Dreams

People have always been fascinated by dreams and their meanings. In the Bible there are references to dreams including the dream the Pharaoh had about the seven thin cows eating the seven fat cows. This was interpreted for him by Joseph to represent seven famine years and seven years of plenty and the need to prepare for lean times.

Modern research has shown that dreams are our minds way of dealing with things that happened during the day, but were not concluded. Your mind tries to clear itself during dreaming to make way for the events of the next day.

For instance, you have an argument with someone and there is no conclusion to it. Your mind may then try to file it away by creating a dream which has some sort of a conflict in it. Because the mind works in images the dream could be nothing to do with you and the other person but could be for example a dream about two birds fighting over a worm.

The mind works in pictures and uses whatever images it can find to make sense of the day’s unresolved problems.

So it is quite possible that the Pharaoh had been thinking unsuccessfully the day before his dream about how he was going to feed his people. So the cow dream was possibly his minds way of filing the unresolved thought away.

Is it possible you could dream too much? Well in some cases yes. It has been shown that people with depression can dream three times more than non depressed people. This is why many people with depression wake up so tired in the morning. The brain has been working overtime all night causing the fight/flight chemicals to fire off in the brain which leads them to feel exhausted in the morning. Some people with depression describe waking up feeling like they have run a marathon. This is because the brain has been trying to file everything that is unresolved away and this causes them to dream. Then, because they wake tired and exhausted they can start to have depressed behaviour and thoughts which in turn causes them to dream more. The sequence of events then repeats itself over and over or until there is some intervention. Therapy such as hypnotherapy or cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can help to resolve the unwanted waking thoughts which can then end the cycle of events.

I am not saying everyone who dreams a lot has depression, but if you can deal with and neutralise past traumas, bad events or experiences, then the chances of getting or holding on to depression are somewhat less. Happy dreams!