Daily Cascade

Night Dreams and Interpretation

Prompt: Night Dreams
"I dream of painting and then I paint my dream."
Vincent Van Gogh
Have you ever written anything based on a night dream, and do you ever wonder what your dreams are trying to tell you?

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I don't think I have ever written anything based on a night dream, but then who can be sure for the mind works in mysterious ways, sometimes. Often, when I see a baseless dream I can't decipher, I just say, "It's just a dream," but is it really? I haven't yet answered that question.

The reason is, I have dreamt some very special dreams that gave me the news of something happening to other loved ones in different places on earth with whom I had lost contact and didn't know what was happening to them. Then, when I could get in touch with those people or have gotten the news of them, I have found that my so-called dream had been the news of a real life or death occurrence. This has happened several times over and I don't really know what to make of this.

As to dreams inspiring or causing literary work, here are three of them:
"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll
"The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka
"The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" by H.P. Lovecraft

Also, I suspect that Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" could be based on dreams in some way, because it includes dream-like sections and surreal elements.

Then, "The Interpretation of Dreams" by Sigmund Freud points to the connection of dreams to the subconscious or the unconscious mind. Today's psychotherapists, as least some of them, use Freud's ideas in their treatments of their patients. After Freud, Carl Jung suggested dreams to be bridges between the conscious and unconscious mind, guiding us for self-understanding and personal growth. His shadow work I have used and I'm still using in a personal journal.

The bottom line is, whether or not dreams convey messages depends on how we interpret them and the framework we use to analyze them. From spiritual and cultural perspectives, some see dreams as messages from a higher power, a person who has passed on, or the universe itself. Today's interpretations gives importance to personal symbolism. There is also that fact of brain activity, which isn't totally discovered, yet.