I saw a couple of polls on the YouGov site, and wondered about having a go : comments [Peter]

Dreams: I sort of feel I've been forced into "Do". I don't believe in dream interpretation, in any sort of hidden symbolism or stuff like that - OTOH I think the basic emotional content may be a reflection of what's going on in life. Maybe I'm not interpreting "reveal" heavily enough. Do anxiety dreams reveal anything when you have plenty of other evidence there's lots of anxiety in your life?

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I think dreams may *reflect* what's going on in life, but to *reveal* it they need to provide knowledge, either through traditional interpretation or some other mechanism. If significant things in life cause dreams in a manner that's not reversable (or reverse-engineerable) there's no revelation.

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Maybe I'm not interpreting "reveal" heavily enough.

*nods* I voted 'Do not', without actually disagreeing with what you say here. I think dreams are a warmed-over mishmash of memory and imagination, and hence don't give any information you might not just as plausibly have got from memory and/or imagination while awake.

Occasionally I've had a really good idea in a dream, but not often enough to make me think dreams are an especially good source of cool ideas – it seems much more likely that that was just a good idea that I happened to have while dreaming instead of having it (or a similar thought) some other time. And yes, perhaps just occasionally a dream has made me think 'hmm, I might be a bit stressed' a little before my waking behaviour gave me the same idea, but not enough before (or often enough) to make dreams any kind of Magical Oracle into your Inner Psyche.

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That's about what I was going to say, but I phrased it as "dreams sometimes reveal things about your life". I'm sure there are good examples of not realising how worried you are about something before it came up in a dream. But I think "random mishmash of stuff you already know" is more common.

Or to put it more positively, if something about a dream bothers you, it's worth thinking about what it is. But it's not worth examining every facet of a dream and assuming they all have to reveal something.

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I'd have to go with (sometimes) reveal or perhaps cause; it's hard to determine which applies.

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Peter

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