Guys wtf are dreams?

>Are they a window into the unconscious?
Of course. Once I started understanding mine this became appearent. My dreams even used 'subconscious' to describe themself sometimes.

>What about dream analysis are there any legit books about understanding your dreams?
A lot of dreams use a private language of symbols that are very personal. One of my dreams used the religion of Islam to represent something dissoaciated with me, because it's such a foreign thing to me. It said 'this is like Islam, it's nothing like you'

As a result you can't get a dream dictionary which tells you what each symbol means. What you can do is learn the general theory and patterns by which symbols operate. You can also learn symbols that are very common, what Jung would say are part of the collective uncoscious. For instance that water represents the unconscious. Or how to recognize the anima or shadow when they appear.

I found Man and his Symbols useful for this. I have not read dreams.

I'm on the last chapter of dreams, its a tough read not much fun but being aware of the symbols and direction structure enhances the experience

get a dream diary making it routine helps most, look up lucid dreaming. You'll spend 1/3 of your life asleep might as well put your unconscious to work while you do.

some dreams are reminiscent of the psychedelic experience I even had a "waking up moment" before waking up, recently been seeing myself in mirrors within the dream

when you start getting dreams that are trying to warn you of something look up Warrior King Magician Lover

I've seen something I'd describe almost the same way several times in my dreams. Each time I'm also in a dense, evil forest, and it's guarding the exit.

>Guys wtf are dreams?
God's pranks.

more than psychedelic experiences i think dreams look like delirant expieriences like the once you might get from salvia or high fever, sleep deprivation, light form of psychosis. sleep supplements who work on serotonin ime tend to give more order to dreams just like lsd makes the world seem more structured, in a very forced pattern

Often it creates a story around a feeling
f.e. i once had a dream where i killed someone in a metro and i thought 'fuck now im going to jail' and i felt that realisation i fucked up.
The same feeling was present in another dream where i came to a class totally unprepared for an important exam.

>when you start getting dreams that are trying to warn you of something look up Warrior King Magician Lover

Why.

Is this book good or is it just a meme? I read up about it a bit and it sounds like it could be legit but it also sounds like it could be retarded

Here’s what is apparent;

-Some dreams are clearly meaningful. They are directly about things you’ve experienced, and involve people you know, or are about events you’ve experienced or are anticipating.

-Dreams have the capacity to integrate in physical stimulation. We’ve all experienced the sound of our alarm being integrated into a dream before realizing what we are hearing. Experiments indicate that sensation on our skin can also be integrated in on some circumstances. In this context dreams could be thought of as a mechanism to enable us to stay asleep while experiencing disturbances.

-We also have dreams which actually wake us from sleep (nightmares) so dreams aren’t exclusively to keep us asleep.

All these facts are acknowledged by Freud. He postulates that all dreams have some sort of meaning, or rather, all dreams are built of things in people’s memories, and thus contain some information about the minds of people who experience the dreams.

Freud tells us that universal dream symbol dictionaries are impossible to construct, because it’s not any particular thing that means anything, but the relationship of different things in the dream content in relation to the individual’s own history which create meaningful content.

The most common theory of dreams today is just that dreams are random neural firings, strung together by our brains interpretation after the fact. This isn’t actually incompatible with Freud broadest notions, if you say that the firing isn’t totally random, but actually has some rough pattern. The degree to which it’s random would explain why our dreams aren’t straightforward but instead have a difference between its manifest content and its latent content.

Frankly how Freud’s notion of therapy ends up treating dreams or association as a sort of ink blot image, who’s goal is to try to encourage the patient to reflect on their own mind, motivations, traumas, and so on.

If you read The Interpretation of Dreams I find nothing that a materialist minded, science oriented person would strenuously object to. There is a lot you can object to in Freud’s own practice, and his methodologies, but while I wouldn’t say Freud is ‘correct’, I don’t think he can be as easily dismissed as some would suggest.

I believe dreams are very underrated:

1. I go to bed angry as hell at something like housemates making noise or family member acting like an idiot. I dream about fighting someone and absolutely using all my energy to stay alive. I wake up relatively peaceful.

2. I dream about desiring a woman and wanting to fuck her. She becomes undressed and I'm ready to penetrate. However the closer I get to sticking my dick inside her the more she starts to turn into a random object, and the more surreal the dreamworld becomes, until I end up waking up just as my dick is about to touch "her". I wake up desiring a girlfriend and renew my pursuit of finding one, i.e. my brain knows that letting me fuck girls in my dreams will discourage me from pursuing penetration IRL.

3. I join a soccer team and am eager to impress. I play alright but still I think all the time about improving my skills. I dream about running extremely slowly on a soccer pitch, falling over often and barely able to kick the ball. I am extremely embarrassed and frustrated. I wake up even more prepared to focus on not moving slowly or miss-kicking a ball in IRL.

4. I worry both about being too weak to defend myself (e.g. against a pack of niggers) and also against the weight of the world's expectations. I dream about being attacked by a stranger and only being able to throw slow, ineffective punches (which obviously miss the target because they're so slow) while barely protecting myself against the stranger's more powerful punches. I wake up more concentrated on aiming punches properly if need be, and also more prepared to aggressively secure my situation against an overwhelming world.
Etc.

Symbolically dreams are very informative and allow you to appreciate your past and your actions by interpreting what things in a dream (e.g. a river, a fairground) represent as well what your journey to and from these places represents in that context. Without going into details, I experienced a very lengthy dream last year which basically summarized my entire life until that point and the "journey" I had been on and after interpreting it that way (subjective of course, so open for any interpretation) I felt a sense of detached calmness about my life despite my many failings. Dreams are "wise" in that sense because they don't provide a clear answer, as they could do simply by writing it out on a piece of paper and having us dream of reading it.

Dreams are also a great training simulator to prepare one for the real world by introducing fears into the brain and by encouraging the brain to prepare itself (subconsciously) for fights etc. I imagine the reason animals dream (e.g. dogs running) is that they are training themselves for pursuing prey and for outrunning larger predators. I think this is the reason children dream far more vividly than adults, as their impressions become systemized in their brains and their subconscious works behind the scenes to identify and mitigate potential threats.