Dreams

What even is the purpose of dreams?

If you ask Freud, he’ll say that dreams are the “guardians of your sleep.”

Now if you ask a psychologist who uses research and reason, they’ll tell you that dreams are your desires or stresses rooted deep in your subconscious that play a role in your everyday thoughts and decisions.

It makes sense, but after a while you’ll remember one of your dreams and it’s you riding a big spider in the middle of the Sahara Desert while doing your APUSH homework with your telepathic gorilla friend.

How are you going to tell me THAT’S a root desire?

Yes, sometimes dreams are your wonders or anxieties, but they can also just be your imagination playing tricks on you. Whether you like it or not, your brain does have a mind of its own sometimes. Your imagination runs wild at night because your other brain functions aren’t playing a role in moderating thoughts.

I’ve been progressively getting more vivid dreams which seems terrifying, but it has actually jump started some original storytelling ideas. Anyway, I had a dream last night where coronavirus had reached the end of its reign and my parents were selling our house. I went upstairs to see some random strangers touring the house and then I started coughing violently. The strangers told me “good thing we don’t have to worry about coronavirus anymore,” and I smiled and laughed right before passing out. I woke up in the hospital surrounded by the strangers who were now coughing violently and a doctor hovering over me saying “congrats Sophia, you contaminated the world… AGAIN.” Then I woke up.

Classic anxiety dream. It was a mix of my stress about general life and the pandemic where I felt at fault for everything even a pandemic. Weird.

That one was a bit of both. Anxiety and creative quirks were both found in my dream. I prefer the imagination dreams because those are a bit less scary and more fun!

I’m obviously not an expert at analyzing dreams, but if you do want to try and figure out the meaning of one of your dreams, you should email a dream analyst. I have a friend that did that one time for fun and it was actually pretty useful to her. She wrote a story about it and sent it in to a writing competition. After a while, she decided to become a short story writer and now enters all kinds of essay competitions. Maybe dreams aren’t so bad:)

Let me know in the comments if you guys have been having any weird dreams lately, and if not, tell a story about one of the dreams you’ve had in the past!

Thanks for reading, stay safe and healthy.

See y’all later!