Do Dreams Have Meaning? 
A somewhat rational consideration using story-contexts.
Richard Wilkerson

Let's try another question first. Is life itself meaningful? People debate this issue endlessly without full agreement. Some are quite sure the answer will always be an opinion rather than a fact. Others feel it is self-apparent that for those who continue to choose living, that life is, for a fact, meaningful. Others find the game of fact-finding not the most relevant way to answer the question.   In other words, everyone has his or her own way of addressing questions about the meaning of life, and of course, the many aspects and parts of life as well, including dreams and dreaming.

Now we could do this democratically and vote : 

And tally all the results. This would produce a consensus truth (which, by the way, would say that dreams definitely have meaning as there are a thousand articles and books saying YES to every one saying NO.)

But this isn't exactly what people usually mean when they ask if dreams are meaningful. So what we do mean when we ask if something has meaning or not?  Generally the answer depends on the context of the situation. 

In the context of science when we ask if dreams are meaningful, its often means whether or not  they function to help us thrive and survive in some way.  Different sciences will approach meaning differently. A psychologist may want to know how the dream works to show a person a better way to live and experience life, while an anthropologist may be more interested in how the dream impacts the way people in a tribe alter or confirm the way they live and interact with one another. A brain scientist may be more interested in how dreaming and sleeping contribute to the restoration of our health or consolidation of our memories and experience.  

Artists and writers are more interested in the inspirational aspects of dreaming and how they can carry the images, novelties and creative dreaming process over into their own waking processes and creations. 

Spiritual and tribal people are often aware of a different meaning of a dream, the dream as a message. The message may be from an ancestor, a spirit or god, or even from one's own soul or unconscious. 

The same dream may have different meanings to all of these people. Which one is correct, or are they all incorrect in looking for meaning in a dream that has no meaning?  

Many people in the Dream Movement, a loose coalition of individuals and groups that study and work with dreams, formed  in 1984 a "non-profit, international, multidisciplinary organization dedicated to the pure and applied investigation of dreams and dreaming." ¹ The purpose of the organization was many-fold, "to promote an awareness and appreciation of dreams in both professional and public arenas; to encourage research into the nature, function, and significance of dreaming; to advance the application of the study of dreams; and to provide a forum for the eclectic and interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and information." ¹ The overall consensus was that dreams have many levels and layers of meaning, but that the final decision about just what these meaning would be had to be left up to the individual. That is, the individual was to be the final authority on the meaning and value of his or her own life, and this included one's dreams. ²

However, just because a bunch of people get together and decide whether or not something is true, doesn't necessarily make it so. If you doubt this, look at the disagreements between what things mean to different religions and the millions of people who die fighting over these meanings. 

 This leads us  back to the question of what things we think are meaningful and how they get that way. One way of viewing this is through story-contexts. In biological sciences, the story-context that gives things meaning is evolution. If something fits into this context, it is considered meaningful. Are dreams advantageous to evolution, or are they an epiphenomena and functionless appendage like the appendix or tonsils? Are they essential to the well being and continuation of the species and individual, or just something like poop that we excrete and don't need to attend to for survival and passing on of genes? 

Here are a few areas that science has investigated as to the functioning of dreams:

• Memory consolidation - moving memories from short to long term memory - Palombo
• Learning consolidation - organizing things we have learned during the day
• Emotional contextualization - giving context to new emotions
• Clearing networks - cleaning up loaded neural networks
• Protecting Sleep - allowing imagination to spin stories instead of waking us up each disturbance
• Self Maintenance - to maintain our sense of self through sleep. 
• Problem solving - to resolve conflicts during the day and find creative solutions
• Hard-wiring during fetal development, soft wiring of neurons after birth. 

There are scientist who point out that these are theories not proven facts which are clear as saying the heart pumps blood and the lungs process air and carbon dioxide. And so the debates and investigations and research continue. However, like the meaning of dream-content, the meaning of the dreaming process seems to be evolving in some ways to the same theoretical acceptance. That is, the dreaming process has many functions and meanings. Like most of our organs, dreaming seems to do more than one job. 

But are we getting too far away from the original question of the meaning of a dream? Usually when this question is asked, its about a specific dream. "I was waking down an empty hall and saw an open window," or "I married a woman who turned out to be my mother," or "I started flying across a vast ocean of alien creatures."   Do these dream images have any meaning?  Here the story-context is different than that of science. Here its more like "Is there a personal significance to me that is held in these dream images/story?" 

Hard science has yet to adequately address this issue as there is now a kind of brain-mind split. Hard science studies the brain and its observable effects,  and the humanities study the mind and its productions.

 The great theorist Sigmund Freud attempted to bridge brain and mind by theorizing that dreams helped protect sleep by partially covering up disturbances, while letting them blow off a little steam. Thus we might feel the need to urinate during sleep, but not strong enough that it would cause damage, so instead of the mind receiving the message from the brain to wake up and pee, it instead got the signal that it was already awake and looking for a bathroom. The dreamer could imagine him/herself urinating and get some relief from this thus allowing the body to continue sleeping until the need to urinate was truly urgent and not just a little impulse.  The same process was then applied to thoughts about topics and situations in the dreamer's past that might arise during sleep, especially the ones that the dreamer might keep repressed when awake. 

Swiss analyst Carl G. Jung also tried to bridge the brain-mind barrier with his theories of dreaming. One of his theories involved the theory of compensation. Jung felt that during the daytime, the human mind, especially in Western cultures, was very willful and often acted in ways that were not conducive to the maturation of the whole individual. That is, we often decide to ignore the messages of health and wholeness and  "damn the torpedoes" and "go our own way."  This leads to a psychological imbalance that Jung felt dreams tried to address. During sleep,  the unconscious attempted to address and compensate this daytime attitude symbolically by finding reconciling symbols that could hold the rational and irrational together in a way that would further the development  of the dreamer.

However, most psychological dream theories avoid dealing with the brain-mind connection. Most have story-contexts which don't necessitate bridging this gap.  In psychotherapy,  for instance, its not so important that the dreaming brain seems to be activated at regular cycles by the brain stem causing rapid eye movements (REM). But it can be important that the dream produced during this REM cycle includes a story about the patient finally asking a clown to smile. The story-context of brain-evolution is superceded by the story-context of emotional healing. The meaning and value of a dream then is found in the service of story-context in which it is told. 

But wait, is this saying that the meaning of all dreams is just relative to the person and his/her story-context? Don't dreams have a real and true meaning independent of the person that is trying to impose a meaning on them?

I feel they do, but not in the way we used to think about real and true meanings. ³

Tribal Meaning and Value.   It used to be that we all lived in more isolation and the true meaning and value of life and its dreams were determined very differently. I live in a very different world now, but pockets of these indigenous peoples still exists.  At one time, meaning and value was circulated through one's family and tribe, as well as one's affiliations. Dream stories were circulated and flowed through lines of filiations and alliance. That is, one got up during the night, went to the fire in the village and told whoever was there what your dream was. The people gathered there used the rules, the story-context of the their tradition, to extract various meanings and notice various impacts that the dream produced. Sometimes these needed to be further told to a specialists, a village shaman, and sometimes the shaman called in other shamans to discuss the meaning and value of the dream. The results could change the flow of goods and people, marriages and other events. It was if the dreams came up from the night of the bio-cosmic earth itself, were captured by the tribes, coded,  and circulated among them. 

 Despotic State  Meaning and Value. There was, and at too many places still exists, yet another form of society that imposes a particular style of meaning and value, the despotic state. Here there is a singular center that draws together all the meaning and value to a central point. The king is one and the earthly servant of the One. All the codes in the despotic state point to this singular accumulator and distributor. Everything flows to and from the Pharoah, the King, the Despot. All money bears his image or the god he represents.  All primitive codes and laws that determine the flow of life are overcoded and redirected to flow through him. The meaning and value of life is rigidly set and any questioning of this is considered a sin and transgression of his law.  The first thing to know or find out  about a dream in this kind of system is its relationship to the emperor. Does the dream indicate favor or bad omens? Will there be more money and children, or illness and poverty?  Dreams can no longer be messages from the gods, as this might challenge the hierarchy and place the authority for revelation and the flow of goods and ideas and people beyond the court.  But elaborate systems of interpretation and representation in service of the Pharaoh will proliferate so that no flow of decoded dreams escapes the empire.

Capital Economy and the Free Market of Meaning and Value.  As Deleuze and Guattari (among others)  have pointed out ³  while capital economy frees us from being stuck with old systems of meaning and value, it does nothing to provide us with alternatives. And so we are left to our own devices to encounter forces that shred egos and personalities to pieces and crumble empires that have existed for a millennium.  Capitalism both produces this condition of the uncoded and unmediated real and at the same time constantly constructs artificial territories to ward it off.  We are swamped in a media culture that does its best to keep us from having to directly encounter anything but a shopping mall. We watch all our wars on T.V. and do all our trading online. We haven't a clue to what is real, it seems to us that this is something that is totally lost and un-recoverable. This is my society, anyway, here in the West.  Only those things which can be reproduced are considered real. And yet that is just exactly what is not real.  That is just a simulation of reality. Models take the place of the modeled. Copies take the place of the originals. As French cultural critic Jean Baudrillard pithily notes, we live in the time of the simulacrum, copies without originals. We get so lost, there is no way back to the original. ⁴  Dreams serve psychoanalysis, serve to bring the people who can no longer handle it, back into conformity with the capital economy and its needs. Good little job, nuclear family, and lots of time to watch advertisements for products to consume. 

Footnotes,  Bibliography and Citations

1. The Association for the Study of Dreams Mission Statement

2. The ASD Dreamwork Ethics Guideline.

3. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix 9  ). Anti-Oedipus.

4. Baudrillard, Jean (  ). Simulacrum

5. Wittgenstein, Ludwig ( ) Philosophical Investigations.

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