DO DREAMS HAVE MEANING?

DO DREAMS HAVE MEANING?

The phenomenon called dream has been seen by many as a spiritual insight into the future. Many people especially in Africa, where many still have strong belief in Myths or Superstition, believe dreams are revelations of future occurrences and make great efforts in finding meanings to dreams.

As a matter of fact, am using Nigeria as a case study in this article. In Nigeria, where we have many ethnic groups, people generally all have similar views to dreams. It is generally believed that when you dream, it must be taken seriously because it is a revelation and if not taken seriously, the unpalatable events in the dream would be unavoidable. So in other to avoid bad dreams from coming to pass is to know the meaning of the dream and take the appropriate preventive measures. In the end you find out that in the course of looking for meaning to dreams, people get out of their way just to know the interpretations to their dreams. That is, they go to the religious heads, depending on what faith they are, for assistance with the interpretation. Sometimes it even gets to the point where the dreamer is asked to perform a ritual just to avert the bad dream from becoming reality.

In the world of the “Enlightened People” (where I would like to be classified) on the other hand, a dream is just a mere drama performed by the brain while the subject is at sleep. To psychologists, dreams are just a replay of events that are stored in our unconscious mind: that is, out of all events and experiences that happen in the human conscious mind, some unimportant information drawn from the scenes of our visual experience by the brain are automatically stored in the unconscious mind. And during sleep (since the brain still works while we sleep), the brain automatically replay those information that are stored in the unconscious mind and this is done randomly by the brain. While the brain randomly picks information that is stored into its memory, it not only picks them from the unconscious mind but also from the conscious mind. In a nutshell, it can be simply explained like this: this is just the same thing as the human mind thinking, imagining or fantasizing. The only difference is, the brain fantasizes, imagines or thinks while we are conscious or awake and while we are unconscious or asleep, the brain does the same (fantasizes, imagines or thinks) and we call that dream. To help a lay man understand this scenario, just know this fact: “when you sleep your brain doesn’t”. When your brain does the normal things it does when you are awake, you see that activity as a dream while asleep. With all these explanations, it is therefore easy to conclude if truly our dreams have any special meaning or not.

Before I or you draw any conclusion, I will also like to point out two important facts about dreams:

1.      “No matter how hard you try to, you can never remember where your dream started from”

2.      “It is impossible to see someone you have never met before in your dream”

The first fact points clearly to us how obvious it is that the brain just picks random experiences, pictures or images, events and faces from our unconscious mind or residual memory and the revisiting of these information create in our sleep a visual psychological film in form of a dream. So that is why you can never remember where your dream started from because the dream itself does not follow any organized pattern. To explain this further, can you remember exactly how you started the fantasy, imagination or thoughts (I am not talking about while sleeping now, I mean while you were awake yesterday and was thinking or fantasizing) you had the previous day? It is absolutely impossible, so also is dream because they are actually the same, one only happens in sleep and the other while awake.

The second fact about dream proves to us that the dream is a product of the brain. That is to say, what your mind has never conceived cannot be dreamt about. In other words, the brain needs the information, pictures or experiences stored in the residual memory to be able to form a dream. This fact is the simplest to understand, it means without the physical information, like places, names, faces and events, stored in the brain, the brain will be unable to create any event in form of dream.

In conclusion, it will totally be wrong to criticize those that attach meaning to dreams, because a person’s dream is just a replay of their imaginations, fantasies, fears and other conscious events in the brain. However, attaching a meaning to a dream is like attaching a meaning to a fantasy or imaginations. We all have imaginations at one point in time or the other: “I have imagined myself living in a very big house, with state-of-the-art electronics, swimming pool, basket ball court, garage packed with latest cars and so on.” This imagination goes in form of a replay of something that has been in my mind before or in form of a film but with scenes of earlier experiences. Even in imaginations, we still need information stored in our residual memory. An African for example, who is imagining being in Europe but has never been to Europe will only use the pictures of  a street, a house or a scene from one of the European movies he or she has seen or stories heard of or read about. Even sometimes our imaginations become obscure to we ourselves, this happens when there is no appropriate image of what we trying to imagine or its equivalent in our unconscious mind.

Even in Nigeria, where we attach so much meaning to dream, there is a popular Yoruba (a major ethnic group in Nigeria which dominates the Western part of the country) idiom about dream which when translated into English language means “If someone founds or sees money in the dream and he/she is happy, he/she should be advised to work harder or else he/she will die of hunger”. The moral lesson in this idiom is that “when you found money in your dream and you believe that the dream is a revelation that you will become rich in reality, you are deceiving yourself and will die in poverty if you don’t work hard”. This idiom emphasizes the meaninglessness of dreams even though the idiom comes from a society which strongly believe in the meaningfulness and spirituality of dreams. In fact this is the strongest point that proves that dreams have no meaning.

I will therefore personally conclude that, trying to give a meaning to a dream is like dreaming. Because a dream itself is a fantasy while you sleep and attaching a meaning to that dream is also an act of fantasizing.

By Kunle Adesokan