About the Role of Dreams and How We Can Understand Them

When we sleep, our subconscious no longer has to struggle with our conscious side, so it may come to light. Dreaming is one of the best ways for the subconscious to come out and come in contact with it. It's just that the messages of the subconscious transposed into dreams appear in the form of symbols, not always easy to decipher. Dreams are an important means of self-knowledge.

The dream - an intensely speculated mystery

It is not known exactly why people sleep, sleep is still a mystery, a kind of daily rehearsal that prepares the great recital which is death. The most common theories say that sleep strengthens our memory and helps us find solutions to the problems we face when we are awake.

Dreams have a mostly visual component and usually seem illogical, but sometimes they provide you with exactly the unconventional thinking you need to solve various problems during the day.

In an experiment on this topic, with students being told to choose a problem they can't solve and to think about it every night, it was found that after a week, half of the students had dreamed of the problem and a quarter had found a solution.

On the other hand, Sigmund Freud said that dreams exist to fulfill our desires and that they originate in the events of the previous day, but modern theories claim that dreams are more than that, because dreaming has also been influenced by human evolution.

Another interesting thing about dreams from a study is that 80% of young people dream in color, but the elderly (those over 60) dream more in black and white: only 20% of them still have colorful dreams, but it is not known exactly why this is happening, or even if this is not just an illusion imprinted in the memory of the study participants.

But dreams can help us to understand ourselves more deeply, they are an opportunity to learn about us. In dreams, the unconscious tends to build bridges with our conscious side.

How can we understand our dreams?

If dreams are a good way to get in touch with ourselves, then we need to learn to do so.

First of all, we must start by noting our dreams, even a few words about the help, anything we remember can be useful. Even when you don't remember, write down those nights in your notebook. After a while, while monitoring every night, you can make interesting connections and you can discover things you didn't think of.

You will realize what moments in your life were connected to certain dreams or the nights when you forgot what you dreamed.

As for the dreams you remember, try to identify how you felt in them, how you felt, and how you felt when you woke up. Through dreams, we feel the ideas in the subconscious, the thoughts so we can better understand ourselves and listen to each other.

It is good to analyze all the elements of a dream because we can find ourselves in any of them. Sometimes we can find our personality in several dream characters, even if there is a clear distinction between us and the other protagonists in the dream.

You can learn things even from dreams that seem insignificant to you by asking questions about them. Some things may appear to you as symbols and require more analysis to decipher.

Think about the context in which the dream action took place, how you were there, if you were there, how you felt, why it is connected and what exactly reminds you of the things/situations in the dream.

Dreams can be a way to ourselves, and we can be a way to decipher them.