Some dreams may be telling the dreamer something they may need to know, some may be premonitory, some may be telepathic - but nowadays I struggle to believe that the vast majority of our dreams are anything more than us just stirring the slop-buckets of our daily lives. That's a disappointing conclusion to draw - it would be nice to believe that our nights are spent more productively than that - but there we are.
I really like the line that a poster above came out with, about our dreams being `thoughts with the brakes off`.
I dream every night and my dreams are extremely intricate and incredibly involved and usually suffused with an atmosphere of anxiety (although I always feel sad as I exit them). It's a good morning if I can recall as much as 25 per cent of them these days. I am just left to feel staggered as to where all this material has come from.
I never ever get nightmares. (We have a thread on this issue:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/nightmares-who-gets-them-and-why.66136/)
The nature of my dreams seems to have changed as I have become older. There was a time when every so often I would have a striking dream, full of clear symbolism, which begged to be remembered and analysed. Accordingly, I have been through phases of being into `dream interpretation` of different kinds and have owned dream dictionaries and taken the precaution of keeping notebooks by my bed and so on. If I am to be really honest though, I can't really think of a dream from that period of my life which really imparted some message to me that I really needed to know. Mostly it was a case of tallying some extraordinary dream image with what I already knew (if deep down) was going on with me in my waking world.
All that stuff has since joined the sad array of Fortean interests which have fallen by the wayside as I slowly but surely morph into a being one Boring Old Git.
Ironically, my dreams these days seem somehow
younger - as I have got older. They are full of manic energy and much faffing around and seem to have no discernible plot or clear purpose. I no longer seem to dream much about people that I know - instead the characters in my dreams are strangers, but composites of real acquaintances.. It's the same with places: everywhere I visit in my dreams is a place composed of a mash up of real locations that I have known. And my dreams are full of incessant chatter. Lots of people talking endlessly and verbosely. I only need to nod of on a sofa and - lo! - some stranger is gabbling to me in a prolix way about Some Very Urgent Topic - all of which is forgotten upon waking, of course.