries with bacon bits. I work at a diner and always think that the cook never uses enough cheese. I certainly hope that an awesome basket of cheese fries is in my future.

 

[I Ratant]

Mine make so little sense I don't bother "interpreting" them, I just enjoy them.
Some of them are obviously running away with events of that day, in strange directions.
But they're hardly predictions, just variations on how things may have gone, but mostly just plain impossible stuff that makes sense -in the dream-, but couldn't be possible awake.

 

[cwalner]

My most memorable and vivid dread required almost no interpretation and is a dream I still remember quite vividly 35 years later despite only having the dream once.

When I was 5 years old , I had open heart surgery in November to repair a congenital heart defect. My dream was that I was awake on the operating table with my chest cavity open, and the surgeons doing whatever surgeons do (Hey, I was 5 years old, I wasn't aware of all of those little details yet!) During the surgery, my family came in one at a time to talk to me and reassure me. The most surreal dream detail was when they served me Thanksgiving dinner during the surgery, but being hospital food, it was just a Swanson's frozen turkey dinner.

As I said, not much interpretation required. I knew enough about the surgery to be concerned, and my brain fed me images to reconcile this with a measure of reassurance. To me, the most remarkable thing about this dream is the clarity of detail that I still retain from it. However in context of the emotional trauma of undergoing heart surgery at 5 years old, both my own anxiety and the anxiety I was surely picking up from my parents goes a long way to explain why that particular dream was so vivid and memorable.

 

[Belz...]

Do you consider dream interpretations woo?

Yes.

The only way I ever found of making sense of my dreams is by looking each individual element that makes up the dream and realize that it's all part of recent memory.

My personal hypothesis ? Brain de-frag.

 

[Belz...]

As for dreams predicting the future, as far as I know it's just déjà vu. People think they've dreamt it before, but they're just being fooled by brain farts.

 

[Moochie]

As for dreams predicting the future, as far as I know it's just déjà vu. People think they've dreamt it before, but they're just being fooled by brain farts.

I love the expression "brain farts," as I do "brain explosion." They are so descriptive.


M.

 

[Senex]

On a related issue I often dream about what I hear on the TV when it's playing while I sleep. Last night I fell asleep in front of the TV on the Comedy channel. The Penis pill commercial came on. I dreamed I was in college and these girls were trying to get me and my buddies to give them our credit/debit cards in order to charge us 46 cents for mailing penis enlargement pills to us. They were also willing to go out to a nightclub with us if we agreed.

I was telling my friends it was a trick and no sincere business person wants to charge 46 cents to your credit card (they say 46 cents and it will be 46 dollars I said). I said they are crooks who will take your credit card information and cheat you. My friends (not me -I stayed behind) went with the girls and got cheated as I predicted. Later, a girl from the infomercial approached me angry that I tried (and she said did in a couple of cases save a few of my buddies) to stop the treachery. I said you try to protect your friends. She was angry at me.

I also remember argueieng with the doctor who took credit for creating the pills. I kept asking him what excactly was in the pills and all he said was herbs and no one listened to me as I stated that was an inadequate answer.

 

[legne]

Look what I just stumbled across:
whatstheharm.net/dreaminterpretation.html

 

[shandyjan]

Great thread!! Dreams are so..... gosh, fascinating is an understatement. Frankly I would hate them to predict the future..as I have some nasty ones
I do sometimes fall asleep with the tv on. The most recent one..I dreamt a whole lot of nonsense mixed up..but I remember getting surrounded by fire and it was freezing cold rather than hot, and we had to drive fast to get home and phone the emergency services. I woke up, the tv was on, and the next news update told of the fires in Australia. No surprise I was hearing some of that in my sleep!

 

[ImproperUsername]

Dreams can be fun and interesting and sometimes they are just scary ****. I don't think there can be a truly universal bible for interpreting them because different things mean different things to different people.