What Do Dreams Mean?
From the boulevard of broken dreams to California dreamin’, the Savvy Psychologist tackles the psychology and physiology behind your dreams. What does it all mean? Find out.
Ellen Hendriksen, PhD
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What Do Dreams Mean?
It has been said there are two types of people in this world: those who believe dreams hold special meaning and those who believe they’re just a coincidental mash-up of thoughts and experiences.
Those who think dreams hold special meaning, it turns out, are in the majority: an international study found that up to 74% of people around the world believe that dreams reveal hidden truths.
In addition, more people reported they would change their travel plans after a dream about a plane crash than after an actual plane crash on the same route. What’s more, more people said they would change their travel plans due to a dream than after an actual Code Orange from Homeland Security. Superstitious? Or just having good sense? The debate continues.
One thing everyone agrees upon is how we dream. Most dreams occur in a stage of sleep called REM, or rapid eye movement sleep. As we sleep, we cycle in and out of REM, resulting in about 5 dreams per night, ranging anywhere from 5-40 minutes each.
Additionally, dreams are surprisingly similar across cultures. Dr. Calvin S. Hall was a psychologist who, starting in the 1940s, collected more than 50,000 dream reports from around the world. He discovered that people everywhere dream of being chased, being unable to move, falling, and losing teeth, among others.
What might some of these and other dreams mean? The jury is still out on specific symbolism, but here are 5 dream interpretations with scientific backing. I do have to live up to my “evidence-based research” tagline, after all.
Dream #1: The Falling Dream
There are two themes of falling dreams. In one, you step off something low, like a curb or a stair, and land with a jolt. This dream actually incorporates a muscle twitch, called a hypnic jerk, which occurs when muscles relax during the transition to sleep. The second theme of the falling dream is the long version: falling through thin air. This is more often a sign of…
Dream #2: The Anxiety Dream
In dreams, negative emotions are much more common than positive emotions. And of the negative emotions, anxiety is by far the most prevalent.
Dreams such as falling headlong, being chased, being late, finding yourself naked in public, or being unprepared for an exam all signify anxiety. More specifically, causes may include feeling overwhelmed, uncertainty brought on by life changes or decisions, or plain old stress.
Dream #3: The Nightmare
Everyone has nightmares from time to time. While they’re scary, occasional nightmares are nothing to worry about. Recurrent nightmares, however, especially after a life-threatening situation, violation, or other trauma, are a common symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
About 71% of individuals diagnosed with PTSD experience nightmares related to their trauma. Some researchers believe nightmares mean the brain is trying to process the experience and make sense of the situation. But others believe it’s just the brain stuck in a neural rut. For the latter, a promising therapy called Image Rehearsal Therapy, or IRT, has been proven to reduce the frequency and intensity of PTSD-related nightmares.
The short version of IRT is this: Nightmare sufferers, while awake, write down their nightmare. Then they write a new, safe ending to the nightmare and rehearse the doctored version, repeating it over and over with the intent of diminishing the original nightmare.
For more on IRT check out episode #55, How to Stop Nightmares and Night Terrors
Dream #4: The “Replay the Day” Dream
Personal experiences from the day – a new book you’re reading, an intense conversation, a problem you’re mulling over – often find themselves repeated as snippets of dreams. Why? Well, it might be your brain’s way of consolidating what you learned that day; it’s been found that dreaming about new experiences impacts learning and performance.
For example, in a 2010 study, researchers at Harvard Medical School taught study participants to find their way through a complicated 3D maze. Then, some participants took a nap while others kept practicing. Those who napped and dreamed about the maze later performed significantly better at navigating the maze than those who either didn’t dream or didn’t sleep. Therefore, dreams that incorporate recent memories might mean that your brain is working on a problem, even while you sleep.
So, rather than pulling an all-nighter before your next exam, presentation, or other knowledge-based test, make time to sleep. However, even if you don’t have time for a full 8 hours, the early stages of sleep, called non-REM sleep, also help consolidate learning and memory. In fact, sleep-dependent learning works nearly as well with a nap than with a full night’s sleep. A 2008 study even found that power naps as short as 6 minutes make a difference.
Dream #5: The Bedroom Intruder While You’re Paralyzed Dream
The experience of being paralyzed while seeing or sensing a shadowy human figure in one’s bedroom has been documented the world over. This is arguably the most scary of the dreams we’ve covered today, but it turns out there may be a straightforward biological explanation.
The transition time between wakefulness and sleep is a tricky one and in addition to hypnic jerks, the brain and body do some odd things in this liminal period.
The first is sleep paralysis – being temporarily unable to move as you fall asleep or wake up. As it turns out, this a surprisingly common phenomenon: a 2011 study found that approximately 8% of the population has experienced sleep paralysis. (The same study, interestingly, found that 35% of those with panic disorder had experienced sleep paralysis).
During REM sleep, your body’s muscles aren’t actually paralyzed, they’re deeply relaxed to the point of being unable to move. Sleep paralysis occurs when the transition from REM to wakefulness is out of sync: you’re awake and aware, but your muscles haven’t yet transitioned out of REM.
A second potentially disturbing phenomenon at the intersection of wake and sleep is hallucinations, called hypnagogic hallucinations if they happen when you’re falling asleep, and hypnopompic hallucinations if they occur as you’re waking up. These hallucinations can be of almost anything and are quite vivid – a colleague of mine remembers hallucinating that a volleyball was coming her way, and she woke up with her hands up, ready to catch it.
And while these hallucinations can vary, there is a mysteriously common theme of that shadowy figure lurking in your bedroom. While it can be terrifying to experience, there’s a theory that the figure is simply a hallucinated projection of what’s called the homunculus – a map of the body’s surface – in the right parietal region of the brain. The theory hasn’t been supported through experiments yet, but stay tuned.
So while I can’t tell you the meaning of that dream where you arm-wrestled Richard Simmons while Batman gave you a pedicure, I can tell you that even the weirdest of your dreams are totally normal.
What’s your weirdest dream or sleep hallucination? Tell us in the Comments section below or on the Savvy Psychologist Facebook page.
References
Morewedge, C. K., & Norton, M. I. (2009). When dreaming is believing: The (motivated) interpretation of dreams. Journal Of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 249-264.
Hall, C., & Van de Castle, R. (1966). The Content Analysis of Dreams. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Lahl, O., Wispel, C., Willigens, B., & Pietrowsky, R. (2008). An ultra short episode of sleep is sufficient to promote declarative memory performance. Journal of Sleep Research, 17, 3-10.
Wamsley, E.J., Tucker, M., Payne, J.D., Benavides, J.A. & Stickgold, R. (2010). Dreaming of a learning task Is associated with enhanced sleep-dependent memory consolidation. Current Biology, 20, 850-855,
Mednick S, Nakayama K, & Stickgold R. (2003). Sleep-dependent learning: A nap is as good as a night. Nature Neuroscience, 6, 697–698.
Krakow, B., Hollifield, M., Johnston, L., Koss, M., Schrader, R., Warner, T. D., et al. (2001). Imagery rehearsal for chronic nightmares in sexual assault survivors with posttraumatic stress disorder: A randomized trial. Journal of the American Medical Association, 286, 537-545.
Jalal, B. & Ramachandran, V.S. (2014). Sleep paralysis and “the bedroom intruder”: The role of the right superior parietal, phantom pain and body image projection. Medical Hypotheses, 83, 755-7.
Sharpless, B.A. & Barber, J.P. (2011). Lifetime prevalence rates of sleep paralysis: A systematic review. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 15, 311-315.
About the Author
Dr. Ellen Hendriksen was the host of the Savvy Psychologist podcast from 2014 to 2019. She is a clinical psychologist at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders (CARD). She earned her Ph.D. at UCLA and completed her training at Harvard Medical School. Her scientifically-based, zero-judgment approach is regularly featured in Psychology Today, Scientific American, The Huffington Post, and many other media outlets. Her debut book, HOW TO BE YOURSELF: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety, was published in March 2018.