The Power of Dreams comes from your Interpretation

          I find it fascinating that there are countless resources where one can identify what different images or situations from their dreams mean.  One such article I found even argued for that even bad dreams can have positive interpretations, such as your own death in a dream meaning you are facing the beginning of new changes in your life or snakes representing healing after a transformative part of your life.  In fact, humans have been assigning meaning to dreams for thousands of years, as evident in Homer’s The Iiliad.  In this work, Zeus sends a false dream to Agamemnon convincing him to attack Troy.  Agamemnon is so convinced of this dream that he rallies his troops the very next morning.  Dreaming continues to pop up in literature, plays, movies, and much more as a tool for characters, and the audience, to understand a new meaning.  In Oklahoma!, there is a long dream sequence in which Laurey sorts out her feelings for Jud and Curly.  In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Scrooge sorts out a new meaning of Christmas.  In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy discovers “There’s no place like home” after an adventurous dream to the Emerald City.  Dreams have long been associated with meaning something deeper than the actual events of the dream.
          However, the true power of dreaming actually comes from your own interpretation of the dream.  The meaningfulness of dreams comes from what you assign the meaning to be.  A study published in the Association for the Study of Dreams found that interpreting one’s own dream provided a deeper, more insightful psychotherapy session than the act of interpreting someone else’s dream or even interpreting one’s own event in waking reality.  This indicates “that it was not just the process of interpretation that leads to how good or deep sessions were judged to be. Rather, it made a difference that one’s own dream was being interpreted” (Hill et al).  Even if we go back to fictional characters, we can see that it is the dreamer’s interpretation of the dream that matters.  Take, for example, Harry Potter’s dream of Arthur Weasley being attacked by a snake in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  If Harry had wanted to he could look online and find the article about how snakes in dreams means healing, but this is not the conclusion Harry came to.  Instead, the snake to Harry was a symbol for Voldemort due to his connection to his pet snake, Nagini, and symbolized a pressing danger to Harry.  Dreams are powerful, but it is important to understand that this meaning behind dreams stems from yourself and interpreting your own dreams gives you the deepest insight into yourself.