Hello, my dear dreamers, and welcome back to Pillow Talk! As always, I am NOT a licensed professional. I’m just a dude who likes to read… and occasionally dish out some amateur dream interpretations.
Recently, I was honored to have a mid-tiered BNOC (Big Name On Campus) come to me to offer a dream he has been repeatedly having. However, he wishes to remain anonymous because the context involves him under-age drinking (oh no!) and he doesn’t want to spoil his political ambitions (welcome to Stanford).
Anywho, here is the dream, offered by my friend “Alan” ’26:
“The night after drinking at a party, I went to bed dehydrated and ‘woke up’ really thirsty, so I went downstairs to fill up my water bottle and drank the entire liter. I was then confused about why I was still feeling just as thirsty and realized I was still dreaming, which then prompted me to wake up again. However, this turned out to be another layer of the same dream again, and this repeated another time.”
Alan’s dream here seems to have a pretty obvious message: “Dude! You need some water!” Initially, I didn’t think this dream was particularly interesting on its own (except I did omit a part where Alan also dreamt that he texted me about this dream within one of the dream layers… super meta). However, it shocked me when my mom (who is well over the legal drinking age and has no political aspirations) mentioned that she had an almost identical dream under similar circumstances. She told me:
“Saturday night we went to a birthday party, and I may have consumed a few more whiskeys than usual. That’s important because here is what I remember about my dream Saturday night – I spent the whole dream searching for water. And as soon as I found it (in the dream), I guzzled it like my life depended on it. Small cups, like paper Dixie cups, big mugs, whatever I could find. I have no recollection of who else was in my dream or where I was exactly, but I am pretty sure I was in different places, frantically searching for water. I woke up in the middle of the night, and that urgent desire for water was still with me – I was parched, so I immediately filled the water bottle I keep by my bathroom sink and drank the entire thing. I may have taken a few Advil, too. When I went back to sleep, I did not have the dream again.”
Hm… quite uncanny! Here, it seems we have two dreamers on opposite coasts of the country having nearly identical dreams under the same conditions. For our purposes, this coincidence demonstrates an important fact that I’ve tried to point at in my previous articles: dreams seek to send a particular message, usually one that insists on some actionable item in your life. Understanding this claim and its importance requires revisiting the nature of dreams.
Dreams are a collection of symbols produced by our bodies, yet not by our conscious will. So, what part of ourselves is responsible for our dreams? Why do we dream about the things we do?
The psychoanalytic theory I subscribe to (that of Carl Jung) regards dreams as being produced by the unconscious: the parts of yourself connected to instinctual brain processes that are unavailable to conscious awareness, such as memory, affect and motivation. For example, if you’ve ever dreamt about someone you haven’t thought about for ages, that is the unconscious at work – pulling images, thoughts and emotions from deep within your psyche. But do dreams have a specific intention? Jung would answer: yes.
After empirically observing dreams, Jung proposed that dreams are driven by a natural tendency to resolve unfinished issues in the dreamer’s life (whether that be social, emotional, etc.). Essentially, dreams are seen as messages from your unconscious that are seeking to be realized by your conscious awareness. How, then, does this theory hold up against the dreams we discussed earlier?
Alan and my mom’s dreams indeed represent a need to resolve a very literal and tangible issue: dehydration. There was an unconscious issue (dehydration) that needed to be realized by conscious awareness (so that they’d drink water). Therefore, I’d say that these dreams are a light proof of Jung’s theory of dream functionality. They demonstrate how dreams in general may provide a cathartic commentary about the concrete issues of a dreamer’s life.
Though as you may have observed from your own nocturnal fantasies, dreams rarely have such simple images, and their morals are usually more abstract than “drink more water!” People often tell me about dreaming the wildest things – viewing parallel worlds spanning infinite directions or getting lost climbing up an infinite staircase. What internal issues are these dreams seeking to resolve? And why are those symbols specifically used by the unconscious?
Welp, those questions are for another article! Until then, feel free to send me your dreams (if you dare) at [email protected]. As always, thank you for reading, and sweet dreams!