Dreams are usually dismissed as “nothing other than very vivid thoughts” with limited benefit to your waking life.
And if you’ve ever taken the time to remember and record your dreams, you’ll probably agree that they don’t make much sense. (Learn how AI can help to decipher your dreams.)
But occasionally you’ll pick up a clear message, a directive or an understanding about someone you care about. So even though I don’t always learn something from dreams, I like to think of them as educational. The fact that they might need to repeat themselves lots of times for the message to sink in is more a comment on my learning style. I’m sure most of my high school teachers would agree.
In 2024, I made a habit of drawing one image or symbol that stood out from my dreams of the night before. Since most dreams are blurry or are about people, they can be hard to draw. So, I biased towards images that were easy to draw. If a dolphin appeared as an element in any of my dreams, I’d draw that the next day. In most cases this would only be one symbol. If there was a few, I’d pick the more interesting one, or one that I hadn’t dreamt of before.
When the year wrapped up, I had drawn about 260 unique symbols. My symbols neatly fit into three broad categories: Personal, Nature and Conceptual. Each of these had a few sub-groups. Let’s take a look!
Personal
Food & Drink
Let’s face it, we are all food obsessed. We spend all day planning our next meal. So I’m not surprised my unconscious made use of chicken drumsticks and bagels. Unfortunately, it’s not the most appetizing collection of food (onion, old bread, eggs). Beer was the most common drink.
Home
Although most of these items look domestic, it’s because we’ve lost the context of the dreams. The t-shirts for example were part of an elaborate dream set in Israel, where t-shirts indicated your political stance. Cigarettes and pills (ecstasy or otherwise) repeated quite often for me.
Hobbies
I’m pretty active, so images of tennis balls and bikes makes sense to me. But I haven’t skateboarded or played guitar since I was 14 or so. Images like footy or fishing trips felt like they related to social groups and male friends.
Technology
My psyche loves boats. And submarines. And ‘colossal’ ships. For some reason, the sight of big container ships floating across a red horizon filled me with hope and joy. The bigger the better. The other big theme was guns and bombs. Impending nuclear strikes and Uzis pointed in my face were obviously my least favorite dreams.
Natural
Body
Two celebrities made an appearance here, Tony Robbins and Woody Harrelson. One of my favorite dreams involving my body was the ‘headstand’, claimed by Yogis “to destroy all diseases. to increase the digestive fire, and to banish signs of ageing.”
Animals & plants
There’s a wide variety here, and I always appreciated a dream animal because they seem to easily convey feelings. Finding caged birds in the trash broke my heart and a wolf filled me with primal fear. They also taught me lessons about myself. A ‘guilty’ dog that wanted to be hand-cuffed and sent to jail for some unknown crime was both funny and prompted me to consider my own tendency to blame myself. The only interesting dream about plants was a specific reference to a large ‘Banyan’ tree, maybe a good symbol for life itself.
Elements
Dreams can forecast the future. I think 10,000 years ago we’d be experiencing a sort of early warning system every night: a lot of storms, rivers overflowing and hungry animals that might directly threaten our tribe. We take in so much information everyday that we’re not conscious of. Instead of discarding it all, perhaps we sometimes receive it repackaged in dreams. One example of this was a dream about a powerful storm that caused spot fires. I took this as a warning of ‘extreme weather’ for an upcoming bike race, where it turned out to be over 45 degrees on the road.
Conceptual
Cultural
I’d occasionally have dreams which I started to call ‘future backwash’. These weren’t particular warnings, but rather just images that I would come across that day or the next. For example, the neon sign of a burger store was part of a dream plot, and I noticed something very similar on a walk home from work (not my usual way home).
Spiritual
I had a dream where I’m staring at a book by candlelight. We’ve all probably had reading dreams where we are looking at letters but not able to absorb anything. In this case, I recognize ‘NUIT’ and some Egyptian looking drawings. Wikipedia suggests this is a reference to Nut (close enough), the goddess of the sky, starts, cosmos, mothers, astronomy and the universe in ancient Egyptian religion. I’m happy there was no sign that I had disturbed or angered her. 😅
Overall, I’m somewhat disappointed at how vanilla my unconscious is. Where are the shrieking devil monkeys, the green aliens or the fire-breathing dragons? I’ll have to try harder in 2025.
Buddha Bike 