People say that, when you are asleep, your conscious mind (who’s doing the most work for us to function “normally” when we are awake) goes to sleep mode, but our emotional brain parts are still active. Even more active than they are when we are awake.
That’s why dreams don’t make sense, but the emotions in them are usually very, very intense — therefore, very very real for us.
That’s when I get confused: usually I can well associate my emotions to reasoning, and combining the context given by reality, I can explain the emotions I feel. But emotions in dreams don’t make sense for my brain after I’m awake again.
This is not only confusing, but frustrating at times.
I bet many of you have had similar experiences.
I consider myself as relatively self-conscious. At least I’m always “consciously” trying to be aware of my thought and emotions. But I’m still scared sometimes of how intense dreaming emotions are.
They are all different kinds of emotions: love, jealousy, sadness, fear…
Sometimes I feel extremely in love, and I can’t wait to go back to sleep to revisit that feeling.
Sometimes I’m relieved when I wake up, for I just spent a very long time escaping from some crazy hunters. They were chasing me closely the whole time.
Sometimes I dream of someone and wake up, suddenly feeling extreme sadness because they are not there with me.
At these times, I used to ask myself: does my dream tell me something about myself? Of what I really want, how I really want to live, and who I really am?
When I ask myself that, I was desperately trying to reject the functionality of my reasoning. Because the motive that’s discovered here, at an unconscious moment, is supposed to be the purest. For the purest deserves the bravest.
And that is my action.
I thought, I really needed to act on that. Because my dreams showed me.
For the sake of the length of this post, I’m putting this part short. So what I did was that I stopped myself from asking those questions, to read too much into my dreams.
The thing is: our brains are programmed to solve puzzles around us. They need to do something in order to make sense of the world.
They like to put pieces of information together in order to understand the things happened and why the things happened in the way they did.
That’s where the problem appears if I ask myself too much about what “happened” in my dreams.
We can certainly take something from why we felt how we felt in a dream: it might just be one of the things that you care about or you think is important. But that’s the extent of it. Not more than that.
Stop trying to make sense of the dreams. Accept what happened there as what they are.
You know what? More often than not, they don’t mean anything for the present you. That’s the mind playing trick on you, to make you “feel” strongly again if you haven’t had that for a while.
And what’s more: same with the world our conscious mind is living in.
Many things are just not to be understood. It’d be great if you can just accept them and let go.
So the next time when I dream of my ex revealing his enduring love for me, I will not go all over his social and wondering whether he’s really thinking of me. (“I mean I don’t care. Really. But that’d be something…)
Because that’s just a waste of my current, beautiful life.
Clear Word Drops 