Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

The newsletter devoted to spreading love and cultural awareness around the world.

Carol’s Corner

March 1, 2008

What Do Our Dreams Mean?

Carol Roach

Dreams is a topic that delights and fascinates many people.  I know that I have been intrigued with dreams since I was a young girl.  Most of my early education on dreams came from my grandmother’s notions about what dreams are all about. I was enthralled with the subject from the time I was 8 years old.

My grandmother would say to take the opposite meaning to what you dream, for example if you dream of a marriage it means there will be a divorce or break up, if you dream of death you will hear of a birth.  This theory satisfied my curiosity for years and I analyzed all dreams and all my friends’ dreams that way.  Of course sometimes I cheated, I bought a little pocket dream analyses book to compliment my interpretations.  It was the rage by this time I was about 15, and by this time, all my friend’s were into this exciting pseudo science.

I got my first look at dreams in a scientific fashion when I went to CEGEP (college) in 1973. It was then that I was introduced to psychology and the theories of Dr. Sigmund Freud.  His interpretation of dreams proved to be a very difficult book to understand for me at the time but I did get the gist of it.  He maintained that dreams were a gateway to the unconscious, the ideas and feelings that we were not aware about in our conscious waking state, were   worked out in our dream state.  Hence, for him, judging by what he saw from his patients, dreams were wishful thinking. 

At the time, I could buy that theory for the most part, but at 20 years old, I did wonder about it.  It did not appear to answer all my questions.  For example, I can see if someone has a dead end job, and suddenly dreams of a promotion it is truly wishful thinking.  But, what about a woman who dreams that she is being raped?  Again Freud would say that was repressed sexuality; na na, my young blossoming feminist self did not buy that. 

There are dreams, then there are bad dreams, nightmares and there are night terrors.

Of course I did not know all of this from the beginning psychology courses I took back then, but I did explore dreams when I went for a psychology degree in the 90’s.  We went over Freud but we also learned of other theories as well. 

The biological theory of how dreams are an important human function, of course, was the strongest.  Enough studies have been done to show if dreams during REM sleep are interrupted the sleepers will suffer consequences. The gamut runs from sleepiness during the day to full fledge hallucinations if major sleep deprivation has occurred. Night terrors also had a biological component.  Suffice to say for the purpose of this article that Night terrors is a sleep pathology with the disturbance generating in the brainstem in proximity to the medulla oblongata. 

Not only did I have psychological explanations at my disposal, as well as biological explanations, I also had para-psychological explanations.  I was dating a man who was both spiritual and psychic.  He introduced me to the astral traveling theory culminating in dreams.  In a nutshell for those who do not know about astral travel, this theory purports that our soul or spirit leave our body at night to travel to different planes, realms (states of consciousness).  When we dream we are remembering those experiences, the things we did, places we visited etcetera. 

After my divorce, with the encouragement of the above-mentioned boyfriend, I discovered that I too had psychic ability.  I will not bore you with the details, you can read my articles on the subject published in this e-zine and several other websites, or email me and I will gladly forward them to you.  However, for clarity in this article, I will tell you that I have experienced several prophetic dreams all of which came true somewhere down the line, though not necessarily right away

Most of the time my prophetic dreams are classified as bad dreams and are as far away from Freud’s wishful thinking as you can get.   For example, I will give a short dream, I dreamt my dog was hit by a car and died, a month later that is exactly what happened.   I have had at least 10 prophetic dreams to date.  They scare me.  I think they would scare you too.

I am astute enough to differentiate these dreams from reliving a variation of daily events while in the dream state. Often we watch a scary movie then have a scary dream.  The prophetic dreams I have generally do not seem to have a bearing on my everyday life, except for one thing.

Sometimes they happen when I am very stressed (though they can happen when I am in a happy state as well).  If these dreams happen when I am stressed out, or worried, I fall back on Freud’s theory and rationalize that is the result of my troubled mind.

Last night I had the scariest dream I think I ever had in my life. Here it is:

I had a baby daughter. She was beautiful with an olive complexion, dark hair, and dark eyes.  She looked just like Matt, her father.  She looked to be about 18 months old. She was still wearing diapers in the dream.  For some reason she had never met her father, and I told her that she would be meeting him for the first time.  She wanted to know why, and I explained that we were going to buy a house together and she would have a big back yard equipped with a swing, a slide, and before I had a chance to finish my thought she blurted out a sandbox.

Now if you are following me, you can guess that a child this young can not talk all that well and certainly could not talk about a sandbox, something that she had never heard of before. Right there in the dream a warning sign came too me, this baby was not a baby at all but an adult, or old soul or something like that.

Suddenly out of nowhere an average looking man appeared dressed all in black, and I found myself asking him about my child.  I said to him, “She is not a baby is she?”  He answered no she wasn’t.  I then asked him what she was and he responded a messenger from the other world.” I asked him what her message was and he responded, you are going to die tonight at midnight, you will be squeezed to death.”  My heart started to race, I was terrified.  I asked him if he was a demon and he said no, he was a volcano. 

I woke up at that point and I was really scared.

Is this a premonition, have I sensed my own death, will I die by squeezing, maybe suffocation, a heart attack etc?

Or is it the result of my troubled mind?

Your comments are much appreciated as I work through this particularly disturbing dream.

Carol Roach