Understanding Dream Symbols and Their Meaning

Dream symbols are highly personal and specific to each dreamer, and their meaning can vary even from one dream to another for the same individual. Your subconscious mind chooses particular symbols to represent aspects of your waking life, influenced by various factors, and often following certain patterns. Despite these personal nuances, all of our subconscious minds tend to use similar approaches to encode meaning into dream symbols.

Dreams Are About You

Since dreams occur within a deep part of yourself, it’s not surprising that most of what they convey pertains to you and your life. Dreams often portray a snapshot of some part of your daily experience or something on your mind, presented from the unique perspective of your subconscious mind.

Dreams Reflect Your Life

Dreams often mirror elements of your waking life. As you examine each dream, you can often find parallels between the dream’s components and certain aspects of your life or thoughts. The dream presents these elements in the symbolic language of your subconscious.

Dreams Show Your Perspective

In most dreams, everything—people, settings, and other elements—pertains to you personally. More specifically, dreams tend to depict your thoughts and feelings about things, rather than the things themselves. For instance, a dream featuring your sister likely reflects your perception of her, your interpretation of something she said, or your assumptions about her thoughts, rather than portraying her actual self.

Dreams Convey a Distorted Reality

Because dreams portray people and situations as you interpret them, they do not provide an accurate representation of reality. Dreams are filtered through the distorting lens of your subconscious mind, often infused with subconscious fears, desires, and imaginings. Therefore, it’s important not to base decisions solely on a dream, as that would mean blindly following the whims of your subconscious.

See Also: Perspective, Subconscious, Interpretation, Reality