• Question: what influences our dreams and do they mean anything or have any indication of what will happen to us in the future

    Asked by dionneelgott to Sam, Rob, Matt, Kate, Claire on 21 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      Dreams might represent something we’re thinking about in real life, but the science of dreams is still not very well understood. Various people have ways of interpreting dreams – for example, being chased might mean being stressed in real life. But again, this is still poorly understood.

      Dreams can’t, as far as we know, predict the future – there’s no way to tell what’s going to happen short of an educated guess. People predict the future all the time – the weather forecast predicts if it’s going to rain, astronomers predict when eclipses will happen, politicians try to predict what effect different government policies will have. But none of this is magical, it’s just people making their best guess about what will happen using the information they have. And no-one does this in their dreams!

    • Photo: Matthew Pankhurst

      Matthew Pankhurst answered on 22 Jun 2013:

      I’ve cut and paste some of another answer of mine to a different question: Dreams can be explained by our brain processing away while we are asleep – think of it as de-fragging a hard drive on your computer (cleaning it up and organising it). So whatever goes into your head, is called upon while you sleep, and this can be where the images come from -often in weird and wonderful contexts. Have you heard of the phrase “sleep on it” when you’ve got an important decision? It means give yourself time to process the options thoroughly, and a lot of that can happen sub-consciously, and we are sub-conscious when we sleep, and dream.
      To answer more directly: Dreams can be very similar to future events, because you can imagine all kinds of things, and it’s not surprising that they can be very much like things that happen after you’ve dreamed them, because they reflect the experiences you have. I could dream tonight about catching the train to work on Monday morning, and on Monday morning something very similar could happen, hey – what do you know, I take the train! This doesn’t mean I’ve predicted the future, it just means that my imagination has been working on something I do all the time and filing it away into my memory, and sure enough – it happens! However, if you have dreams of when volcanoes erupt and it turns out you’re correct all the time – we should talk!!!

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