Day into night

Dream material - Dreams come from many sources. They might come out of unresolved internal conflicts, or from repressed thoughts. Casual "triggers" can come from something we see or hear. A dream can posess many other memory associations, past and recent.

Makes sense - One of the functions of dreaming is to integrate day material into memory. Dreams can function to sort and put away lots of the bits and pieces floating around up there without real meaning. Often our dream maker will weave several unrelated mental fragments into a dream tapestry. This dream has a plot, a setting or several locales, characters and symbols.

Day material - Often dreams come from what I call "day material" - what is going on in our lives right now. Anything that happens during the past day or couple of days can end up as a dream element. This includes any stimuli from the outside or inside of us. Examples include thoughts, sights, songs, movies and TV, the face of a stranger, a phone call, or something we read. For me, most of my day material is not from yesterday, but the day before that.

Big dreams, little dreams - The day material is usually unrelated but it soon becomes all the parts of a single or a series of dreams. Old material that is from a long time ago can also appear in such a "sense of nonsense" dream, a "little dream." In this case casual day material can augment the main stuff of the dream, which might represent a return to a recurring theme of something unresolved, generally a "big dream." These dreams often help us put together the big pictures in our lives.

To be continued in another post . . .

Tags: daily life dreams and the supernatural events life thoughts