Dream Interpretations

When I was younger, you could always tell what was trendy at my school by what kinds of library books were missing from the shelves at a given time. I'm not sure what it was, but the reading awareness program in my school district was highly effective. We fought over who got to check out the "cool book" this week. Granted, half of my 4th grade year, I went book-less because I made the cardinal sin of losing a library book. Fortunately, I recovered from this trauma and was eventually able to wrestle for the right to claim one of the cool books again before moving on to middle school.

One of the trends I do remember is when we all discovered the books about interpreting your dreams. We always skipped the beginnings of these books; the authors would always go on some 200 page diatribe about the history of dream interpretations, how they tie in to spirituality, and whatever hocus pocus was trendy at the time the author was writing (usually sometime in the 60's). The real treasure trove was at the end, where there would be a list of things that might appear in your dreams, and what each thing means. There was a point where we discovered some clever author completely did away with the preface and just jumped straight to the list, hence creating a comprehensive dream dictionary.

A few lucky people would manage to race to the shelves and snag these books to check out for the week, and they became the official dream gurus at the lunch table. We'd all discuss the dreams we'd had that night - whether real or made-up - and they would consult their various dream interpretation dictionaries, giving us valuable insight into our inner psyches. Or just providing fodder for us to make fun of each other even more than usual.

My dream from last night had a few odd components to it, from dreaming that I was actually taking sleeping pills (isn't that a bit redundant?), to my childhood home, to wolves, and even a sloth (yes, the actual animal, not a lazy person). I decided to check it out with the first legitimate-looking dream dictionary I was able to locate via Google:

Sleeping pill: Choosing to be ignorant about a situation, or deciding to make a fresh new start

Childhood home: Desires for building a family; unfinished feelings; outdated thinking

Peephole: Looking through a peephole in a dream suggests narrow perspectives and requiring facts to make an informed decision, or a non-reciprocating situation

Nightgown: Acknowledging aspects of yourself you were previously uncomfortable about

Wolf: Survival, beauty, solitude, mystery, self-confidence, pride; being a loner; aggression or sneakiness, an uncontrollable situation

Sloth: Passivity in a situation; need to be assertive; gentleness, laziness, lack of ambition

Airport: Births and deaths; desire for freedom, ambition, and hopes

Do you think dreams have meaning? Have you ever incorporated your dreams into your writing? Are your dreams as incoherent as mine? Or, check out the dream dictionary and post some of your interesting interpretations from a recent dream in the comments!