Soon after starting a new job at Transitions Bookplace, a Lincoln Park bookstore that specializes in the spiritual, Callie Munson had a spectacular dream.
The dream, set in Indonesia, had Munson and one of her new co-workers surfing together in an ocean filled with roaming elephants, rhinoceroses and hippos.
Lovely? Sure. Bizarre? Absolutely.
Meaningful?
That centuries-old question is still up for debate.
To Munson, 22, the dream was far more than a fanciful movie projected in her mind. She believes it reflected her trust in her new co-workers, the tranquility of her new work environment, and, perhaps, her desire to be somewhere warm just as Chicago’s weather turned cold.
“I think dreams are a way for the subconscious to talk to the conscious,” said Munson, who lives in Lakeview.
Munson always puts stock in her dreams and says that sometimes the subconscious messages she gleans from them help her recognize problems she’s not aware of while awake. Dreaming about her ex-boyfriend, for example, made Munson realize she wasn’t over him, even though consciously she’d been insisting otherwise.
Whether Munson is correct in her dream analyses depends on whom you ask.
Professional psychoanalysts and dream hobbyists believe dreams provide important insight into a person’s subconscious, while some researchers believe dreams are just physiological reactions with no meaning at all.
Many sleep experts reside somewhere in the middle, uncertain about the significance of our unconscious adventures.
“I don’t know if there’s any empiric data or science to support whether [dreams] mean or don’t mean anything,” said Babak Mokhlesi, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at the University of Chicago. “It’s a fuzzy and unclear area. The scientific literature is very weak.”
Rosalind Cartwright, chairman of the psychology department at Chicago’s Rush University, said it’s unfortunate many researchers dismiss the importance of dreams.
“You miss the psychological import of what you’re doing with your brain if you don’t pay attention to how we use experience of the night, and how it affects the next day’s feelings and methods of approaching a problem,” said Cartwright, founder of the Sleep Disorder Service and Research Center at Rush.
“Often you wake up with a better idea of how to move forward, and that’s not rest– that’s mental work.”
Munson’s co-worker at Transitions, Brian Rittenhouse, 39, believes his dreams are trying to tell him something. Rittenhouse, a singer who lives in Albany Park, said he has dreamed of being completely unprepared for an upcoming performance, with neither music nor songs memorized moments before he is supposed to take the stage.
“There is certainly part of me that is a procrastinator,” Rittenhouse said.
While theories abound about why we dream, Cartwright said she thinks most dreams aim to help us regulate our moods. For example, if you go to bed angry or scared, dreaming about something in your past that made you angry or scared helps to diffuse those emotions so you wake up feeling better, Cartwright said.
“We’re trained to be logical when we’re awake, and in dreaming we’re not very logical,” Cartwright said. “In dreams, we put things together more emotionally than logically.”
The illogical nature of dreams can make it hard to make sense of them.
Ashley Honig, 25, who lives in River West, said she’s had a recurring dream since she was 6 years old in which she and her brother fall into the whale tank at Sea World and almost end up in the whale’s mouth.
Curious to understand the dream’s meaning, Honig tried to find answers on the Internet, but none of the interpretations rang true. For now, she has concluded that the stubborn dream simply represents how terrified she is in real life of sharks and whales.
Jay McCormick, director of the Chicago School of Metaphysics in Portage Park, said people can easily learn to deconstruct their dreams, and it’s worthwhile because “the more you understand your dreams, the more you understand yourself.”
At the School of Metaphysics, students learn that every dream is about the dreamer, and every symbol and person in the dream represents the dreamer.
The 30-year-old school, which is headquartered in Missouri and has 17 branches throughout the Midwest, teaches students to interpret symbols using the “universal language of mind”–that is, images that represent various states of being and thinking.
If you dream, for example, that you kill someone, it doesn’t mean you will or want to.
“Killing someone in a dream–or someone trying to kill you–represents change,” said Pam Blosser, who teaches at Chicago’s School of Metaphysics. “How you feel about the killing in your dream helps you understand how you feel about the change.”
Likewise, if you dream you have an affair with your boss, don’t get too worried. It means there’s some kind of harmony or creativity that you feel with him or her, Blosser said.
McCormick said some dreams are precognitive. Dreaming that you are in a car wreck, for example, indicates you might get sick soon, he said.
While few dreams come true, Cartwright said researchers don’t know enough about what is going on in the dreamer’s mind to discount their predictive value.
With better technology to track the brain’s activity, she believes the next frontier of dream research will explore the transcendent possibilities of dreams.
“What are we tuned into during sleep? What information channels are open in dreaming?” Cartwright said. “I’ve had enough spooky things happen in the lab that I’ve kept an open mind about that.”
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SLEEPING AND DREAMING
What happens after you drift off to sleep? You probably have two hours of dreams, but you may not remember them, according to Rush University psychology professor Rosalind Cartwright.
Does everyone dream?
Yes, except in some cases of brain injury or disorders. Not everyone remembers their dreams, though. Only when you wake up during your dream do you remember what it was about.
How many dreams do we have a night?
You have about 120 minutes of dreams during a typical night’s sleep, though they’re not continuous. We dream mostly during REM sleep, a stage of the sleep cycle when the mind is very active. You fall into the first REM period about 90 minutes after falling asleep, and that lasts only a few minutes. After cycling through deep sleep (non-REM), each recurring REM period is longer. You could have a different dream story in each of your REM periods or there could be a theme.
What’s the best way to remember your dreams?
You do most of your dreaming at the end of the night, and it’s the last stage of our sleep, so if you wake up naturally, without an alarm clock, you should remember. Lingering in the memory of the dream and writing it down helps. Women are more likely to remember their dreams than men, in part because they tend to be more interested in their inner lives. You are more likely to remember your dreams when you are emotionally upset because you sleep more lightly.
— Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz
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SYMBOL SECRETS
What do your dreams mean? Books give varying interpretations, but most experts agree that a dream should be interpreted in the context of what’s happening in the dreamer’s life, using some common dream themes and symbols.
“I Had the Strangest Dream: The Dreamer’s Dictionary for the 21st Century,” provides an A-Z guide to discerning the meaning of dream symbols–from dreaming of AA meetings (which signifies you’re taking steps in the right direction) to zucchini (which symbolizes a healthy sexual appetite).
Here’s what the book, authored by clinical hypnotherapist Kelly Sullivan Walden, says about some of our more common dreams.
Flying: Represents freedom, joy, confidence, creativity, independence.
Surfing: Represents oneness with nature and your ability to ride the ebbs and flows of life with mastery and grace.
Flunking: Represents feeling inferior, being overwhelmed, or that you are not engaged in your area of expertise.
Being naked: You have a desire for honesty and intimacy, or you fear others knowing your private thoughts and feelings. How you feel about being naked influences the interpretation.
Teeth falling out: You are venting your feelings of insecurity, powerlessness, financial stress or the loss or death of a family member.
Driving: Symbolizes your ambition and drive to succeed. Whoever is in the driver’s seat is influencing your direction. If you are a passenger, the dream may be telling you that you are in a state of passivity or surrender.
Forgetting: This usually indicates your fear of actually forgetting. Perhaps you are overwhelmed, or whatever you are forgetting is not very important to you.
Bombs: Symbolize transformation–old structures, ideas, patterns or relationships being blown to bits.
Paralysis: You are processing shock from a traumatic experience or loss of connection to your spirit.
Sex: Symbolizes your desire, creativity and passion. If you dream of having sex with a particular person, then you are connecting with that person.
— Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz
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aelejalderuiz@tribune.com
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TELL US
Do you think dreams have meaning? Tell us at ritaredeye@tribune.com. Please include your full name, age and neighborhood.
