What does it mean when your dream

What Your Dreams Actually Mean, According to Science

If dreams were movies, they wouldn’t make a dime. They’re often banal, frequently fleeting and they’re screened for an audience of just one. As for the storyline? You’re in a supermarket, only it’s also Yankee Stadium, shopping with your second-grade teacher until she turns into Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Then you both shoot a bear in the cereal aisle. Somebody call rewrite.

But dreams are vastly more complex than that, and if you’ve got a theory that explains them, have at it. The ancient Egyptians thought of dreams as simply a different form of seeing, with trained dreamers serving as seers to help plan battles and make state decisions. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that dreams were equal parts predictions of future events and visitations by the dead.

Sigmund Freud considered dreaming an expression of repressed conflicts or desires, which were — no surprise, this being Freud — often sexual in nature. Carl Jung took a more rigorous approach, explaining dreams as a sort of “shaped energy,” inchoate emotions or thoughts released by the deep subconscious and entrained into narratives by higher regions of the brain. Modern psychologists and neurologists, armed with imaging equipment including PET scans and MRIs, have taken things to a deeper and more technical level, speculating that dreaming is the brain’s way of dumping excess data, consolidating important information, keeping us alert to danger and more.

But why do dreams take the particular shape they do? Why do you keep dreaming about having to cram for finals years after you graduated from college? Why do you dream about flying, or being chased by a wild animal, or showing up at that always-embarrassing party with your always-absent pants? And why are there dreams so stark or bizarre or seemingly perverse that you will carry them to your grave rather than revealing so much as a single detail about them to anyone in the world?

The least glamorous explanation for any dream is that it serves as a sort of data dump — a clearing of the day’s useless memories and a caching of the valuable ones. Researchers had long suspected that that process, if it exists, plays out between the hippocampus — which controls memory — and the neocortex, which governs higher order thought.

A 2007 study at the Max Planck Medical Institute in Heidelberg, Germany helped confirm that theory: working with anesthetized mice, the researchers found that as the neocortex fires during sleep, it signals various regions in the hippocampus to upload whatever information they’ve been holding in short-term storage. The hippocampus is then cleared to gather more the next day, while the neocortex decides what to transfer to long-term memory and what to discard. As that data streams by on the computer screen of the sleeping mind, some of it gets snatched up and randomly stitched into the crazy quilt of dreams, which often only vaguely resemble the literal content of the information.

MORE: How Dream Therapy Can Change Your Life

Justice Ginsburg and the bear, say, may come to mind as your brain examines and discards a scrap of news it picked up about the Supreme Court and the Department of the Interior. Most of this evanescent imagery — an estimated 90% — we don’t recall, which is consistent with the idea of dreaming as purging. “We dream to forget,” wrote Nobel laureate Francis Crick in 1984.

Crick, who is best known and most celebrated as the co-discoverer of DNA, improbably became something of a leading thinker — or at least leading provocateur — in dream theory, and what was colloquially known as his “garbage disposal theory” of dreaming attracted a lot of believers into the 1990s. But most contemporary dream theorists believe things are not quite so simple. For starters, a century of experience with talk therapy has shown that far from benefitting from forgetting all of our dreams, we often get a great deal out of reflecting on and analyzing them.

“It’s not a huge, dramatic effect but it certainly seems like paying attention to your dreams can have positive effects,” says Harvard University psychologist Deirdre Barrett, author of The Committee of Sleep. That’s not to say that dreams don’t involve a certain amount of data sorting and clearing. “This idea that information is being processed, I think does have validity. We’re sorting things into categories, comparing them to other events, considering information that we would suppress during the day.”

Another view of dreaming comes from cognitive neuroscientist Antti Revonsuo of Sweden’s University of Skövde, who has proposed what he calls the Threat Simulation Theory, arguing that the brain responds to potential future danger by running what amount to fire drills while we sleep just to keep us sharp. That may be the source of the persistent dream about failing to study for finals — with finals as a stand-in for a presentation you have to write for work in your adult life. Dreaming about losing some or all of your teeth — reported by a surprising number of respondents in studies — appears to be about anxiety over saying the wrong thing at the wrong moment. It may also be about bodily deterioration — something we all fear even in childhood.

The fact that the same dream themes occur across different populations and radically different cultures is not all that unexpected, since what human beings have in common is often far deeper and more primal than what we don’t. “We share a lot of genetic programming, so even modern humans continue to be concerned about large animals with big teeth,” says Barrett. “The idea of nudity as social exposure seems universal too, even in tribes that wear very little. In most cultures inappropriate clothing means shame.”

A far more productive function of dreaming is problem-solving, as the sleeping brain continues to work on jobs the waking mind handled during the day. In one 2010 study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, 99 people were administered a task that required them to navigate through a three-dimensional maze. During the course of their practice sessions, they were given a 90-minute break. Some were asked to engage in quiet activities like reading; others were were instructed to try to take a nap. Those who did nap and who happened to dream about the maze showed a ten-fold improvement on the task in the next session compared to the other subjects. Something similar happens when students are studying for a test and find they have a better mastery over the material after a night’s sleep, especially if they dreamed even indirectly about what they’d been learning.

“I often think of dreaming as simply thinking in a different biochemical state,” Barrett says.

Finally — give Freud his due — there are dreams that appear to be strictly wish-fulfillment. Dreams about flying may represent a desire for freedom. Dreams about finding new rooms in your home may express a desire for opportunity or novelty. And as for sex dreams? Often as not they’re about, um, sex. (The brain doesn’t always make things difficult.)

Our nights would likely be quieter and our sleep more serene if we didn’t dream at all, or at least didn’t dream so much. But our minds would not be as rich nor our brains as nimble nor our wishes so often fulfilled — if only in vivid fantasy. The screening room of the sleeping brain may sometimes wear you out, but like all good theaters, it will rarely leave you bored.

Write to Jeffrey Kluger at [email protected].

What They Are and What They Mean – Cleveland Clinic

Imagine this. You’re enjoying a deep, restful snooze when suddenly you startle awake. However, it’s not from noise outside, but a vivid dream.

That’s not necessarily out of the ordinary. But you might wonder why your dreams are so realistic. And what does it mean when you dream about someone? What do falling dreams mean? What about recurring dreams?

Psychologists such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung developed theories to explain what dreams mean. “Freud thought dreams are repressed content, ideas or themes,” says behavioral sleep medicine expert Michelle Drerup, PsyD, DBSM. “And Jungian theory came out of Freud’s ideas and has this idea of collective unconscious. It’s something that you’re carrying from your ancestors.”

But from a medical perspective, dream interpretation is still a mystery. “There’s no real consistent, scientifically proven theory linking specific content back to what a dream means,” Dr. Drerup notes.

What are dreams?

Dreams themselves are a little less mysterious. “Dreams are mental imagery or activity that occur when you sleep,” explains Dr. Drerup. You can dream at any stage of sleep, but your most vivid dreams typically occur in rapid eye movement sleep, or REM sleep. That’s the period of sleep when your brain is highly active, your eyes move rapidly behind your closed eyes and you have temporary loss of muscle tone.

“In REM sleep, we have less autonomic stability,” says Dr. Drerup. “Our heart rate increases. We don’t have the kind of steady, calm respiration that we do during other stages of non-REM sleep.”

Researchers find it challenging to analyze dreams because we often don’t remember them. “Even if you’re having a sleep study, it’s not like we can look in your brain and see what’s happening during a dream,” says Dr. Drerup. “That’s part of the reason why they’re still kind of mysterious — they’re difficult to study.”

Why do we dream?

Doctors have several working theories as to why we dream. For starters, Dr. Drerup says you also tend to dream more in REM sleep. Additionally, dreaming during this stage is associated with “consolidation of memories,” she adds.

“That dreaming may represent important cognitive functioning. Brain activity that occurs when we’re dreaming is similar to the memory processing brain activity we experience when we’re awake.”

When you’re experiencing more stress or anxiety, you tend to dream more, too. The types of dreams you have also change. Dr. Drerup says that nightmares or stressful dreams — for example, about being chased or being in a frightening situation — are also common when you’re stressed. “That’s one of the theories of why we dream,” she says. “Our dreams might help us process and manage our emotions.”

Interestingly enough, Dr. Drerup notes that researchers have found that people living in certain places might have similar nighttime visions, although they aren’t quite sure why. “There seems to be some cultural influence on dreams,” she explains. “For example, the same type of dream might be more common in Germany.”

What do dreams mean?

Determining what dreams mean is a big question, one that doctors, researchers and scientists are still trying to answer. But Dr. Drerup stresses that dream interpretation is subjective. “That’s always what I tell people — the meaning that you ascribe to the dream is going to be much more meaningful than anything I ascribe to the dream,” she says. “Because it’s probably something from your life that’s represented in that dream.”

As an example, Dr. Drerup notes that you might have the same dream as someone else, but yours will be more representative of what you’re personally experiencing. “For example, if someone recently lost their job, a certain dream about not being able to find their shoes might mean something very different to them versus someone who recently went through a divorce.”

Dreaming that you’re pregnant — in other words, involved with a new life — is also subjective. This could occur maybe when you’re trying to get pregnant or if you were pregnant and had a miscarriage. Or maybe not. “It’s much more of what this dream means to you. Your dream of pregnancy could be much more about, ‘I’m starting a new career. ’ A new life, in a sense. The dream could mean a whole lot of different things.”

Although experiences you have in a dream might be based on real-life events, that doesn’t mean your dreams are always realistic. “A person might be distorted in the dream, or in a situation or place where they wouldn’t normally be,” notes Dr. Drerup. “What does that mean? Your guess is as good as mine.”

Advertising Policy

However, sometimes even the strangest dreams have logical explanations. Dreams about your teeth falling out could be happening because you’re grinding your teeth in your sleep, a condition called bruxism. “This dream is more a sign of psychological stress,” says Dr. Drerup.

What causes nightmares?

Nightmares can be terrifying and have lingering effects even when you’re awake. “With nightmares, especially recurring nightmares, it can feel like you’re playing out a story,” says Dr. Drerup. “People often say it’s like the same movie’s playing.”

Talking about a nightmare like you would a movie you’ve seen can bring about unexpected consequences. “If you have a nightmare, you’ll tell everybody about it because it was so weird, right?” ventures Dr. Drerup. “But rehearsing that nightmare over and over again means your neural pathways are getting reinforced. It’s like you’re developing a memory of that nightmare. Then, it’s more likely the dream will reoccur.”

Dr. Drerup says nightmares are commonly associated with a variety of other conditions and events as well, such as:

PTSD

For someone living with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), nightmares are often a component of re-experiencing or re-living their trauma.

Alcohol

Overindulging a bit too much can exacerbate nightmares.

Stress

High stress levels can lead to more dreams and nightmares. According to Dr. Drerup, this is likely because the stress is kicking the emotional processing that occurs during dreaming into overdrive.

Psychological disorders

Dr. Drerup says psychological disorders such as depression and anxiety are associated more frequently with nightmares.

Medication withdrawal

Withdrawing from certain medications can also cause more nightmares. “Antidepressants suppress REM sleep, and decrease the amount of REM sleep that we have,” explains Dr. Drerup. “When you go off of an antidepressant, you tend to have REM rebound.”

In other words, you experience more REM sleep, which then makes it more likely that you’re spending time where dreaming happens. “People will often have an increase in dreams or nightmares when they discontinue antidepressants,” she adds.

Addressing untreated sleep apnea

People who get help for untreated sleep apnea often have “a high level of dream recall and potentially nightmares as well,” says Dr. Drerup. “If you have sleep apnea, you’re having fragmented disrupted sleep.” Getting better quality sleep means you’re going into REM sleep — and staying there, “instead of having these brief arousals that are keeping you out of that stage of sleep,” she notes. “You’ll have that REM rebound as well. ”

Can sleep disorders affect dreaming?

Sleep disorders can affect all aspects of slumber, including dreaming.

Nightmare disorder

For some people, nightmares are more than just a temporary scare. They have a sleep disorder called nightmare disorder.

“With nightmare disorder, you have these really distressing nightmares that are repetitive,” says Dr. Drerup. “They occur frequently. They wake you from sleep. You can’t get back to sleep afterwards. You have a panicked feeling upon awakening and take a while to reorient.”

Advertising Policy

This disorder can be debilitating, as you’re often very tired during the day. But Dr. Drerup says treating nightmare disorder is possible using what’s called imagery rehearsal therapy.

“This treatment has some really significant research backing behind it,” says Dr. Drerup. “You work with your therapist to rewrite the nightmare to contain less disturbing content, and then practice the new dream imagery during the daytime. ”

“It’s like guided imagery of that new content to make the dream less distressing,” she continues. “The image you’re practicing can replace or decrease the frequency of that disruptive nightmare, or completely eliminate it altogether.”

REM sleep behavior disorder

A sleep disorder called REM sleep behavior disorder can also cause abnormal dreaming. “During REM sleep, your muscles are typically paralyzed, so you don’t act out dreams,” says Dr. Drerup. “From an evolutionary standpoint, it happened because it was more protective for us to not be able to move when dreaming.”

People living with REM sleep behavior disorder, however, actually aren’t paralyzed — meaning they can move in their sleep while dreaming. Dr. Drerup says it’s not always an issue, but can be in certain situations.

“It’s often not as disruptive to you unless you’re punching someone in your dream, and then punch your spouse or the nightstand and injure yourself,” she says. “There are safety concerns with this. ”

REM sleep behavior disorder can also foreshadow bigger health problems. “When someone is diagnosed with REM sleep behavior disorder really early in life, that’s linked to a really high conversion rate of someone eventually developing Parkinson’s disease or Lewy body dementia.”

Is it normal not to dream?

Dr. Drerup says there is a rare condition called Charcot-Wilbrand syndrome where people don’t dream at all. This dream loss occurs following focal brain damage (typically a stroke) that’s specifically characterized by you losing the ability to mentally recall (or “revisualize”) images.

Most people do dream, though — you just don’t recall them. “People will say, ‘I don’t dream at all, because I don’t sleep well.’ And that’s not necessarily the case,” explains Dr. Drerup. “Just because you don’t have dream content doesn’t mean that you’re not dreaming. We usually don’t remember our dreams unless we’re awoken from them.”

At the end of the day, however, dream interpretation is still a big mystery yet to be solved. But if you’re trying to puzzle out what your subconscious is trying to tell you, look to your day-to-day life for clues.

“We can have really good recall of a dream when we wake up, and then it’ll fade away,” says Dr. Drerup. “And then you think back, ‘I know I had a weird dream, but I don’t remember it.’ So, if you want to have more awareness, jot details down as soon as you wake up — what was the dream, identify if there’s patterns.”

“Once again, it’s much more what meaning you ascribe to dreams,” she adds. “That’s key. That’s more relevant than dream interpretation books that list specific interpretations.”

How to decipher a dream and learn new things about yourself?

35,339

Know YourselfAntistress

In most traditional cultures, a dream is seen as a revelation sent down by the ancestors, the gods, or the universe itself. It needs to be deciphered in order to resolve complex conflicts, whether in our own lives or in the life of an entire community.

In modern Western culture, of course, we look at dreams not as prophecy, but as "the royal road to the unconscious," in Freud's words. Dreams hide our desires and fears, but they can also reveal to us unknown sides of our personality, new life paths, resources to which we can access. Jungian analyst Stanislav Raevsky offers several steps to enter into a dialogue with your unconscious.

First you need to see a dream, or rather, remember it. After all, everyone sees dreams, only for someone upon awakening they are completely erased from memory. What does it depend on? From how developed our ability to self-observation. The more fully we are aware of what is happening in reality, the more aware we will be in a dream. To be conscious means to be able not to get involved in events, but to look at what is happening from the outside, to notice what is happening to us: what do we feel now? what do we think?

This ability can be trained, for example, through mindfulness meditation (also known as mindfulness practice). To remember dreams, it is useful to be in a state of meditation while falling asleep, noting for ourselves how we slowly fall into sleep, how our state changes. Or just give yourself the installation: "I want to see and remember dreams." When we set ourselves up in this way, we no longer miss sleep, do not turn away from the “screen” on which we are shown a “movie”.

Zero step. Recall what happened the day before

The task is to understand how much the dream processes daytime reality. Why is the morning wiser than the evening? Unresolved issues, affects, complex collisions of the past day - all this spins in a dream, mixes up, turns to us in different directions.

At the same time, in a dream, we have access to the "common system": figuratively speaking, not only to the monitor of our laptop, but to the entire World Wide Web. Weak, but still there is access. And from there, important information can also come to us.

All this is connected together, synthesized - and in the morning we suddenly wake up with a clear solution to a complex problem. This is how discoveries are made in a dream, whether it be the periodic table or breakthroughs in personal relationships.

Step 1. Write down the dream

You should write down the dream and put it aside. After some time, we write it down again or narrate it. Why is it important? The second story will definitely be somewhat different from the first one: some details will be lost, others will appear. Our consciousness has already done the work, adjusting the initial story to the scheme of describing the world that we are accustomed to.

After all, we make up stories about our lives all the time, or rather, they make up themselves. But everyone has their own key narrative, each of us sees his own “movie”, different from what others see. What corresponds to our key narrative, we remember, the rest we discard and forget. By comparing two descriptions of the same dream, we can see exactly how our consciousness transforms reality.

Step 2. Collect linear associations

This method was proposed by Sigmund Freud. He believed that the message of the unconscious in a dream is presented to us in an encrypted form: what is shown to us actually means something completely different, and our task is to understand what it is. This sign has two sides, and, therefore, we need to go from the signifier to the signified: then, perhaps, we will get some insights.

Let's say you had a dream about a customs officer. What do you associate it with? With a concierge at the entrance. And what is concierge associated with? With an older brother with whom you have a difficult relationship. It is the brother who is actually the hero of this dream. This is how we step by step build a chain of associations and, overcoming the censorship of consciousness, move from the external symbol inward, to the original image, to the figure that is important to us.

Step 3: Collect Circular Associations

While the linear association method certainly works, it is criticized by many. In particular, Carl Gustav Jung was skeptical that one could just as well interpret a newspaper. After all, it is already clear where Freud's analytics will lead in any case: to the primary figures of mother and father, well, perhaps also brothers and sisters, and their relationship. And since everything is known in advance, then why bother interpreting dreams?

If Freud emphasized such a dream mechanism as displacement, then Jung considered condensation more important, when a cloud of meanings appears around one symbol, and then we see the symbol more clearly. Therefore, instead of linear associations, Jung proposed circular ones. Graphically, they can be represented as a sun: in the center is a signifier (symbol), from which “rays” depart - all the associations that come to our mind.

So, with regard to a customs officer, we may have such associations as “power”, “fear”, “rules”, “border”, “passport”. To this, Jung suggested adding amplification, that is, supplementing personal associations with commonly used ones (for example, a customs officer = "law", "order", "punishment"). Then our individual symbolism of the image is complemented by cultural one, the possibility of understanding expands.

Step 4. Understand what the dream tells us

Classical theories offer different options. Thus, Freud considers sleep as the fulfillment of desires. Indeed, in some cases this is true, especially in children's dreams: the child was not given ice cream, and he gets it in a dream. Initially, in psychoanalysis, destructive dreams were interpreted in the same way: we see someone's death, which means that we have an unconscious desire to get rid of this person, but we are not aware of this desire due to the censorship of our superego.

Unlike Freud, for Jung, sleep is a compensation for a conscious attitude. For example, all our thoughts are focused on a career, but at the same time, we dream of children every now and then. And then this is a signal from the unconscious that there is a clear imbalance in our life and we need to somehow restore the balance.

But the Jungian analyst Hans Dieckmann does not agree with either Freud or Jung. He believes that in a dream the same thing happens to us as in reality. If you are so shy that you cannot buy anything in the supermarket, then in a dream you come to the supermarket and do not buy anything. In the process of psychotherapy, says Dieckmann, changes begin first in the client's dreams, and then in his real life.

Indeed, our "I" behaves in a dream in exactly the same way as in reality. And it can be more convenient for a psychologist to work out exactly the dreams of a patient for whom this is less painful: he is not responsible for his dreams. But such work affects his life.

Step 5. Listen to the prompts

We analyzed our dream from different angles. What to do with this knowledge now? How to use it?

Option one

We tell ourselves that the dream confirms what we already know: “Of course, I thought so!”, “Yes, everyone always offends me”, “I can't do anything”. Then all we have learned from our interpretation is an increase in self-esteem: we have confirmed our insight. But we remained in the cage of our mind, nothing has changed in our life.

Option two

We use dreams as an opportunity to expand our perception, and therefore to change. Let's say in real life we have a bad relationship with our parents, and in a dream we hug them tenderly. We can shrug our shoulders and stop there, or we can continue to think about it: why is it so in life, but otherwise in a dream? And this will correct our position in relation to parents. Or, let's say, in a dream we see our unfulfilled desires: a trip to an exotic island, a love relationship.

We can ask ourselves the question: why don't I fulfill my desires in life? What internal obstacles are preventing me? Thus, with the help of sleep, we can make our picture of the world more voluminous, increase our cognitive complexity. It is best if we maintain some awareness in a dream, for example, we understand that we are dreaming, or we know how to interrupt an unpleasant dream. For some, this is an innate gift, but the ability to lucid dream can be developed.

By the way, Jung was not very fond of working with dreams, because he believed that in a dream we are too unconscious: we go with the flow and do not control what is happening. He suggested that patients add awareness to sleep through active imagination.

I dreamed about a customs officer yesterday, so let's talk to him now. To do this, you need to close your eyes, enter a half-sleep state, imagine this customs officer in front of you, ask him questions and get unexpected answers. We ourselves choose the dream with which we will work, and we can better understand its message.

WHAT DID FREUD THINK ABOUT DREAMS?

“He considered dreams to be the expression of a repressed desire that appears to us in disguise,” explains psychoanalyst and writer Jean-Claude Liauet. “Dreams reflect this desire in such a way that the form (external content) masks the essence (hidden content). ” Freud identified 4 techniques by which the unconscious creates our dreams. Here are the tricks with examples.

1. Condensation

Different ideas and images are collected in one scene. “In the house where I grew up, I argue with my boss, who has the same name as my older brother, who for a long time pushed me and another brother.”

2. Displacement

Priorities and values are jumbled so as to hide unconscious desire and its impulses and to shift the emotions it evokes into minor details. “During the holiday, I meet my husband’s ex-wife, who despises me. All I do is neatly fold paper napkins.”

3. Turning thoughts into images

It is the kaleidoscope of images and words that allows us to build sequences (as we usually do when we talk) so that the dream resembles a connected movie, which, however, hides the essence. Metaphor as a whole plays an important role in the expression of sexual images. "At the movies, the neighbor puts a knife in my bag. "

4. Secondary processing

The finishing touch, which gives the dream a rational and acceptable look. "Eventually, the chatty rabbit informs me that my husband's ex-wife has decided to live on Mars."

About the expert

Stanislav Raevsky is a Jungian analyst, co-chairman of the Moscow Association of Analytical Psychology (MAAP), a member of the International Association of Analytical Psychology (IAAP).

Text: Galina Chermenskaya Photo Source: Getty Images

New on the site

Anniversary syndrome: what it is and why it is so important to know the history of your ancestors

Sales psychology: how to learn to save money and stop feeling guilty after shopping

Buying coffee to go? Scientists told why it is dangerous for health

“I am rude and aggressive towards my relatives. What is wrong with me?"

Top 5 foods rich in magnesium: why we need this mineral so much

14 signs of true friendship: check yourself

9 signs that your life is at a turning point

“I want to get a divorce, but I can’t decide”

when and on what days do you dream

The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud said: “The more strange a dream seems to us, the deeper meaning it carries. ” It is not for nothing that we used to call night visions with subtext prophetic dreams. They, like an internal oracle, not only suggest what is wrong, but also indicate where to run. Human consciousness is critical: sometimes it devalues events that are important for his internal development, forcing him to perceive them as something insignificant.

Haven't called your parents in a while? Nothing, then, - calms the mind. Didn't talk heart to heart with the children? Time is like that. But the psyche can not be deceived - recognizing an obstacle that creates problems for the inner "I", it sends us signals in a dream when consciousness loses its vigilance. She pushes the "owner" to concentrate on something, to rethink, hints at the correct outcome. After all, prophetic means predictive.

But a person cannot always distinguish when he has prophetic dreams, and when the brain simply draws meaningless pictures. Experts say it is possible to learn to recognize dreams with meaning and understand why they dream. You can even calculate when the "dream prophecy" will come true.

- It depends on what phase the dream was in, - explains numerologist and esotericist Anton Ushmanov . - It is conditionally possible to divide a dream into 3 intervals - the beginning, the middle and the end. If a prophetic dream had a dream in the first phase, then it will come true within a year. If in the second, in the middle of the night, then - within 6 months. If in the third, closer to the morning - for a month. If you saw a prophetic dream just before dawn, it will come true within 12 days. And if, before sunset - during the day.

In addition, it is useful to know what days of the week prophetic dreams occur.

What is a prophetic dream

Prophetic dreams are usually viewed from two positions - scientific and esoteric. From the point of view of science, sleep as such is the result of the work of the brain, which, as you know, never sleeps. Throughout its life, the human supercomputer has been busy modeling reality based on experience gleaned through receptors, hearing, smell, sight. The human brain processes a million signals per second. But while we are awake, we cannot realize the results of this “revision” - consciousness interferes.

“At night, when our rational part is resting, the brain through the subconscious mind calmly processes all the information for the day,” explains the process psychologist Lyubov Ozhmegova . - And we see the images that the subconscious shows.

Just with their help, according to psychiatrist, psychotherapist, dream specialist, author of the first scientific Internet dream book in Runet Yaroslav Filatov , the brain helps a person to understand how this or that situation will develop. In fact, the models that the brain builds are the very prophetic dreams.
Dreams are nothing more than information processing. Photo: pixabay.com
“Some say that the brain predicts in a dream,” Filatov argues. - But it would be more correct to say - it models: the state of objects, the reactions of people. Brain models are built constantly, and in a dream they appear to us.
Esotericists and followers of spiritual practices associate the phenomenon of prophetic dreams with the reading of information from space.

“It happens unconsciously,” Alena Arkina, an energy therapist, the author of the life reconstruction method, shares his thoughts , - Possible scenarios in real life are read.

- The most important thing in prophetic dreams is that, having seen them, a person can draw conclusions, realize the reasons for what is happening to him, get answers to questions, - summarizes the psychologist-hypnologist Alexandria Sadofyeva.

Why prophetic dreams occur

Mystic Denis Banchenko is sure that prophetic dreams occur for three reasons. First, when a person was too close to an important event. Secondly, when the "genius of the earth" directly pushes him to pay attention to this or that situation. And thirdly, when consciousness reaches such a level of development that it itself conducts an information signal from the outside.

- A person can capture the vibrations of space in the form of a beam of information (a future event), - energy therapist Alena Arkina explains . - In parallel, there is an infinite number of options for the development of events. And a person catches one of them in a dream.

This happens when the brain and subconscious are trying to show the most probable scenarios for the future. But why does our supercomputer and inner self need this? Why should they show us where to go and where to spread the straw?

“The brain is busy helping us to survive every minute,” psychiatrist Yaroslav Filatov reminds . If nothing bad happens, it doesn't mean that there are no dangers. And the task of the psyche is to reveal our capabilities and abilities that will help in development. From the fulfillment of these tasks, prophetic dreams are born.

In other words, in order for a person to “receive a hat” less during wakefulness, the psyche tries to reach out to him at night.

- Dreams are dreamed by all living beings who have a soul - assures esoteric Anton Ushmanov . - At night, we get the opportunity to live through some of the negative scenarios, "digest" them in a dream in order to avoid or learn how to cope live.

On what days prophetic dreams come true

Monday

It is believed that empty dreams are dreamed on the first day of the week. There can be many emotions and experiences in them, but not very prophecies. But if the dream that occurred on Monday is vivid and memorable, you can try to decipher it. Perhaps he will suggest a solution to some minor life task, but you should not look for a deep decisive meaning in it.

Tuesday

Dreams on Tuesday may come true. And, quite quickly - within two weeks. If the Tuesday dream is with a plus sign, it is better to make every effort to make it come true. And if with a minus sign, on the contrary, it makes sense to try to make sure that the dream does not come true. In fact, Tuesday is the day of choice, when you have to decide whether you want the dream to turn into reality or not. The consequences of inaction can be very unpleasant.

Wednesday

On Wednesdays, as esotericists say, there is not much trust in dreams. They are mostly empty. You don't have to trust them too much. In dreams that occurred on Wednesday, as a rule, there are no prophecies, but there are “bells” regarding your character and personal qualities. They can be a revelation. Try to figure out what the psyche signals: this will help to work on yourself.

If the dream you had on Monday is vivid and memorable, you can try to decipher it. Photo: pixabay.

com

Thursday

"Dreams from Thursday to Friday are prophetic" - this is how people think. And experts say it's true: Thursday's visions openly hint at the future and indicate how this or that situation will develop. Prophetic dreams that appeared on Thursday will come true within three years. Often on Thursdays, romantic, fabulous visions come. But in fact, they are far from romance as such. She is just a symbol. Even in such dreams, you need to look for important life prophecies.

Friday

Friday dreams are usually very ordinary. Deciphering them is just a waste of time. But if you dream of a romantic plot on Friday, it directly hints at a relationship with your soulmate. A bad dream "about love" does not bode well in reality. So be vigilant and take action.

Saturday

Saturday sleep should be analyzed more closely. It may come true before noon. In addition, esotericists say that a dream that occurred on Saturday can predict not only your future: you can see in it what awaits your loved ones. I often have nightmares on Saturdays. They do not need to be afraid, but worth taking into account.

Sunday

Sunday sleep can be "ordered". If you concentrate well and formulate a desire (or question), you may dream of exactly the situation that worries you the most. Sunday dreams are often prophetic and come true quickly. Often on Sundays, good prophetic dreams are dreamed, predicting prosperity.