The overwhelming majority of the signals that the brain receives from the environment are never processed into conscious activity. The ego prohibits one from seeing more of reality because it is usually screened out as too frightening.
When we sleep, however, these unprocessed stimuli assume the form of our dreams. It is an attempt by our whole brain to understand the mind's true unconscious contents.
Upon awakening, we usually cannot remember our dreams & the ones we can remember we remember through the filter of our conscious minds, so they once again become embellished. most only see their existence as if through a tiny aperture.
SpectralJulianIsNotDead seems to have a grasp of this principle as he engaged in self-analysis of the dream. he also seems to remember more about his dreams than most people do. I take this as a sign that he perhaps has less conscious fear, & perhaps more of a connection to the unconscious than many. usually this is a hallmark trait of the creative individual.
I haven't written anything in this post to interpret the dream & it's more of a Jungian desciption of the nature of dreams than Freudian. I had my own theory of what dreams were before I ever read Jung; it was nice to get confirmation. It's besides the point, but interesting (at least to myself) to note that Jung made Freud faint...twice.
Some researchers believe that the unconscious signals in dreaming are like random feedback loops of unprocessed material & this is what makes dreams a non-linear hodge-podge. I feel that this is a misnomer & that they simply do not understand the distinctions between dreaming & waking consciousness to the extent that they should. Many scientists, not all but many, are threatened by the "religious" & the simple fact of it all is that God is trying to communicate with the dreamer, but the dreamer never understands very much of the message upon awaking & form their own image of what the dream was as they remember.
All researchers uniformly assert that deep restful rem sleep is extremely important for overall physical & mental well-being & express deep concerns that most members of society are sleep-deprived.
CNN recently aired "Sleep" with Dr. Sanjay Gupta that I watched because the Laurie Anderson Club gave me a heads-up that she appeared in the hour-long special report.
Now, Laurie is a buddhist. In my mind, she is a true bodhisttva. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is like an ancient Science of Death, but it can also be applied to dream interpretation. Jung also understood how arcetypal symbols & patterns present in ancient books of wisdom were manifested in dreams. The sexual nature of SpectralJulianIsNotDead's dream signifies, according to the Book of the Dead inference, that he understands only up to a certain level what the dream was about really. To his credit though, he was able to derive an important lesson from the dream (the part about always having condoms on hand). Dreams definitely can predict future events. Freudian analysis interprets only up to the primally sexual level as well & chooses to ignore some of the more spiritual aspects of dreaming. One of my little aphorisms is that Freud was like the Elvis of psychology. His
The Interpretation of Dreams from 1900 opened up the doors to a wider understanding, but a far from complete one. Thus Freud provides tools for understanding & not the all-inclusive (& ever-elusive) truth. Freud's insights were mainly derived from intensive psychological study of the ancient Greek tragedians. The numerous books you can readily purchase at any book store dealing with dream interpretation are largely a bunch of watered-down new age hooey.
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/sleep/
http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/03/09/gupta.sleep/
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIP...22/ltm.19.html
some of the part with Laurie:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIP...24/acd.02.html
I tend to have these dreams that were really super vivid, long. And I -- sort of an epic, and so I decided to draw them -- completely out of self-defense so that I wouldn't just have a kind of big mental meltdown, living in my own private theater.
If I had to really say what my dreams were about, I would say I'm thinking about those things that are going through my mind during the day in a slightly different way, looking at them in a different way. And sometimes obsessing or sometimes attaching them to emotions that I didn't realize I had.
For me, it's fun to take something very literally like, well, are you influenced by your dreams? Yes. Well, what are your dreams? And than really try to see what they are.
- Laurie Anderson