Five Types of Dreams

There are five types of dreams people have, according to psychologists. These dreams are often interpreted by those who believe dreams have meaning. Other professionals believe that dreams are just a manifestation of your feelings, thoughts and experiences. Understanding the different types of dreams could help you to understand why you are dream what you are dreaming.

Waking from Nightmares

The Five Types of Dreams

Regardless of the meaning behind dreams, most dreams fit into one of these five categories:

• Ordinary Dreams: The most common dreams are those that fall into this category. They are dreams that stem from the things you have seen or heard during wakeful hours. The subconscious mind interprets your thoughts and the result is ordinary dreams.
• Lucid Dreams: Lucid dreams are quite unique. In these dreams, you are aware of what you are dreaming and therefore able to control them. Through practice, you can control what you dream about prior to falling asleep. This is almost a method of planning your dreams ahead of time.
• Telepathic Dreams: In telepathic dreams, individuals are in communication with those who have passed on to death. There is a mental connection between those who have died or even from one living person to the next. Those that believe in this possibility believe that the soul is communicating during the night with others.
• Premonitory Dreams: This type of dream is like telepathic dreams in that they are a spiritual type of dream. These dreams are supposed to reveal what will happen in the future. It is a belief that these dreams see the truth that is not within reach during wakeful hours.
• Nightmares: Nightmares are the result of suppressing fear or they can contain a forewarning about something that is to come. Nightmares may also be a way of working through old, unsolved problems that are just too frightening to deal with when you are awake.

The Effects of the Types of Dreams

While these may be the five types of dreams you face, what you do with them is up to you. For example, some dreams can work as a tool to helping you to overcome a problem.

Through dreams, even nightmares, you can work through your feelings for something or someone. Your subconscious mind is exploring what you are going through in life and trying to put the pieces together for an answer. This is why so many people say they want to "sleep on it" prior to making a decision. When you wake up, your decision may be clearer.

It is also believed that dreams can be used as a way of obtaining your goals. For example, if you want to lose weight, dreaming about weight loss can help your subconscious mind to make decisions about losing weight during wakeful hours. You do not feel the need to grab a snack as you did before.

Whether or not you believe in premonitory or telepathic dreams is a personal and often spiritual decision. Yet, for many people, these dreams can be the most shocking and interesting. Since researchers don't know what actually happens to the mind during dreams, there is no reason to believe that these types of dreams are not real.

On the other hand, many believe that these types of dreams are simply the same as ordinary dreams. They may be just the subconscious mind related to the experiences of the day.

A Word of Warning

There are various bits of information available on the Internet to help you to interpret your dreams. Yet, as much as this is true, it is important to note that from one website to the next you will find different meanings for the same dreams. A person may interpret Christian dream symbols while another may find no correlation in the same dream. There is no scientific evidence to support any of these items. There simply is no sure way to know what your dreams mean.

Dream dictionaries online could help those who want to explore the dream meanings more thoroughly, though you should not count on these dictionaries to be 100 percent accurate:

• DreamSleep.net
• DreamMoods.com

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