The Psychology of Sleep: Why We Have Nightmares, Exes, and Sex

According to psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, dreams are messages that our unconscious is trying to convey to us.

Psychologist Daria Milay told us how to decipher these signals using analytical psychology.

Why do we need dreams
Dreams are our secret world, which we find ourselves in when we go to the kingdom of Morpheus. In this world, we can fly, travel, meet people and unknown animals without any obstacles. Thus, our psyche receives the emotional and bodily experience that we lack in reality. That is why we often dream of people with whom we want, but for some reason we cannot be around. Often in dreams we see bad scenarios - we quarrel or sort things out. This may mean that a person has a taboo on the manifestation of aggression, and with the help of sleep he releases negative feelings. Sending to the safe space of sleep to win back aggression and let off steam, the psyche saves us from breakdowns and psychoses. You can read about the meaning of certain dreams here https://insidemydream.com/ . This also applies to intimate experiences, including bisexual ones. Thanks to dreams, we realize fantasies and dreams that we would never have dared in life, and in a dream we experience these emotions with minimal risk to ourselves.

Sex in a dream: why would it?
But not always dreams can be interpreted so unambiguously. Jung believed that the semantic field of a dream is much wider than the individual framework, it reflects not only the personality of a particular person, but also the entire wealth of the unconscious - both individual and collective, or, as it is also called, archetypal. It can be myths, legends, fairy tales that we were told in childhood. Our unconscious fills all these images with a certain meaning, in order to later convey to us with the help of symbols. For this reason, I would not advise turning to dream books, because for each person the same symbol can mean the exact opposite. For one, the symbol of a mare is strength, power, transformation and personal growth, and for another it is something strange, scary and incomprehensible (read also: “7 exercises for developing intuition”). It is quite possible that your intimate dream is not about sex at all, but about accepting yourself, or any qualities in yourself. Suppose a connection with a businessman may indicate that you are trying on the traits inherent in men - determination, courage ... And the businessman has become a symbol of these traits for you. And sex with a woman may indicate that you would like to work out your femininity, which you seem to have forgotten about.

A Nightmare on Elm Street
Do not be afraid of dreams in which loved ones die. Often this means your separation from the dreaming person. Most likely, the relationship or spiritual connection with him will be broken or communication will reach a completely new level of mutual understanding. Also, dead people dream of serious changes. By their appearance, they seem to say that a certain life stage has been completed and it is time to prepare for the next one. A dying child in Jungian interpretation means that your inner child is missing something. First of all, it affects the sphere of pleasure, inspiration, creativity, thirst for life, carelessness and lightness. If in a dream you are killing someone, pay attention, who is a woman or a man? Jungian theory says that this is either your feminine or masculine.

The nightmares that we see in dreams are often a reflection of our fears formed in childhood. Sometimes we see ourselves in the place where we experienced the most terrible feelings or strong shocks. I recalled the story of my client, who regularly had the same dream: at night, she was alone in her children's room, and there were monsters outside the window. Even in a dream, a stepfather appeared, whom she did not love and was afraid of - such a terrible, post-apocalyptic scenario. When we began to work through the dream, the woman remembered how her mother and stepfather had a very strong fight, and she sat on her bed in the nursery and looked out the window, trembling with horror. To get rid of such fear, she had to live and play these moments again, but in a positive way. Here it is very important to highlight the sensual component, that is, what controls you at the moment - a feeling of fear for your own life, insecurity, and so on. You can write several scenarios at once, choose the one that you like best, and then work it out with a psychologist or psychotherapist.

Write down your dreams
The practice of lucid dreaming will help decipher the messages of our unconscious. Go to bed with a request, formulating your intention to sleep - what question do you want to get an answer to? And be sure to put a notebook with a pencil at the head. Dreams tend to disappear very quickly, so try to write it down immediately after waking up, being in a sleepy state. Describe the dream as it goes, without trying to think out, complicate and rationalize, because the unconscious communicates with us like a three-five-year-old child - with the help of simple words and concepts. Be sure to track your bodily sensations, with what feeling you came out of this dream, what did you experience - fear, curiosity, or were excited. And one more piece of advice: when we dream of something like that and we want to unravel the symbolism of sleep, we definitely need to analyze what has happened to us over the past 7-10 days. Most likely, something happened these days that was the trigger for this dream.