14 replies to this topic

[injungirl]

I woke up today at 4:00 AM startled for some unknown reason. I drank some water and went back to bed in a minute. I dreamt my house was surrounded by grave stones. It was very realistic. I woke up in shock and looked at the clock. It was almost 5:45 AM. I've bee thinking about the dream all day. I don't think the property was an ancient burial ground but the house is 70 years old. Does the dream mean anything? Can someone interpret my dream?

[Blueye Aj]

injungirl, on 28 April 2010 - 06:01 AM, said:

I woke up today at 4:00 AM startled for some unknown reason. I drank some water and went back to bed in a minute. I dreamt my house was surrounded by grave stones. It was very realistic. I woke up in shock and looked at the clock. It was almost 5:45 AM. I've bee thinking about the dream all day. I don't think the property was an ancient burial ground but the house is 70 years old. Does the dream mean anything? Can someone interpret my dream?

um it was a nightmare?

i had a nightmare of being attacked by a angry mob of cookie monsters once (not kidding), scared of cookies ever since, care to interpret that?

[CausticGnostic]

Without a more detailed description of your dream, there's not much for one to interpret. Sleep (Hypnos) was the brother of Death (Thanatos) in Greek mythology, and in the European tradition, the two have often been equated: Sleep being like a temporary death; death like a permanent sleep.  Gravestones, in and of themselves, signify death, or at least the place where something lies buried (which I suppose you could interpret metaphorically. But the fact that you dreamed of a lot of gravestones surrounding your bed brought to mind circles of standing stones, such as  Stonehenge--which might ultimately have a positive connotation.  After all, the "Death" card in the Tarot deck doesn't usually mean death literally; it usually means an abrupt or radical change.  Maybe your unconscious mind is trying to tell you that you need to make such a change. . . .

Or maybe your dream has a far deeper or higher meaning, one related to the spiritual symbolism of "awakening"--what Mircea Eliade once called the "soteriological meaning" of the sleep-death homology.  For in certain Greek, Hindu, and Gnostic traditions, sleep and death are seen as "forgetting," so that an "awakening" is "remembering," in a metaphysical sense.  So perhaps the radical change that your unconscious is urging you to make is to "awaken" from "spiritual forgetfulness."  Eliade quotes a line from the Gnostic text "The Hymn of the Pearl" that you may find relevant: "'She forgot her original habitation, her true center, her eternal being'" (Myth and Reality, p. 129).

Edited by CausticGnostic, 28 April 2010 - 09:49 AM.

[Blueye Aj]

CausticGnostic, on 28 April 2010 - 09:13 AM, said:

Without a more detailed description of your dream, there's not much for one to interpret. Sleep (Hypnos) was the brother of Death (Thanatos) in Greek mythology, and in the European tradition, the two have often been equated: Sleep being like a temporary death; death like a permanent sleep.  Gravestones, in and of themselves, signify death; but the fact that you dreamed of a lot of them surrounding your bed actually brings to mind circles of standing stones, such as at Stonehenge--which might have a positive connotation.  After all, the "Death" card in the Tarot deck doesn't usually literally mean death; it means an abrupt or radical change.  Maybe your unconscious mind is trying to tell you that you need to make such a change. . . .

dude its just a dream, REM cycle throws some weird dreams at times, seeking meaning in it is like looking for shapes in cloud.

[Natural Wonders]

injungirl, on 28 April 2010 - 06:01 AM, said:

I woke up today at 4:00 AM startled for some unknown reason. I drank some water and went back to bed in a minute. I dreamt my house was surrounded by grave stones. It was very realistic. I woke up in shock and looked at the clock. It was almost 5:45 AM. I've bee thinking about the dream all day. I don't think the property was an ancient burial ground but the house is 70 years old. Does the dream mean anything? Can someone interpret my dream?

What emotions did you feel in the dream about the gravestones? Afterwards? Do gravestones hold any significance for you? Did they look familiar?

Scientifically, research has supported the idea that dreams are our brain's way of retrieving information learned through the day and processing it for long-term storage. It would be interesting to understand why your brain considered the information encoded in the vision (of encroaching gravestones) important enough to be processed.

Edited by Natural Wonders, 29 April 2010 - 04:57 AM.

[Fluffybunny]

Keep in mind that not all dreams have meaning. Sometimes there are brain cells firing that bring up a mixture of odd situations and items, with things changing rapidly and without reason.

Dreaming about a graveyard in your home may not be anything more than your brain pulling up an old dusty memory of a graveyard you drove by, or saw on tv, overlapping your current settings of home. I don't know if it is a matter of you needing the dream to mean something, if that is the situations then there are plenty of dream interpretation websites that will list tons of things, all with someones idea of what that item means.

Of course dream interpretation is pretty much considered a joke in psychological circles, and not considered to have any merit. When you ask a therapist about what a dream means, they will immediately ask, "what does the dream mean to you?" as the feelings you get from the dream are the only thing that really matter, and no one else is going to be able to tell you that.

[susieice]

According to the encyclopedia I have regarding dreams, it says that from a spiritual perspective, a graveyard isn't just a place of death but also a place of spiritual regeneration and rebirth. There may be parts of you that you've stop using, or killed off. Sounds a little like what Caustic Gnostic was saying.

[eight bits]

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Can someone interpret my dream?

Not me. That's for sure:

Disclaimer: I don't interpret other people's dreams, but some dream motifs and characters are dreamt by many, many people, and I sometimes recognize those motifs and characters. I can tell you what several of the people who have dreamt dreams like yours have thought about their dreams, but only you can decide whether that has anything to do with your personal dream.

I agree with my friend CG, that the report is brief. Many of the dreams that stay with us afterwards, dreams that occupy waking thought, are terse. But even then, there is usually more to be said than simply a single galvanizing image.

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I dreamt my house was surrounded by grave stones. It was very realistic. I woke up in shock...

Were there no dream characters? Where was the dream character "You?" In what sense was the house your house? How surrounded? Why did you think the stones were grave markers? In what sense was the dream "realistic?" Why "shock?"

Some of the other matters are easily disposed of.

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I woke up today at 4:00 AM ... It was almost 5:45 AM.

That's a normal sleep cycle length, and REM sleep at the tail end is a normal placement of it. Also, it's not unusual to wake up from the second-to-last sleep cycle (in fact, I am writing this having woken from what would have been my penultimate, but I decided to get up and take advantage of the early morning quiet, and the beautiful light as the moon sheds its fullness).

However, you report that you were "startled" when you woke up at 4. Do you remember anything about that cycle's dream?

And one thing that may be especially interesting

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I don't think the property was an ancient burial ground but the house is 70 years old.

And you placed a ghostless dream report in with the forum's ghost stories.

With all respect for my colleague from UCLA,

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REM cycle throws some weird dreams at times, seeking meaning in it is like looking for shapes in cloud.

Dreams are, on their face, human thought. Of course, there are religious traditions in which seeking meaning in any human thought is indeed held to be like looking for shapes in clouds. So, I apologize if you are of such a tradition.

But I think I am safe, since those views are severely underrepresented at UCLA, whose student and employee selection procedures favor people who believe thoughts to be, at least some and at least potentially, meaningful.

So, applying the obvious truism that dreams are thought to OP's dream, it is unremarkable that something that is in your waking thoughts would also show up in your dreams. That may not be the whole story, but it is something I believe that you should consider. The ghost-hosting potential of your home has occurred to you, the waking you.

Finally, FB.

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Of course dream interpretation is pretty much considered a joke in psychological circles, and not considered to have any merit.

Depends on the circle. There are a lot of Jungians out there.

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When you ask a therapist about what a dream means, they will immediately ask, "what does the dream mean to you?"

Some will. Jungians distinguish between "big dreams" and personal dreams. The former use stock elements and a uniform grammar of expression that varies little between people, cultures, and epochs. A responsible Jungian will point out collective elements, and offer standard interpretations as an option.

The dreamer remains the best judge (Jungian analysis is a cooperative venture generally), but it is obviously silly to present someone who doesn't speak Turkish (say) with a Turkish text, no translation, and ask them what the text means to them. Better to provide a transcription of what a bilingual Turkish speaker makes of the text. Maybe that still makes no sense, but the other way is almost a guaranteed fail.

On the other hand, personal dreams, which are the majority of traffic, are just that. To assist with those may be feasible for someone in a longterm relationship, like therapy or friendship, but it is unlikely that a stranger on an internet forum will be of much help.

I wouldn't have posted on this if there wasn't "big dream" potential (mostly based on terseness, strong affect, continued waking involvement, and some aspects of the image reported), but too little was said about the dream for me to have any confidence that it wasn't personal, e.g maybe complementary reflection on the OP's obvious waking interest in whether her home might be haunted.

[Blueye Aj]

susieice, on 29 April 2010 - 06:21 AM, said:

According to the encyclopedia I have regarding dreams, it says that from a spiritual perspective, a graveyard isn't just a place of death but also a place of spiritual regeneration and rebirth. There may be parts of you that you've stop using, or killed off. Sounds a little like what Caustic Gnostic was saying.

Dear eightbits, thanks for the reply, i am not sure whats the general concensus at my school is regarding dream and its meaning but what I want to know is what scientific principal and logic one can apply in interpreting them? sometimes I had extremely vivid dreams where i behaved and acted extremely rationally and sometimes I did so random and weird stuff that would seem completely implausible in real life. My point is searching meaning in these chaotic random occurances is pointless.

I can now sit and sort meaning through something completely random and come up with a meaning that somewhat seems logical and satisfies me, but it doesn't mean its true. Thats exactly what psychics do, they tell you things you would want to hear based on your emotional condition and people think they are communicating with a world beyond when in reality they are just exploiting our suggestive nature.

[eight bits]

Hey, Blueye.

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I can now sit and sort meaning through something completely random and come up with a meaning that somewhat seems logical and satisfies me, but it doesn't mean its true. Thats exactly what psychics do, they tell you things you would want to hear based on your emotional condition and people think they are communicating with a world beyond when in reality they are just exploiting our suggestive nature.

There are a few things that can be said. All symbolic expression, not just dreaming, presents a broad target cross-section for interpretation. That's both a strength and a weakness of that modality of thought.

Interpretations are not mutually exclusive (another simultaneous strength and weakness of the modality). Your "seems logical and satisfies me" may be an excellent guide to it being true. Alas, that does not mean true to the exclusion of something else being equally valid, and both valid at the same time.

There's a big cut between the personal dreams and the more-or-less universal dreams. For the personal dreams, what some third-party "interpreters" or some "dream dictionaries" do is exactly what fake psychics do: cold reading, "Barnum statements," and all that jazz. The material on some web "dream resources" is visibly recycled newspaper and magazine horoscopes, now indexed by key word instead of by date. BS, through and through - with a paper trail, no less.

But on a personal dream, the dreamer brings a lot of background knowledge to the task. And the material isn't completely random. If you remember it, then a dream is almost always at least locally consistent (like a movie with so-called continuity errors - the movie is wrong, but it is also a long way from being from random blasts of photons and sound waves - or even random scene-image and sound sequences).

You quoted susieice, who in her turn cites CG. I think what they're doing is called "symbol amplification," or at least the first steps of it. "What does this symbol mean to you?" is an ill-posed question - even if you're the one whose symbol it is. There is a reason, after all, why the source of the symbol is called the unconscious.

So, maybe other folk offer you some ideas in hopes of "stirring something up." The chances of a third party hitting on a personal dream may be slender, but the chances of energizing the dreamer to dig in and find a workable answer seem pretty good.

And it is a whole different world for the relatively few universal dreams.

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what I want to know is what scientific principal and logic one can apply in interpreting them?

Because we find them wherever we find dream reports, or imaginative literature, or representational art, or ..., or political speeches. They are as "species-specific" as fire use. We can infer a lot of the meaning from the uses of the motifs in waking life, other bits from what we know of the cognitive architecture in which they arise, and finally from the same sort of dreamers' "seems logical and satisfies me" as is used with personal dreams.

With respect to the last, we catch a break. Since these dreams are dreamt by a wide variety of people, they are sometimes dreamt by people who are well versed in how symbolic expression works (artists, writers, ..., politicians' speechwriters).

First, there really is a method to the madness of symbolic thought (for an analysis of that, almost completely independent of any "dream lore," see, for instance, Rudolf Arnheim's stuff). So, there is such a thing as human expertise in it. And so, when an expert dreams one of the universals... profit.

The downside is that of the 100,000 or so dreams a person might have, maybe fewer than 10 of them will be "big" universals that survive into waking memory. (There are also "small" widespread motifs, helpful for establishing the principle of collectivity, but otherwise not especially interesting: the dreamer is negligently naked in public, is a student unprepared for an exam about to be given, etc.)

So, there you have it. It isn't random, dreamers can make headway with personal dreams, maybe being helped by others in symbol amplification, and for a few dreams, can take advantage of the many others who have dreamt the same thing over the millennia for which we have records.

[Master Nightmare]

injungirl, on 28 April 2010 - 06:01 AM, said:

I woke up today at 4:00 AM startled for some unknown reason. I drank some water and went back to bed in a minute. I dreamt my house was surrounded by grave stones. It was very realistic. I woke up in shock and looked at the clock. It was almost 5:45 AM. I've bee thinking about the dream all day. I don't think the property was an ancient burial ground but the house is 70 years old. Does the dream mean anything? Can someone interpret my dream?

All options must be considered. if you saw grave stones all around your house, then it has to do something with that. perhaps it is an old ancient grave yard, but you just don't know it.

[TheJess]

injungirl, on 28 April 2010 - 06:01 AM, said:

I woke up today at 4:00 AM startled for some unknown reason. I drank some water and went back to bed in a minute. I dreamt my house was surrounded by grave stones. It was very realistic. I woke up in shock and looked at the clock. It was almost 5:45 AM. I've bee thinking about the dream all day. I don't think the property was an ancient burial ground but the house is 70 years old. Does the dream mean anything? Can someone interpret my dream?

To see a headstone in your dream, represents a forgotten or buried aspect of yourself which you need  to acknowledge. Consider also the message on the headstone. It may indicate a statement about your life and its condition.
The house is supposed to represent your self.
So, my interpretation, is that there is something about yourself or your past that has been plaguing you. Something you need to come to terms with. I don't think has anything to do with death. Many times the real meaning of dreams is nothing like what it appears.

[Punk94Dead]

Blueye Aj, on 28 April 2010 - 09:08 AM, said:

um it was a nightmare?

i had a nightmare of being attacked by a angry mob of cookie monsters once (not kidding), scared of cookies ever since, care to interpret that?

lolololololololol epic !,angry mob of cookie monster sure is scary if you think about it but,how can you scared of cookies ?? they're delicious you know....

[elemental bender]

Blueye Aj, on 28 April 2010 - 09:08 AM, said:

um it was a nightmare?

i had a nightmare of being attacked by a angry mob of cookie monsters once (not kidding), scared of cookies ever since, care to interpret that?

you havent eaten a cookie since then?

[Master Nightmare]

Maybe you're just overthinking this too much so maybe it's just another dream that means nothing.