Dreams reflect personal experiences. Therefore, we all have different dreams. However, while our individual dreams can be very different from each other, dreams can be divided into the following basic dream types:
Compensatory Dreams
Compensatory dreams are dreams in which you do things that you would not do in waking life.
They allow you to explore possibilities without taking the risk of causing any harm to yourself or to those around you.
Sexual dreams are often compensatory dreams. In a compensatory sexual dream, you may engage in sexual practices that you would never consider in waking life, or you may have sexual relations with someone who would be would be off-limits in waking life, such as the spouse or partner of a close friend.
A compensatory dream can allow you to explore aspects of your personality that are not very well developed. For example, if you are not very assertive, you may dream about telling off your boss. If you are not a very daring person in waking life, you may dream of going skydiving.
Everyday Life Dreams
These are dreams about things that happen in your everyday life – going to work or school, going shopping, getting together with friends. The places and people in everyday life dreams will be familiar to you.
Everyday life dreams can also include dreams that are influenced by books you have been reading or movies or TV shows that you have been watching. For example, if you are reading a book about vampires, you may dream that you are a vampire or that you are attacked by a vampire. If, before you go to sleep, you watch a news story about someone who has been kidnapped, you may dream that someone tries to kidnap you.
Healing Dreams
A healing dream is a dream that helps you to release negative emotions. Therefore, a healing dream can be very disturbing or frightening. In a healing dream, you may find yourself behaving in a way that you would never behave in real life – for example, you may dream that you violently attack a loved one.
You may have healing dreams when you are experiencing a conflict – either with other people or between different aspects of your personality -or when you have to make a difficult choice. Healing dreams are a frequent experience during times of stress.
Although they can be very upsetting, you should welcome healing dreams, because they allow you to release negative emotions so that you can be free to grow emotionally and to make positive changes in your life.
Lucid Dreams
A lucid dream is a dream in which you know that you are dreaming.
Often, a lucid dreamer can control the events in a lucid dream and the behaviors of other people in the dream.
People who have out of body experiences also tend to have lucid dreams.
There has been an extensive amount of research done on why some people have lucid dreams.
Nightmares
Nightmares are dreams in which the dreamer experiences intense fear or other intense negative emotions.
You may experience nightmares when you are repressing upsetting emotions or difficult memories. Your repressed memories and emotions will come to life in your nightmares.
If you had a traumatic experience in waking life, you may relive it in the form of nightmares.
People with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) often suffer from nightmares.
Physiological Dreams
These are dreams that tell you something about your physical state. For example, if you are sleeping in a cold room, you may dream that it is snowing.
Physiological dreams are often designed to encourage you to take action regarding a physical problem. For example, a dream about snow can be a message for you to turn up the heat in your bedroom or to get an extra blanket.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud mentions a time when he ate a salty meal and then went to bed thirsty. He dreamed that he was drinking large amounts of water.
A physiological dream can sometimes be a warning of a more serious physical problem, such as a chronic or life-threatening illness that has not yet caused you to experience symptoms in your waking life.
In the 1961 Twilight Zone episode, The Midnight Sun, a character with a high fever dreams that the Earth has left its orbit and is falling towards the Sun.
While pain or injury in a dream often represents emotional or spiritual pain, whenever you feel pain in a dream or are injured in a dream, you should always make sure that your dream is not signaling a real physical problem.
Precognitive Dreams
Precognitive dreams are dreams that appear to come true.
People who have precognitive dreams often think that they are unusual, and that few people have dreams like these. However, precognitive dreams are, in fact, common.
Precognitive dreams occur for three main reasons:
1. A precognitive dream can be a message that has been pieced together via clues from your unconscious. Your unconscious mind picks up a lot of information that your conscious mind filters out – sometimes because this information is painful or upsetting, but often, simply because your conscious mind can only deal with a limited amount of information, so your conscious mind focuses on the things that are most important to you at the moment.
Your unconscious takes all of the information that has been hidden from your conscious mind, as well as information that you are aware of consciously, and uses it to come to conclusions that appear in your dreams.
For example, you may have noticed, unconsciously, that a work colleague seemed tired. However, you have not thought about this consciously because you have been focusing on your work. You dream that your colleague calls in sick. In waking life, the following morning, your colleague does call in sick. Because you don’t remember, consciously, that your colleague appeared to be tired the day before, it seems as though your dream predicted what your colleague’s phone call, without any warning before hand.
Sometimes, a precognitive dream provides a warning about the consequences of negative behavior. For example, you may be eating a lot of unhealthy food, but denying that there is a problem with your diet. You then dream that you develop a health problem that is related to a poor diet. You may even dream that you have a heart attack. If you deny that you have a real problem, and you don’t do anything about your diet, your dream will come true.
You may have what appears to be a precognitive dream if you forget something that you have read or heard. Your unconscious mind retains this information. For example, in waking life, one of your neighbors may casually mention that a cousin of theirs, who lives far away, will be coming to visit them in a few months.
A month goes by, and you forget that the neighbor told you this. However, you dream that you see the cousin on a street near you. Later on, the cousin does come to visit, and you run into them unexpectedly. You don’t remember being told that the cousin was coming to your town, so it seems as though your dream foretold the future.
2. Precognitive dreams can be self-fulfilling prophecies. If you believe that your dream means that something is going to happen, your belief can cause you to make the dream come true.
For example, you may dream that you ask a girl that you like out on a date, and she says “yes”. Because you believe that the dream means that she will say “yes”, you ask her out, when otherwise you might not have had the courage to ask her. Your confidence – because of the dream – makes you seem more attractive-so she does say “yes”.
Self-fulfilling prophecies can be negative as well as positive. For example, you may dream that you are in a car accident. This can make you so nervous about having an accident that in waking life you have trouble concentrating while you are driving, which causes you to have an accident.
3. Sometimes what appears to have been a precognitive dream really did not predict the future at all. The dreamer wants to believe that their dreams tell the future, so they remember their dreams in a way that makes it appear that their dreams came true.
For example, you may dream that you are walking along a road and someone stops their car in front of you and asks you for directions to a popular tourist attraction.
A few weeks later, you are walking down the same road and someone does stop and ask you for directions to the same place- not a surprising or unusual occurrence. You remember that something like this happened in your dream. In order to make it seem like your dream came true, you remember the things about the dream that were the same- that it was the same type of day or the same type of car, for example.
On the other hand, you forget the details of your dream that don’t match your waking life experience. For example, that it was raining in your dream but sunny in waking life, or that the driver of the car had long hair in your dream but short hair in waking life.
Remembering things and forgetting others in order to prove that your belief – in this case, that your dreams predict the future -is true is known as having selective memory. Many studies have shown that selective memory is very common. It is a common problem when dealing with witnesses to crimes.
Keeping a dream diary – and writing down all the details of each dream as soon as you wake up – is a good way of finding out if your dreams really do come true.
Problem Solving Dreams
A problem solving dream is a dream in which you find a solution to a problem that has been plaguing you in waking life.
Sometimes, another person will appear in your dream, and they will tell you something that will help you solve your problem. This person may be an authority figure, such as a parent or a teacher, or the archetypical wise old woman or man.
The identity of the “guide” in your dream can have something to do with the solution to your problem.
There have been many stories about people who have found solutions to problems in their dreams.
One of the most famous problem solving dreams has to do with the discovery of the shape of the benzene molecule. The chemist Friedrich August Kekulé claims to have realized that the benzene molecule is shaped like a ring when he dreamed of a snake biting its own tail.
Recurring Dreams
Recurring dreams are dreams that repeat over and over. A recurring dream is often a sign of an unresolved conflict.
You may experience a recurring dream whenever you find yourself in a new situation or when you begin a new phase in your life. Your dream acts as a signpost, to give you an idea of where you are going in life.