You might be the one floating in your dreams, or you may see other people, animals, or objects floating. In each case, it helps to examine the emotions you felt in the dream: a floating dream can be either positive or negative depending on how it made you feel. If you were the one floating in your dream, it can indicate that you are generally happy and content with your life situation, and have let go of or resolved issues that were previously troubling you. To float you have to relax and let the water support you, so a floating dream could signal that you have come to a place of acceptance in some area of your life. Perhaps you feel able to “rise above” a previously challenging situation.

Dreams about floating can be negative if you felt out of control or like you had nothing to hold onto in the dream. Some people describe dreams in which they spontaneously started to float away from the ground. They felt anxious and scared that they wouldn’t be able to return and instead would float off into space. They might see friends and family members standing on the ground below and be powerless to get back to them. This kind of floating dream is similar to dreams of falling, and can be a subconscious hint that you feel out of control in some aspect of your life. Uncontrolled floating in dreams, especially if the dream environment around you is indistinct, may indicate that you feel aimless in life: you’re just “going with the flow” and have yet to set meaningful goals for your life. A lack of control over your movements in a floating dream could also indicate a lack of confidence in your own waking decisions and actions.

If you feel insecure financially, emotionally, or socially, negative floating dreams can articulate your feelings of insecurity. If you feel like you’re being micromanaged at work, or that your voice is being discounted in your personal or professional life, floating dreams can express your frustration at the lack of input you feel. Perhaps you’ve been observing a conflict or situation between people you know while feeling peripheral to the situation and unable to influence it in a meaningful way. Alternatively, if you feel content in your floating dream it may be a sign that you’ve decided to outwait a negative situation or conflict and have stopped stressing over it.

Other people or animals floating in a dream can have several meanings depending on the tone of your dream. Seeing animals floating on water was traditionally thought to denote happiness and contentment. However, if you see animals or people you know floating away from you, it could be a sign that you feel disconnected from others; perhaps you’re experiencing difficulties that are isolating you from those around you. Likewise, seeing objects floating in dreams can indicate that you feel ungrounded and want to strengthen your connections to the rest of the world.

Finally, if you feel that you floated out of your body while remaining conscious, you may also want to learn more about out of body experiences, including ways to control and induce them. Like floating dreams in general, OBEs tend to be a lot less scary when you understand what may be causing them. Floating dreams can be either calming or distressing depending on the content and tone of the dream. Dreams both positive and negative spring from the thoughts, events and emotions of our waking lives, so if you have scary or upsetting floating dreams, the best way to reduce them or change them into positive dreams is to honestly address the conflicts and stresses in your life that may underlie them. Once you address the underlying causes of negative floating dreams, you may even experience a positive counter-dream of floating that will assure you the issue has been resolved.

Dream dictionaries will often include traditional interpretations of some common dreams; these interpretations tend to be prophetic, religious or spiritual in nature. Sites that mostly discuss psychic phenomena and spirituality usually emphasize the spiritual, prophetic, or mystical sides of dreams, and sometimes help visitors detect spiritual messages in their dreams. The meanings of dreams can vary widely depending on the cultural lens you use to interpret them: a Christian dream interpretation site would interpret a snake dream much differently than a Buddhist or Hindu site, for example. When looking at a traditional interpretation of your dream, it might help to ask yourself if the interpretation fits with the tone of your dream.

More and more, online dream dictionaries are focusing on the psychological underpinnings of dreams, and offering people psychological explanations for their content. In my opinion, the best dream interpretation sites leave dream meanings open-ended: instead of dictating a specific interpretation for your dream, these sites try to give you as much information about what your dream might mean as possible, and leave the definitive interpretation up to you. Alongside their general dreams database, well-organized sites will include quick-reference categories like common dreams, nightmares, recurring dreams, and lucid dreams. Dream interpretation databases tend to be huge, and the best sites are those that organize their dream themes both alphabetically by first letter and using categories such as Animals, People, Places, Colors, Feelings, etc. This cross-referencing makes it easier to find your dream theme, and perhaps do a little browsing of related themes along the way to give you ideas for interpretation.

Online dream dictionaries can stand alone, or be part of a more comprehensive site devoted to the exploration and discussion of dreams. Many dream interpretation sites will include a sidebar or page of helpful articles related to dream interpretation, such as current psychological theories of dreams, traditional understandings of dreams, and the history of dream interpretation. Websites that offer tips and instructions on how to lucid dream also often include a database of dream themes and interpretations on the site; it has been proven that paying attention to the content of your dreams can be a booster to achieving lucid dreams. You can also find dream forums where visitors can post a description of their dreams and receive feedback from other visitors about what they might mean. The more comprehensive sites will give you a wide range of nuanced dream interpretations to choose from, and if you use a forum for inspiration, you can check people’s offered interpretations against a range of possible meanings in the database.

Dream dictionaries can be helpful if you’ve decided to interpret your dreams but aren’t sure where to start. They can suggest possible meanings that have been associated with your dream, and forums can give you feedback from other people who are interested in dream work. If you consult an external resource like a dictionary, database or forum for dream interpretation, it usually works best when you stop to consider if a given interpretation resonates with you and your life. Dream interpretation is ultimately an individual task, but a framework such as a dictionary can provide you with the map to chart your dream’s meaning.

The researchers monitored the REM sleep of the participants, and had them use eye signals to indicate when they became lucid. In surveys afterward, the participants reported whether they’d had become lucid after the dream began (a dream-induced lucid dream, or DILD) or slipped directly into a dream while retaining lucidity (a wake-induced lucid dream, or WILD). LaBerge and Levitan also asked the participants if they had experienced any of the sensory phenomena associated with an out of body experience: vibrations, feelings of bodily distortion, or a feeling of floating or being outside of their physical bodies. They found that dreamers had experienced one or more of the classic symptoms of an OBE in 28% of the WILDS, but only 6% of the DILDs. This suggests you are much more likely to have an out of body lucid dream if you enter it from a waking state.

An additional round of surveys showed that 85% of OBE experients surveyed had their experiences while they were resting, dreaming, or about to fall asleep. They also showed that people are more likely to have an out of body experience if they have had lucid dreams; are frequently able to control their dreams; or if they have had flying, falling or floating dreams. However, out of body experiences might still differ markedly from lucid dreams because they usually occur when a person is either entering or waking from sleep. OBEs may be a very intense hypnagogic phenomenon that can kick in when the brain is disconnecting itself the body’s sensory input at the onset of sleep. In OBEs that occur when a person is waking up, the brain may have woken up before it could reestablish sensory connections with the rest of the body.

If you’ve never had an out of body experience, you may still have had out of body dreams. Many dream workers make the distinction between first-person and third-person dreams: in first-person dreams, you are directly involved in the dream. You may be someone completely different from your waking self, but your physical sensations and actions will be connected to a specific dream body. In third-person dreams, you become a viewpoint which is detached from the action or plot of the dream. Think of it like watching a movie in your head. You may connect emotionally with the plot and characters, but you won’t have a body in the dream to which these sensations attach. You may seem to be floating above the scene or watching a series of different scenes spliced together like edits in a movie. Many people describe alternating between first and third-person perspective in the same dream. Researchers like LaBerge have suggested that third-person out of body dreams are a very gentle kind of out of body experience— one which doesn’t feel different from the rest of the dream or stop the dream narrative from unfolding.

At this point in time, we must consider out of body experiences as categorically different (if related) to lucid dreams. Though OBEs can share many of the same features as a lucid dream— such as the ability to fly, manipulate the physics of the environment, and teleport instantly to a desired location— these experiences also incorporate distinct bodily sensations not found in most lucid dreams. Overall, OBEs are much rarer than lucid dreams, though they can also be experienced by someone who has never dreamed lucidly. People who have experienced both OBEs and lucid dreams are usually quick to put OBEs in a category of their own. Experients of OBEs have asserted that they feel fundamentally more vivid, immediate and physiologically intense than a lucid dream. Until there are more in-depth scientific studies on the connection between lucid dreams and out of body experiences, it makes sense to recognize OBEs as similar yet separate from lucid dreams.

The “dream argument” postulates that the act of dreaming provides evidence that the senses we trust to distinguish reality from illusion are untrustworthy, and that we should rigorously test and question any reality that depends on information we receive from our senses. In fact, we should perform the same kind of reality checks we would make in dreams. However, Descartes believed reality checks might not be enough to determine that you are not dreaming at this very moment. “Wait,” you might say, “Dreams don’t hang together like real life. Impossible things happen in them. Even the most coherent dream can have wonky gravity or physics that lets you know it’s a dream.” But what if you are just in the middle of a very coherent dream, one your brain believes in so completely that reality checks don’t work? False awakenings are a perfect example of a situation where you believe you’ve woken up and may not think to check reality at all— or if you do, the dream reality defies your expectations by remaining consistent. Descartes used these kinds of arguments to undermine people’s confidence that the world around them was unquestionably real.

He also used a thought experiment involving an evil demon to illustrate this point. Suppose that there is a demon powerful (and mischievous) enough to present a complete yet illusory world to your senses, including the internal sensations of your body. In this scenario, you would be completely unable to tell that the construct the demon is presenting you with is unreal… which means you would have no way of telling what the world beyond it is like, or if there is even a real world beyond it at all. Even what you think of as your body would be part of the illusion. Going back to dreams, you could think of your brain in the role of this demon, presenting you with a completely real-seeming dream world as you sleep, constructed using mental approximations of the same senses you use to process information while awake. This means that you cannot rely only on your senses for verification that the waking world is real. What Descartes concluded was that the only thing you can be absolutely sure of is your own existence, summed up in his famous maxim, “I think, therefore I am.” You can believe that the real world is an illusion and that you don’t have a body, but you cannot believe that you don’t exist in some form; otherwise who would be thinking those thoughts? In other words, you can believe that your entire life is a dream, but something called you must still be around to have the dream.

However, there are problems even with this view, one of which is expressed by the Dzogchen school of Buddhism. Dzogchen proposes that everything we sense with our external thoughts is an illusion or dream, and this extends to thoughts based on external sensory information. For most of us, a majority of our thoughts and feelings derive from our external experiences in what we believe to be “the real world”, but to a Dzogchen Buddhist, externally-based thoughts are complicit in perpetuating an illusory reality. The Dzogchen school holds that meditation can help the practitioner quiet these misleading thoughts and get in touch with the Self of pure awareness that exists independent of our thoughts.

The question “Can we be certain of anything?” has also led to three main streams of thought in Western philosophy: materialist, objectivist, and idealist. Idealists believe that if our reality is generated by our perception, then perhaps people’s different perceptions create different realities. In this framework, there is no single real world at all; rather, each person lives in a different equally valid reality. The opposite approach, materialism, holds that there is just one reality that exists regardless of people’s perceptions and beliefs. Scientists ascribe to methodological materialism (or naturalism)  to generate hypotheses and design experiments. Finally, objectivists tread the middle way by agreeing that people may perceive reality differently, but different perceptions do not create or alter what that reality is.

Many of us are probably objectivists: there are practical reasons for agreeing that reality is a certain way. Most people ascribe (at least in their everyday lives) to consensus reality: defined as what is real, or what seems to be real, to the greatest number of people. Consensus reality offers us a practical guide for navigating the world and making decisions based on the information we get from our senses. In dreams, we operate within a consensus reality of one: if you subscribe to Descartes’ skeptical approach, reality checks within dreams can prove, at most, that you’ve entered a different reality than the consensus reality you inhabit while awake. Whether that world is any more real than your dream will rest on your beliefs.

One of the hardest steps in astral projection can be getting yourself into the right state of mental relaxation. During the day, our minds are often buzzing with activity; even if you lie down for that midmorning nap— which many practitioners claim is the ideal time to astral project— it can be hard to calm your mind. Astral travel needs a mind that is alert enough to perform mental tasks, coupled with a body that wants to fall asleep. This is the basis of the proven “4 o’clock in the morning” method: set your alarm for 4 A.M. and go to sleep at your normal time. When the alarm goes off, get up out of bed. This will be difficult, but don’t worry—you only have to stay up and active for about two minutes. Go to bathroom or splash water on your face, then return to bed and lie down on your back. A small dose of activity will wake up your brain, while your body will still want to go back to sleep.

In this state, imagine yourself standing in a corner of your room away from the bed. Picture looking at your body in bed from this detached point of view, and try mentally repeating a simple affirmation like, “I am going to astral travel. I am going to leave my body.” Make sure your new point of view is the last thing in your mind as you drift off. At this point you may experience some of the sensations associated with an impending astral separation, including vibrations in the body, buzzing in the head, changes in weight perception and hypnagogic hallucinations.

Here’s the tricky part: in order to separate from your body, you must ignore these sensations. They are signals that you’re about to astral project, but these sensations can also distract you from the mental task of separating. An effective if not well-known separation technique is the “hanging rope” method: imagine a rope hanging above your head, then imagine the action of reaching up, gripping it with both hands, and using it to climb out of your body. Advocates of this technique stress that it’s not a visualization technique, but a method that hones your ability to imagine tactile sensations and physical movement away from your body. This mental activity can give you something to focus on throughout the distracting sensations which precede an astral projection. It also trains you to shift your bodily awareness to a point in space which is divorced from your physical body.

After you successfully achieve separation, you will probably find yourself in a version of your bedroom. For your first journey, focus on exploring the physical space of your bedroom and seeing if you can affect anything in it (by touching and handling objects, etc). It may be hard to stray very far from your body or stay separated very long the first time, but that’s okay—this is practice. Once you feel comfortable in your astral body, concentrate on returning to your physical one even if you feel like you want to explore more. You may even encounter a guide entity in your room when you first project; in this case, talk to it and tell it you will project again in twenty-four hours. Giving yourself a day or so before you attempt to astral project further will give you time to plan what you want to do, and even more importantly, to process the experience you’ve just had. Especially if you’ve never astral traveled before, it’s a lot for your brain to take in. You risk being overwhelmed if you don’t give yourself time to savor each part of the experience.

Astral journeys take planning and a clear idea of where you’re going to go and/or what you’re going to do once you achieve that state. Furthermore, the more time you spend planning your journey, the less you have to think about it when you’re actually trying to astral project. Clear planning ahead of time will allow you to devote all your mental energy to separating from your body during your actual practice. The best way to get started planning your journey is probably to read up on the astral projection experiences of others to give you an idea of what might appeal to you. You might also want to get the support of people around you who may be able to offer you ideas about what to try out while you’re away from your body. Planning your astral journey, much like planning lucid dreams, is a form of visualization which makes it that much easier to get the most out of your astral travels.

Stories of near-death experiences usually start with an accident or other medical emergency: people have had NDEs after being seriously wounded in an accident, having a heart attack or stroke, or experiencing complications during surgery. As the name suggests, a near-death experience can occur when a person comes close to death or has been pronounced dead by a physician. (Death is medically defined as the cessation of measurable activity in the brain.) People have woken up in their bodies after a near-death experience and been told that they had been medically dead for as much as a couple of hours! Although the medical study of NDEs is in its infancy, the anecdotal evidence suggests that NDEs may occur in situations where the brain is severely deprived of oxygen, for instance if someone is choking or experiencing a stroke.

Most common of all the near death experience stories that I read was that of being pulled down a tunnel to a bright light: people find themselves floating in a black space, or sometimes above their own bodies. They may be aware they were in medical trouble or even that they’d died, but feel little or no concern over the fact. People will often perceive themselves as bodiless, although some have reported seeing their astral bodies or a silver cord connecting their soul to their physical bodies. A feeling of omniscience, or the ability to see everything at once, is another feature of NDEs: many survivors have asserted they were able to see what was happening to their physical bodies even as their disembodied point of view was traveling down the tunnel. Especially interesting is that many survivors’ account have been later matched to medical records of what occurred and been found to be accurate.

Near death stories also sometimes contain descriptions of encounters with various entities. Several have described meeting a being of light that they equated with God, their guardian angel, or their spirit guide. Many report meeting deceased relatives along the way, and survivor Ken Mullens describes an encounter with a “radiant being” that he realized he was related to after he communicated with it telepathically. Survivors’ descriptions of traveling down this tunnel of light have been overwhelmingly positive and have included feelings of unconditional love, perfection and joy during the journey; many have said it feels like “coming home”.

Travel within the physical plane is also possible in a near-death experience. Much like astral projection, during an NDE people have been able to travel to different places just by willing it. One man experienced a separation while in a coma, teleported himself to Scotland, and found himself hovering above a cliff in a storm, able to hear the thunder and feel the salt spray from the ocean. Survivors have also traveled to distant places around and even outside the universe during an NDE. Artist Mellen-Thomas Benedict had a profound NDE when he was suffering terminal cancer, in which he was visited by a being of light which appeared to him as a composite of Jesus, Buddha and Krishna. The being told him that all human beings were connected and that there is no evil, only a lack of love which distorts people’s actions. With its guidance, Benedict went on a cosmic journey through the universe in which many different creations and intelligent species were shown him before he finally woke up in his body. His hospice nurse had found him, apparently dead, half an hour before. He woke up feeling completely healthy, and when he went for a medical screening about three months later, his cancer was gone.

As the thousands of survivor testimonials attest, a near-death experience can have a lifelong impact on the person who comes through it. Many survivors such as Benedict and Mullens have dedicated themselves to inspiring others via the messages and experiences they came back with. Mullens says he realized after his NDE that it was his mission to write and speak to people about it to help them conquer their fear of death. He also credits his NDE with helping him live a more open-minded, happier life: “It changed my whole outlook on life, my whole outlook on people, and changed me from being a bigoted type of person to being more broad-minded… as a Christian I felt my faith was the only faith, and this experience made that view just ludicrous.” He adds, “I think I had to die to learn to live.” Many near-death experiences are described in ways that sound very similar to dream herb experiences and other lucid dreaming experiences, making one wonder whether the death experience and the dream experience might not be somehow similar.

You’ll find that most of your dreams deal with experiences, thoughts and feelings from the past day or two. Think back to things that happened in the past couple of days and ask yourself if you can link any elements in your dream to these events. For instance, if you meet characters from a movie in your dreams, was it a movie you recently watched or that has been on your mind? If you see someone you know in your dreams, is it someone you’ve been spending a lot of time with or who has been present in your thoughts?

Dreams may use important issues occupying your mind (both good and bad) as the background content of a dream scenario: you may have an upcoming occasion like an exam or date, which your brain might be processing ahead of time in a dream. Dreams can also reflect long-term issues you’ve been grappling with, such as changes in your thinking, habits or relationships. Something might be coming to an end in your life, like a partnership or a long-term project. For instance, I recently began revisions on a 600-page manuscript it has taken me several years to write. On a day close to the date I’d chosen to begin my revisions, I dreamed that I was in a huge archive full of drawers and drawers of unread manuscript. I interpreted the dream as an expression of how I subconsciously felt about the daunting task ahead of me.

Your brain may also process new feelings and thoughts through dream symbols, and highly emotional dreams can involve bizarre or seemingly nonsensical situations. To get at the dream’s meaning, it helps to look at the emotions inspired by the dream and the life context surrounding it. For example, one heterosexual man dreamed that he was kissing another heterosexual male friend. He was concerned the dream might mean he was gay, until a dream interpreter told him it was more likely to mean that he was growing closer to his friend as they shared details of their emotions and life situations. The man agreed, as he remembered that he and his friend recently had a long talk where the friend confided that his marriage was breaking down. In this context, the dream kissing represented the emotional accord and trust between the man and his friend.

This brings up another important point about the background of dreams, which is that the events of a dream may not be about you. Psychologists are fond of saying that most dreams are about ourselves, but it is equally possible for a dream to be about someone close to us. You can determine if a dream was probably about yourself or someone else by asking yourself if the content of the dream fits with what’s currently going on in your life. One man dreamed that he rescued his friend from drowning in a storm drain, and had to go back and fish her shoes from the drain as well. When asked about his own life, he admitted he was pretty stress-free and happy at the moment but that his friend had been down on her luck that year and often seemed overwhelmed. It’s likely that his thoughts about his friend’s struggles to cope and find direction had provoked a dream in which she was drowning. That she also lost her shoes, which often represent our direction and personal autonomy, could represent her real-life struggle to find direction in her life. Conversely, friends and loved ones in dreams may not represent themselves but be stand-ins for a symbol or concept. If you dream about your grandfather but have not seen or thought of him in a while, he may be a stand-in for anything from your attitude about getting old to your subconscious feelings about the passage of time. This is why it helps to examine your recent thoughts and events surrounding your dream.

If you can’t think of anything major preoccupying you in the days leading up to a dream, consider minor causes. Sometimes dreams don’t symbolize anything very deep at all, but instead offer a subconscious commentary on something minor that happened the day before. One woman dreamed of being trapped inside a ruined skyscraper with the cast of the TV show Friends, a show she didn’t particularly care for. In trying to analyze it, the only thing she could link the dream to was a disappointing experience watching her new digital cable the night before. Though she’d generally been happy with the programming, that night she could couldn’t find any interesting programs and had to settle on Friends. Voila, dream context: her interpreter suggested the skyscrapers may have represented her generally positive feelings about her cable service, as skyscrapers often symbolize confidence in dreams. However, that it was a ruined skyscraper could have expressed her feelings of disappointment with the programming the night before.

Like your dreams themselves, the meaning of dream symbols is highly individual; understanding their underlying meaning requires a careful and thorough examination of your life context. Dream symbols reflect our lives through a glass darkly: by learning to gaze the right way, we can come to a fuller understanding of our lives and ourselves.

There were also medieval books on dream Islamic interpretation, such as the Islamic dream guide compilation attributed to scholar Ibn Sirin, which included 25 different sections on Islamic dreams interpretation— everything from the proper etiquette of dream interpretation to the meaning of reciting certain surahs (passages of the Qu’ran) in dreams. He recommended that lay people consult an alim (Muslim scholar) who would help them interpret their dreams within the right cultural and religious framework. Generally speaking, for the meaning of dreams in Islam, you would refer to holy texts such as the Qu’ran and hadiths (sayings attributed to the Prophet Mohammed) to assign meaning to dreams. One such hadith asserts that dreams come from one of three sources: Allah/God and the angels, a person’s own self, or Shaitan/Satan.

Nightmares are often thought to be dreams sent by Shaitan, and for this reason Muslims call them false dreams. In the past, Islamic interpreters would advise people not to discuss these dreams with anyone, as paying credence to false dreams could lead to harm. In the Muslim interpretation of dreams, the correct way to deal with nightmares was to pray to Allah for protection three times, and then spit over one’s left shoulder three times (where Shaitan was supposed to lurk) to ward him off. However some modern Islamic sources adopt a gentler stance on nightmares, saying it’s okay to discuss them with people you trust in order to take the dream’s weight off your mind.

Dreams sent by your subconscious are called pathogenetic dreams and stem from your personal desires, concerns or obsessions. Islam agrees with Christianity and other religious traditions that pathogenetic dreams have little or no spiritual significance. They are probably just the result of our minds working through the events and stresses of our waking lives.

Finally, true dreams are those sent by Allah or the angels: these are very pleasant dreams which leave a vivid impression on the dreamer. The meaning behind true dreams will grow and change over the years as the person comes to a more mature understanding of life and the hereafter. True believers are more likely to be sent truthful dreams.

Although Muslim scholars can guide someone’s interpretation of a dream, it is best if the person to whom the dream was shown settles on its meaning. In Islamic dreams interpretation, it’s important to preface any dream interpretation with “It may mean this”; only prophets are able to say what something in a dream means for sure. Dreamers must be equally careful when sharing their dreams with others: while it’s beneficial to relate true dreams to others, a dreamer must only confide it to people he or she trusts. It can be dangerous to a share a good dream with someone who is jealous or bears ill will toward the dreamer. For instance, in one surah of the Qu’ran, a young man named Yusuf has a dream in which eleven stars, the sun and moon bow down before him. He tells it to his father Yaqoob, who interprets the dream to mean that Yusuf will rise to prominence over his eleven brothers, who are already jealous of him. He advises Yusuf not to tell his brothers the dream in case it spurs them to plot against him. The dreams Islamic interpretation and the warning message here is very clear.

Islamic dreams interpretation agrees with Christianity in that it recognizes true dreams as messages from God or his angels. In Islam, true dreams are a way for Allah to communicate with human beings, who would otherwise be unable to perceive Him. Allah usually sends believers dreams to show favor to the dreamer; to express His pleasure with the dreamer’s good conduct on Earth and raise his or her future rank in Heaven; and to otherwise show believers the good things that are in store for them. While this is not comprehensive and believers may still have to overcome hardships in future, true dreams meaning in Islam are overwhelmingly positive and reflect a basic optimism about the future for those who follow Islam’s tenets. The Prophet Mohammed (believed in Islam to have been the last earthly prophet) stated that “glad tidings are all that is left of Prophethood.” When asked to explain what he meant by glad tidings, Mohammed responded, “Good dreams.” Interpretation of Islamic dreams can be very helpful in assisting you to understand vivid or confusing dreams, as it can provide a spiritual and religious grounding to your experience that can help to guide you on your path in life.

Clearly, dreams are meaningful to the person who has them, both during the dream and when they examine or analyze it after waking. Indigenous cultures and modern religions have viewed dreams as messages from their ancestors, God and friendly spirits, and the inner Self, which bear important messages for the dreamer and his or her family and society. Artists and people with creative tendencies often value dreams as a conduit for inspiration: in dreams we are able to effortlessly think out of the box to arrive at creative solutions to problems and projects. The idea that the brain discovers solutions through dreams is so powerful that it has made its way into other frameworks for explaining the significance of dreams.

A framework or model that human beings use to understand a concept is called a story context. People have used story contexts like the two above to assign significance to dreams as messages from the supernatural or inspirations from the self. Today, scientists also use story contexts to explain the significance of dreams within a psychological, anthropological, neurological, or evolutionary model. Story contexts are models of reality which give meaning to anything that contributes to the model and discard possible meanings that don’t fit the story context. Because dreams have many potential functions for human beings, it can be helpful to examine the significance of dreams using a variety of story contexts to illuminate different facets of dreams’ importance to us as individuals and as a species.

Psychology examines the significance of dreams for the individual; in a psychological story context, dreams contain subconscious messages that a person can respond to in order to make positive changes in their lives. The psychological approach requires that people look at the content of specific dreams for symbolism that may relate to the context of their lives— their problems, interests, desires and needs. Researcher Clara Hill performed an experiment in which people were asked to discuss their lives using three different contexts: the content of their own dreams, someone else’s dreams, or their waking life issues. They then had to rate which context seemed the most meaningful. People perceived the most meaning in their own dreams, suggesting that your dreams are an important tool for understanding your personal experiences.

Neurology studies how dreaming restores our health, regulates brain functioning and assists in neural processing. Neurology focuses on phenomena in the brain that are directly observable by researchers, such as rapid eye movement and electrical activity in brain structures. Researchers have theorized that dreams help the brain consolidate new memories, move memories from short-term to long-term storage, and process new experiences and emotions. The learning centers of the brain are also active during REM sleep, and some neurologists have theorized that dreams may aid learning in humans by allowing us to rehearse behaviors and test the outcomes of certain actions in a safe context. Neurology usually doesn’t discuss what specific dreams might mean to dreamers, because that’s impossible to answer within a physical evidence-based story context.

Biologists use an evolutionary framework to address the significance of dreams: following up on the learning theory, some biologists have suggested that dreams contributed to the evolution of behaviors in our past which encouraged the survival of the human species. According to primitive instinct rehearsal theory, dreams are “rehearsals” or automatic stimulations of the body that train it to face real-life threats, challenges and opportunities. Professor Antti Revonsuo of Turku University in Finland has argued that dreams are rehearsals for threats to the self and allow us to hone our self-defense instincts. Researcher Keith Stevens has taken a more integrated view where dreams are rehearsals for all human instincts: resource competition, threat response, pair bonding, mating, and searching out new experiences. Instinct rehearsal theory argues that dream experiences prime the brain to carry out these kinds of survival functions in real life, and don’t need to be consciously remembered to be beneficial.

Anthropological theories of dreams examine the roles of dreams in various cultures, using story contexts that interpret dreams as a kind of cultural survival mechanism. Depending on their cultural significance and interpretation, dreams can affirm or alter a human group’s way of life, affect social ties within groups and interactions with other groups. In societies knit together by relations of blood and marriage, one person’s dreams were and are of importance to the whole village or band: people would often report their dreams to family members and the village’s spiritual leaders for interpretation. Significant interpretations could change village events such as marriages, seasonal migration patterns, and trade with other villages.

Modern dream movements such as the Association for the Study of Dreams have argued that it’s outdated to ask after the significance of dreams using a specific framework like those above. Dream worker Montague Ullman has argued that dreams should be their own story context; that dream work can and should be taught outside of any external frames of reference. Ullman argues that we live in a dream-deprived society that has socialized most people to dismiss dreams, and has advocated integrating dream work into primary, secondary and post-secondary education. To rediscover the significance of dreams in their own story context, we must create a dream-literate society that values these experiences as part of the largest story context of all: what it means to be human.

Formerly called dream anxiety disorder, nightmare disorder is catalogued 307.47 in the DSM-IV and is a common component of other sleep disorders and trauma-related conditions such as PTSD. Nightmares in adults are only classified as nightmare disorder if the bad dreams are frequent enough to interfere with a person’s waking activities and enjoyment of life. People who have experienced a traumatic event will often relive the scenario in a recurrent nightmare, which is one of the common symptoms associated with PTSD and other anxiety disorders. If you or someone you know suffers from frequent or recurrent nightmares, there are effective therapeutic ways to deal with them that do not involve taking psychiatric medications or even sleeping pills. Image rehearsal therapy can help you envision and act out a more positive end to your bad dreams while you’re comfortably awake. You can also use lucid dreaming methods to confront threats during your nightmares and transform these dreams into positive experiences.

Cognitive therapies like those above are effective for adult nightmares that stem from trauma, stress and anxiety. On the other hand, nightmare disorder can also accompany deep-seated personality disorders resulting from serious traumas or chemical imbalances in the brain. Recent research has revealed that dissociative disorder and borderline personality disorder are two conditions that may include frequent nightmares as a symptom. This is partly because these two disorders often disrupt the sufferer’s quality and duration of sleep.

Dissociative disorder can be a reaction to extreme trauma in which a sufferer closes him or herself off from the memories and experiences associated with the trauma. It can be accompanied by nightmare disorder if the dissociation is a defense mechanism against recalling a traumatic event. In this case, elements of the sufferer’s trauma might play themselves out in recurring nightmares. People with dissociative disorder are at higher risk for suicide and self-mutilation, and may also have borderline personality disorder.

Nightmare disorder may also be a component of extreme borderline personality disorder: people with severe BPD experience altered stages of sleep, with much heavier Stage 1 (NREM) sleep and lighter Stage 4 (deep) sleep. So, in the stages of sleep when the brain would normally be at its most inactive, the brains of people who have BPD show heightened brain activity, which can cause unusually vivid dreams in someone with BPD. Like dissociative disorder, if borderline personality disorder is a defense mechanism to guard someone against a past trauma, it makes sense that most of these dreams might replicate traumatic content that the person is unable to acknowledge in waking life.

There are other disruptive dream-related disorders that don’t incorporate what we would call nightmares at all. One of these is REM sleep behavior disorder, in which your brain fails to send you into a state of sleep paralysis (REM atonia) before it initiates REM sleep. The result is that sufferers act out their dreams, risking injury to themselves or a sleeping partner. REM sleep behavior disorder is more common in men than women, and more frequent in middle aged and older people. Sufferers’ dreams are often violent or action-filled, but don’t necessarily have to be scary or distressing. However, REM sleep behavior disorder is worth going to a doctor about, as it can indicate degenerative neurological disorders such as narcolepsy, primary dementia and Parkinson’s disease in about 50% of people affected. Lesions in the brain or brain stem, or thalamic abnormalities can also cause REM sleep disorder.

Finally, night terrors — while categorically different from nightmares— can also disrupt sleep in both children and adults. Night terrors occur naturally in about 1-4% of children, and are defined as episodes of extreme terror and panic in the early stages of sleep. They can be characterized by writhing movements and intense vocalizations which some people have described as “bloodcurdling screams”. It can be hard to rouse someone from night terrors, and they may have trouble remembering the dream’s content even though they feel the same level of distress as in nightmares. Adult night terrors can be a sign of psychopathologies such as affective disorder or substance abuse, or they might be a result of sleep disruption resulting from restless leg syndrome or sleep apnea.

On the whole, frequent adult nightmares don’t have to be the result of a psychological disorder requiring medication. Sometimes nightmares are the product of unresolved conflicts, stress and anxiety, or poor health habits. You can usually reduce frequent nightmares through cognitive therapies and by improving your diet, being regularly active, and maintaining a regular sleep schedule. However, sometimes regular adult nightmares are a sign of deeper psychological issues, and you should always consult a doctor or psychologist if you have persistent nightmares that interfere with your quality of life. Our bodies and brains have evolved to give us warning signals when something’s not right with our physical or emotional health, and our dreams are one such signal; all you have to do is listen to them.