Hi I'm new to this site and am not sure whether this is fight place to post this, but a while ago i had a very strange dream and I'm curious as to what it means.

Ok, its like this:
I was at a party with some of my friends at a place where I used to live. We were havin fun and enjoyin' ourselves, then all of a sudden, there was a flash of orange light in the sky, its creepy, then a rectangular shape appeared in the sky, then, a face appeared, not human, but it looked an orange Gray (alien).
We were all baffled at its appearance, and it was really weird, then one my smart a*** friends said "what the **** is that and the **** is it here!?"
Then, me being the idiot i am, said "**** off" to the alien thing and pointed my rude finger the sky, then it was speaking different language and was doing what had done to it and gave my friends and I the rude finger, not with one or two hands, but with eight or so hands.

Thats it, after that I inquired about UFO sighting and close encounters in the area, but to no avail.


I any one cane help, I'd appreciate it, as I can't figure out whether it is a fictionous dream or it is an insight on whats to come.......

Lol i don't know, but watch out just in case

haha the 8 hands thing was funny

Nothing funny about it, I'm serious, I woke up and I was feaked out. It really scared the sh** out of me.

dreams are usualy not so literal. i would say that this is not one of those.
in dreams things that you are having a hard time dealing with, or situations that you do not unederstand are presented to you in a fashion that makes more sense to you.
the same thing in two different peoples dreaqs mean completly different things.
this dream is about your life, and your experiance.
dream interpritation is not my thing ( within the realms of my abilities )but dont let it scare you.
it could be somthing as dumb as, you shouldnt have catsup on your fries.
but that is for you to figure out ( just dont let it consume you )

Dreams are normally images created by our subconscious processing conscious and subconscious concerns/events etc. Quite often the images are representational, ie they do not accurately reflect reality, but are representational symbols of real events and concerns.
In your dream, as you retell it, some of the interesting symbols are;

party/friends : what are the connotations of this ? good: relaxing friendship etc; bad possible consequences guilt etc(only you may be able to put the correct interpretation on it.)

In the past: thus a reflection on a past time, maybe looking back with pleasure or regrets, maybe knowing that it is time to move on.

Flash of light/rectangular shape in the sky : maybe a doorway or portal, again signifying a change in your life, either physical or emotional (I actually saw a real one of these in the night sky once. It inspired my first post to this site a couple of years ago.)

aliens : a version of a monster. Symbolic of a rea,l physical or emotional concern in your life.

Your friends reactions. They are not taking the monster/your concerns seriously enough?

Your imitation of your friends reactions: Note that you imitate them , but with an exaggerated response. In real life how to you feel about your friends and their relationship with you. Do they treat you with respect? Do you worry too much about trying to please them, or fit in with them. Be honest with your self.

Note that the monster/alien speaks in a language you do not understand. What ever your fears/concerns are, your subconscious is struggling to make sense of them and bring them to your conscious awareness so that you can deal with them.

OK. Now all that is based on an external analysis of your description, of your dreams, so it may be well off the mark. You should be able to do a much better job of analysing this, and other dreams you have, because you will have some idea of your real life, and what symbols your subconscious might use.

Try analysing your dreams, element by element, as I have done, to see if you can make connections between what your subconscious is saying through dream symbols, and what is happening, physically and emotionaly, in your life .

Lol. I thought this was the clearest dream that's been posted on UM in a long time.

Never flip off someone who's bigger than you

Eternal truth. Words to live by. Bravo.

I wouldn't assume that all dreams have "messages." The notion that the mind has nothing better to do than to encode messages to itself in obscure metaphors is ludicrous. It happens, of course, but there is a surface implausibility to that as a policy.

We have the cognitive apparatus we do because it confers survival advantage. Any message worth sending is worth being understood. The idea that we ordinarily and "intentionally" obscure useful information that we have turned up is to say that we are suicidal.

Dreaming is symbolic thought, and like all thought, some of it is great stuff, but quite a bit of it is "just thinking things over."

If you would like to experience this perspective in waking life, consider a survey of the works of Pablo Picasso. You look at a painting like Guernica and you see a dream that leaves you speechless, literally and precisely because this painting portrays a pattern of symbolic thought about a concrete horror better than words could (most words anyway).

But continue your survey, and you come to his representation of a bull's head made by welding the handlebars of a bicycle onto the seat of the bicycle. That's it. We have records of its creation. Picasso was screwing around, and hit upon this (rather like saying that Einstein was screwing around with light, space, and time while riding the trolley, but accurate all the same).

Guernica it ain't. In fact, it is almost a sign (a conventional device, meaningless in itself, which stands one-for-one with something else... a farmer could use it as an improvised road sign to mark a "cattle crossing").

Not quite, though, because like Guernica, the bicycle bull speaks volumes about its creator, and says something different from what the painting says on those same subjects, the mind of Picasso himself, his contents, and his concerns.

So, indeed, Mr Walker, scrutinize any dream. If it is only screwing around, reflection upon it will nevertheless be evocative. That reflection can take you places you never would have visited (even if they are also nowhere to be found in the dream itself).

When your personal Guernica comes along, you may welcome assistance in parsing it all out, but you won't have to ask "what does this mean, if anything?"

Any difficulty you may have in understanding will be directly attributable to the richness, depth, and inherent complexity of the dream's contents, and to the difficulty of expressing the same thoughts any more simply.

Made me chuckle, so true.

You write an excellent post eight bits and may well be right. However, i suspect that all dreams have critical relevance of one sort or another. The reason?

"We have the cognitive apparatus we do because it confers survival advantage. "

(Sorry this computer won't allow me to use the quotes properly)

Dreams are an important survival mechanism. This is a well recognised pschological and medical "fact." For example, sleep deprivation in itself does much less harm than deprivation of dreams/ the part of sleep which encompasses dreaming.

I believe dreams are our mind's way, not just of processing all the data we receive, but also synthesing and analysing that data.This is the role of the subconscious, and facilitates decision making, and other processes. However, by remembering our dreams, and particularly by analysing and understanding them, we can begin to see, and link, the role of our subconscious, with that of our conscious mind, thus taking greater control of both our conscious, and sub conscious thoughts.

One can use this process both to construct completely controlled lucid dreaming landscapes and scenarios, or to gain a better understanding of your desires, fears and other emotions in the real world.

To give you two examples. It is possible to create a dreamscape, populate it with characters and live within it in a story line which resembles, of all things, the construction and function of online world of warcraft. I was doing this as a kid, back in the fifties and sixties, before personal computers /programming or even dungeons and dragons were known to people. I still do it on occasion, although an adult's life is so much more interesting, and under our control, that the need to create a complete fantasy world for yourself is not so all- consuming.

Secondly, as a young man (10 to 12 years old) I had a recurring dream most nights for years. It involved walking down a narrow, twisty path in a deep thick forest. I came to a fork in the road, and a large wolf, jaws slavering, jumped out of a big tree, right in the fork. I would wake up just as it was about to bite my head off.

As, in my conscious world, I became more aware of dream symbology and my ability to control dreams, I got more annoyed that this dream kept recurring. It was only when I realised exactly what the dream represented that I was able to do anythin about it.

At that time I was facing both, the onset of puberty, and the transition from primary to secondary school. I was beginning to face more adult responsibilities. The wolf represented these fears. The fork in the forest, the divergence in my life.The forest and path represented my life along a safe track as a child, through the wild forest of the wider world.
Armed with this realisation I entered my dreamscape, that night, armed with a pump-action shot gun. I approached the tree, and wolf, from one of the alternative paths, and came up behind him as he waited for my nightly stroll down the path. I can't remember if I called out something cheeky, but I blew him right out of that tree.

I never ,ever, was troubled by that dream after that, but also in the real world, I faced my new life with a much greater understanding and comprehension that all i really had to fear was the natural fear of the unknown(which could be overcome with correct strategies), and fear itself (which just has to be faced down.)

This lesson from the dream world stood me in good stead right through high school, and for the rest of my life. So as you can see, I tend not to discount the significance of any dreams.

Howdy, Mr Walker. I take your point, of course. Everybody agrees that the contents of some dreams can be life changing, or even transcend the personal, and change the world.

The issue is whether that is even remotely true of every dream. And I have a problem with that, based on my 16 hours a day of conscious experience of the same apparatus' operation.

On a good day, 15 hours and 45 minutes of its production will be pure crap. I survive and prosper on the other 15 minutes. Most of the time its output is interesting enough, but hardly ever vital.

Yes, Spanish saffron yellow rice would be nice to go with my chicken Kiev tonight, but having that rather than rice pilaf is not going to change my life - which decision managed to kill one or two minutes of conscious processing time... Mmmm, saffron.

Compare the dream I logged this morning. I drove (in a drive-on-the-right jurisdiction) across an intersection. I almost cut off a right-turning car, but the driver was OK with it, and soon thereafter took a left turn while I continued on straight.

I suppose that this could be a metaphor for the existential plight of natural man trapped in the artificiality of a technological world, where tense but superficial social interactions are the norm... but really... Mmmm, drive the car.

It simply does not follow from the fact that regular dreaming is physiologically and psychologically necessary, that the contents of all dreams are mission critical. The methodological problem of investigating the question is obvious: I cannot prevent (nor allow) dreams from having content separately from preventing (or allowing) the physiological correlates of dreaming to proceed.

Which in no way denies the importance of the most important contents of your dreams to you, and maybe to the world. And thank you for telling me about some of yours.

Creating a dreamscape is awesome. I've only done it once. You're lucky you have such control.

Hi, dannyboyjones. Welcome aboard.

It is a matter of taste, I think, and possibly a function of age, too.

Speaking personally, so much of my waking thought production is "controlled," i.e. focused on tasks, work to be done, problems solved, the crud and lint of adult life ... etc. that I recoil from seeking also to control the little truly free thinking time I have, those precious few minutes of REM sleep interspersed among the eight hours of sleep.

For me, every morning is Christmas morning, as I unwrap the presents that are the memories of the preceding night's dreams. Even if it is just driving the car, that's OK, and there are other nights. All I can say about them is that Keira Knightley may be high maintenance, but she's worth it .

I thought english was Australia's native tongue. And I'd like to know what drugs you were doing!

First of all I would like to thank you all for assisting me in the decoding of my dream, and I would like to thank Mr Walker most of all.

His way, decoding element by element is a simple way to understand the dream. He also brought up some some very good references that I can relate to.

Like how he mentioned that I may have trouble relating with my friends, that is half true, most of my friends consider me as a bass player that has no oppnons for the band, that is not true, I have oppinions but they don't listen.

Anyway, I won't bore you with my life.

I would also like to know how you can create your own dreamscape and manufacture it to your own will, it is interesting that most of you can manipulate your dreams to your desires i.e. Keira Knightly.

Thaks again.