Source: Kelly Bulkeley
The media you consume during the day can have a significant impact on your nighttime dreams. Movies, TV shows, and video games have a particularly strong effect on dreaming. This may sound like a harmful intrusion into your unconscious private space. However, a closer look reveals that most dreams that refer to movies and the like actually convey important psychological insights if you know what to look for.
All kinds of cultural content can enter our dreams. Intensity and frequency seem to be the most important factors. For example, movies that make you feel strong emotions are more likely to influence your dreams than movies that are less stimulating. Similarly, watching a movie multiple times increases the chances of it appearing in a dream. This frequency factor is a common phenomenon among hardcore gamers and TV binge-watchers.
Media-related dreams are not unconscious mirrors that passively reflect our waking experience.both of these dreams selective When integrated: Select to include and exclude certain characters, themes, and settings. They combine these references with what the dreamer continues to worry about in their waking life, with implications that may lead in directions far removed from the original film, television, or game content. It could easily be argued that dreaming is the archetype of fan fiction.
The best way to understand this process is how to play. Dreaming treats movies, TV shows, and video games like toys that you can pick up, explore, imagine, and combine in endless ways. As a mode of play, dreaming is expressed in a variety of spontaneous, whimsical and exaggerated forms. And like any other way to play, dreaming tends to revolve around people’s basic life concerns, their deepest hopes, fears, and desires. (A nightmare is a dark play on a dream, just as a horror movie is a dark play on a movie.) The appearance of cultural references in dreams shifts from individual concerns to community concerns and perhaps all Interestingly, the scope of importance expands. Man. Dreams are no longer yours. It’s potentially about the bigger movements happening in the world around you.
If you’ve ever had a dream like this, let’s say it was a dream in which a female game character appeared.
- How would you describe this character to someone who knows nothing about video games? who is she? what kind of person is she? how does she behave? What are her strengths and weaknesses? How does she relate to other people in the game? Her particular presence in dreams, and her character’s character, is enough to expand our awareness of the character’s place in the world of the game’s life. You will become more aware of what you are consciously paying attention to.
- What energy does this character add to your dreams? How does she change or influence what happens in her dreams? How are dreams different? Of all the impressions and experiences that pass through your mind during the day, your dreaming mind chooses this particular character to appear in this particular dream. What does your intuition tell you about the implications of this very specific choice?
- Where will this character lead you? After the dream she is no longer part of the game.she is part of youYou have a completely different relationship with her now, and your frame of reference for who and what she is has expanded dramatically. Between your imagination and this character, a playful dynamic mediated by your dreams has arisen. She is an active, living presence in your waking mind now. do you feel
If, after pondering these questions, your dreams still seem vague, be patient. Dream meanings do not always appear easily or immediately. We can invite them, make them comfortable, and accept whatever they have to say to us.
