Dream Dictionary

There may be no stranger world than what we experience in our dreams.  It is not uncommon to wake up from a dream feeling that it was so real that it is hard to shake off the images from the dream as you move into your day.  If you start talking to people about dreams, some will think they are funny or somehow expressions of your romantic fantasies.  But not all of your dreams can be explained away so easily.

If you can understand what your dreams are telling you, that would help you cope with them particularly if the dreams you are having are disturbing and leave you feeling uneasy, anxious or full of questions when you wake up.  For many years, very educated psychologists have studied and continue to study what dreams mean to us.  Yes, some dreams don’t have meanings.  But very well regarded experts in how the mind work like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung had a lot of theories about what the subconscious was saying to us when we sleep.

What they suggest is that in a dream, we are seeing the merger of images from our memories, our imaginations, our fears and hopes as well as from input we have taken into our minds such as contents of movies or music.  But there are also common images that dominate society that almost always can be interpreted in a similar way.  These are cultural images that we just know about even if we don’t think about them.  Examples of shared cultural images and their meanings are…

.    A snake is almost always associated with fear and evil.  The cultural connection to Satan and damnation is very strong.
.    Santa Clause is an image that can represent happy childhood images, a positive adult role model or the anticipation of gifts. 
.    Clowns often can carry a good or a bad image.  If the associated emotion in the dream is happy, they can represent humor, imagination and fun.  But many fear clowns so if the associated feeling of the dream is unpleasant or fearful, the clown might represent a bad adult relationship from childhood, fear of authority or fear of what happens when the unknown merges with the commonplace.

These are just a few of the thousands of common cultural images that can appear in your dreams.  Knowing what cultural messages we may be projecting in that movie theater of the mind which is a dream can help you translate the images you see when you are asleep to understandable messages your subconscious is sending out.  That is why there are detailed dictionaries of dream images that have been compiled to help you understand your dream life. 

Many of the entries in these dictionaries come from famous psychologists like Jung and Freud.  If you have an image from your dreams that you suspect has meaning to you, consult these dictionaries to see what the cultural meaning might be.  It can be very helpful in understanding particularly bad dreams and by understanding them, resolve the fear or issue which can make the bad dreams go away.