I don’t know how popular books are that teach dream interpretation. There’s certainly plenty of advice on the Web and many people are curious as to the meaning of their dreams. It’s said that old men will dream dreams and young men see visions but I suspect this means old men will be naturally wise (just as dreaming is naturally induced) rather than having flashes of inspiration. When Pharaoh dreamed of cows and ears of corn they were believed to be inspired of God and neither Pharaoh nor his wise men could fathom them out. Joseph confessed that he had no such skill but it was God who gave him the explanation. He wouldn’t have been able to reproduce this so called gift under controlled scientific conditions because it wasn’t under his control.
The Bible knows nothing of a gift of interpreting dreams. Repeatedly it is a young man who is employed to do the interpreting suggesting it is more akin to a vision than an interpretation. Many of us have experienced crying with laughter over a joke we heard while in a dream either unable to recall what was so funny or coming to the realisation that the laughter was purely spontaneous, there being no joke as such. More often than not dreams occur just as we go to sleep or just as we wake up and so are, themselves, a semi-conscious interpretation of reality. To interpret them would be to see how we view reality when our imagination is allowed to run riot without the constraints of rationality. To make sense of a dream would be like seeking counsel from a person with delusions.
I remember sleeping at my grandma’s house with my cousins. I was having a nightmare involving Herman Munster and I dreamed he was following me up the stairs. As I looked across the room there he was coming through the door. Being half asleep and the light being poor it was impossible to reconcile imagination with rationality. It was no coincidence that my cousin happened to walk through the door at the conclusion of my nightmare. My dream was an interpretation of that event. Being surprised and slightly afraid my mind instinctively imagined the worst and most vivid scenario. It seems the key to interpreting ours dreams lies in the rational and reasonable. Our version of reality is, after all, only an interpretation of what our senses communicate to us. Sleep is an altered state of consciousness cut adrift from the constraints of reason like a boat in mid ocean with no means of navigation. When we reach land we may be able to reconstruct the journey we could not have anticipated.
As I get older I don’t dream more. I put less store in my dreams and nightmares are rare but I think I understand them more, probably because the dividing line between dreams and reality become more blurry. In looking back we can make sense of our journey through life, which has brought us to this point probably more by luck than judgement. The dream, where my limbs become like lead and the more I struggle to move forward the less progress I make, is little more than a metaphor for many of the challenges I face. The dream that I would dearly love to continue, but everything suddenly changes with no way of getting back, is very close to the experiences of many of us. I find myself waking from a nightmare only to find that Herman has followed me into reality. What do our dreams mean? They mean nothing, they are the life we live in an altered universe. Far from interpreting our dreams you could say that our dreams interpret us.
As an aside:
When I put ‘interpreting dreams’ into Google I got predictable results but there was also a link ‘interpreting dreams Christian’ which I clicked out of curiosity. This was like stepping into an alternative universe. The stuff of nightmares.