7 Common Dreams And What They Mean

Dreams come to us in our most private moments: wrapped up in sheets, our public faces stored away for the night. The visions we see in sleep are supposed to be expressions of our individual psyches and imaginations, but most people's dreams are based on themes that are very common. I thought my recurring dream of losing my teeth was scary and freakish until I went online to find thousands of others having the same dream, all trying to find out what the heck it could mean. Just because our dreams are shared, though, doesn't mean they aren't unique; the way we experience these common elements in dreaming life is what's significant.

1. Being chased.
Candice Janco, author of the Bedside Dream Dictionary: 500 Dream Symbols and Their Meanings, describes this dream (the most common) as an indication of a felt threat in your waking life. This threat can take the form of a menacing person or a strong emotion with which you are having difficulty coping. Try to determine who or what is chasing you, where the dream takes place, and what your feelings are during the chase to understand what this dreams means to you.

Keep reading...

Comments

[GEM-592]

Getting laid? Hello?

[fedupnburnin]

I never remember my dreams and I'm glad about that.

[SisterAnn]

I had fallen asleep in the living room. I dreamed some people were in the dining room next to the living room. I started yelling, "They have broken in." as loud as I could over and over, so my husband would wake up. I couldn't see them, but I knew they were there. My husband didn't respod. When I am afraid in bed, I lay real still and fall asleep! That is what I did. When I woke the next morning the dream seemed so real, that I had to ask my husband if he heard me yelling. He had not. I am pretty sure I yelled, whether asleep or not, if that is possible to yell in your sleep.

I take dreams literally and seriously. I am even more careful to shut up the house before going to bed, now.

If I dream of teeth, I go to the dentist before analysing the dream. My theory is that your subconscious knows things before you are aware of them.

[stimpy]

My insight, after listening to others chew on my dreams, is that the literal interpretations are usually the wrong ones. Dig for more insight. There's something else you are missing...

[TheAlchemist]

Escape the reductionist view of dreaming and spend some hours with Uncle Carl.

Snakes? Massive Transformation...

[Aesthete]

I'm a dreamer, but when awake I never worry too much about what a dream meant. Sometimes a dream does indeed mean something and it is revealed to me in the fullness of time. At other times a dream may simply mean that I ate too much of the wrong thing before bedtime. I dreamed about the conflict between the Serbs and Croats 10 years before it actually happened and am still pondering why such a vision was given to me, right out of the blue. It was certainly unrelated to anything I've ever experienced or consciously thought about when awake. However, I have since noticed that a dream may or may not be even remotely related to anything happening in my waking life. Go figure.

[NoSillyName]

To paraphrase Freud, "Sometimes a dream is just a dream."

[LondonTownNY]

I had a dream that Americans awoke from their slumber, forgot who Paris Hilton and Perez Hilton were and decided to hold the Neocon's accountable, removed them from office and held tribunals indicting and imprisoning them.

[stimpy]

No, that's a hallucination. We have meds for that...

[ibsteve2u]

And if you dream of a great big snake scaring the crap out of you, so you run away and in your panic fall over a cliff, that can be interpreted as:

McCain just announced that Joe Lieberman is his VP choice, Dick Cheney will serve as his Secretary of the Interior, David J. Lesar will be his Secretary of Defense but will maintain his office in Dubai, John Bolton will be his Secretary of State, George W. Bush will head the Department of Education, Jeffrey K. Skilling will serve as Secretary of the Treasury, and the ghost of Leona Helmsley will run the Department of Labor.

And Alberto Gonzales will be U.S. Attorney General. Again.

[NoSillyName]

Holy crap, that isn't a dream; its a nightmare!

[CarbondaleKid]

I dreamed that I ate a giant marshmallow and was surprised to find upon awakening that my pillow was missing...

[NoSillyName]

Oh, please. I read that in an Archie comic decades ago, Jughead.

[JonG345]

Repeat after me

Obama:

Right about Iraq.

Right about Afghanistan.

Right for America.

[GEM-592]

Add "black man in America" to your list, then you can wake up from YOUR dream

[OtayPanky]

There are several serious and fruitful approaches to dream analysis.

A reductionistic approach like this - where dream A is supposed to have meaning B - isn't one of them.

Doesn't anybody LEARN anything anymore? Or is everyone too busy blogging?

[JayZee]

A B6 deficiency could cause the reduction of dream recall but....

The fruitful approach from Dr. Jung would still be "Vwhat emotion did this dream evoke?"

Fears and fantasies are primordial and hard wired into us, there is no escape.

[ptillen]

OK, stay with me on this.
Last night, I fell asleep while listening to a chapter in the audiobook version of Sean Wilentz' "The Age of Reagan" which chronicled the rise of the Republican right in the late 1970's, culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. It described in great detail the ideology and culture of the New Right.
I then dreamed about seducing a Republican congressman (or senator, I'm not sure which). No one in particular, a sort of generic Republican congressman. The dream was actually kinda hot.
Seriously, I'm not making this up.

Thoughts? Interpretations, anyone?

[ReelBusy]

Vote Obama.
Once you dream black you never go back.

[ptillen]

Giggle- snort.
Been dreaming about an Obama presidency since the DNC of 04.

[Cynth]

LOL!

[anfractuous]

It seems to me that the people who are most attuned to their dreams are the ones least capable of incorporating those insights into their lives. It's only the zombies that prosper. Why is that?

[Jonahson]

Dreams are your likes and dislikes emotional inputs. When you react emotionally to externally phenomenon like when a child gets frightened we have actually created consciouness which is stored in our memory. When we stop thinking these stored consciouness will flow out. This can also happen when we cease our thinking during meditation.
During dreams we are always the main actor.

[Verena von Pfetten - Huffpost Blogger]

Whoops! Sorry all!

I've added the link now. Thanks, Liam, for your wonderful detective work.

[Liam]

Whoops, I meant to post that with text, not just plain.

I went and searched, the link to the full article, that they missed above, is:

http://www.divinecaroline.com/article/22201/53010-seven-common-dreams-mean

Liam.