Why Dreams Aren’t Actually That Deep

Rori Hornung
2 min readMar 12, 2021

Welcome back! This week I will be going over the controversy of whether dreams have an actual deep meaning or not.

When reviewing your dreams, there are two possible standpoints to take. The first one being the idea that dreams reveal information to us about our waking lives to help us, or that they may even tell aspects of the future. If you hold this view, dreams are worth picking apart in order to find out what they mean and how it relates to your life. The second standpoint is the belief that dreams are meaningless because their plotlines are often senseless and seem to have no connection to reality. If you hold this view, you probably ignore your dreams.

Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash

I believe that dreams are completely random and have no correlation to our everyday lives. First, my dreams are almost always completely irrational, and if they do have a connection to my life, it is a simple one. For example, when I started to watch the show “The Vampire Diaries,” a few of my dreams started to have vampires in them. Other times, the events in my dream are unrelated to anything, such as a tiger teleporting around my house. I don’t see any deeper meaning to either of these dreams.

Secondly, if you really think about it, how could our dreams tell us something about ourselves that we don’t already know? After all, they do only exist because of our OWN thoughts and minds. I just find it a little hard to believe that a dream about being chased reveals I am unintentionally avoiding a situation or person in my life that isn’t already apparent to me.

Lastly, dreams do not have a significant meaning because we don’t remember most of them anyways. Although we dream every night, (LaFata) studies show that we forget almost 90% of them. That explains why you might think you don’t have a dream every night. Don’t you think that if dreams were trying to send us messages about ourselves, we would actually remember it?

“Dreaming -Motivated or Meaningless?” Dreaming -Motivated or Meaningless? | The Psychologist, Aug. 2009, thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-22/edition-8/dreaming-motivated-or-meaningless. Accessed March 12, 2021

LaFata, Alexia. “The Science Of Dreams And Why They Don’t Mean As Much As We Think They Do.” Elite Daily, Elite Daily, 22 July 2014, www.elitedaily.com/life/culture/dreams-dont-really-mean-much-think/669394. Accessed March 12, 2021

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