14 DAY TRIAL // Understanding dreams and their significance has been a long-standing goal of humanity since the dawn of time, as many people believe that their dreams are nothing less than a gateway into their own minds, to thoughts they cannot otherwise access. There are also those who say that they are hidden messages about things they are supposed to do, while psychiatrists maintain that dreams represent the unfulfilled desires and the frustrations of individuals that the mind brings to light in order to prevent them from accumulating in the subconscious.
One thing is for sure – all people dream at least at some point in their life, and they always want to learn the significance of the mental images occurring during sleep. There are numerous books written on the subject, and there is a whole industry built on deciphering them.
Unfortunately, most individuals involved in it are crooks who do not offer any real answers simply because the answers are not there. Over the past few decades, scientists have begun to take an active interest into the matter, by trying to learn what dream really are.
“Psychologists' interpretations of the meaning of dreams vary widely. But our research shows that people believe their dreams provide meaningful insight into themselves and their world,” Carnegie Mellon University assistant professor Carey Morewedge, the leader of a new scientific study on the matter, which has been published in the February issue of the American Psychological Association's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, holds.
“People attribute meaning to dreams when it corresponds with their pre-existing beliefs and desires. This was also the case in another experiment which demonstrated that people who believe in God were likely to consider any dream in which God spoke to them to be meaningful; agnostics, however, considered dreams in which God spoke to be more meaningful when God commanded them to take a pleasant vacation than when God commanded them to engage in self-sacrifice,” she explains.
It has also become obvious to the researchers, following the new study, that people attribute various amounts of meaning to dreams. Counter-intuitively, they rather tend to perceive one about someone they dislike as being more important, in terms of significance, as opposed to one about a friend or a person close to them. On the other hand, dreams about friends have been rated as being more pleasant than those about enemies or people the test subjects have been in a fight with.
In truth, it's highly unlikely that any study will ever find the true meaning of dreams, simply because they manifest differently in the case of each individual. And scientific studies will always operate with statistical correlations, which unfortunately cannot be applied to all things investigators would want them to.