Why Googling your dreams could be getting them completely wrong

Dream interpretation is more personal than Google or AI suggests. Here's why emotion and context are important when decoding dreams. It’s a giant spider sitting on your face. You are being chased by a snake, falling from a building or watching someone bake cookies but as a zombie. It’s all in a night’s dreaming and its interpretation may not mean what Google, an online dream dictionary or even artificial intelligence tells you it does. Dream interpretation, said Heavenly Healing’s Annemari Viviers, is far more personal than matching what happened while you slept to a stock interpretation, and the emotion left behind when you wake up may provide a better clue than the suggested symbolism of the movie or short that played out in your subconscious. Viviers said dreams can be viewed as a conversation between the conscious mind and a deeper part of ourselves, communicating through images, feelings, memories, people, places and metaphors. “It is not a straightforward language,” she said. “Your dreaming mind doesn’t have to explain itself to your conscious mind. It simply says, ‘Look at this’. Your job isn’t immediately to ask, ‘What does this symbol mean?’ Your first question should be: ‘Why did my mind choose this?'” Symbols are just… symbols The idea has parallels with the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, a contemporary and one-time close collaborator of Sigmund Freud. According to Dream Studies Portal, Jung believed dreams were a natural expression of imagination and could help integrate conscious and unconscious aspects of life, a process he called individuation. Jung also explored archetypes, recurring images and patterns he believed could occur across cultures. Viviers said this does not mean every snake, body of water or perhaps death carries the same message. “Someone dreams about a scary snake. They then search ‘snake dream meaning’. And Google says transformation, healing, rebirth, danger, sexuality,” she said. “This sounds wonderful, but we haven’t actually interpreted the dream. What if that person adores snakes or what if they were terrified of snakes? Perhaps the snake was protecting them? What if it was chasing them?” ‘Raphael’s Book Of Dreams’ was first published in 1886. Picture: Hein Kaiser “The symbols in dreams never exist in isolation. The relationship that you have with the symbol is important,” she said. Even then, symbols traditionally associated with particular themes should only be treated as possibilities. “Water often appears around themes of emotion and the unconscious. Death can represent endings, transformation or psychological change. Flying can involve freedom, liberation or perspective. Falling can involve loss of control, vulnerability or instability. But those are possibilities, not definitions.” Focus on feelings Viviers said emotion may be a better point of departure when it comes to dream interpretation. “A person dreaming of enormous waves and feeling exhilarated is having a very different dream from someone dreaming of exactly the same waves and feeling terrified,” she said. “The emotion that the dreamer felt in the dream is probably the most important part of the symbol.” She recommended capturing the feeling immediately after waking up. “Don’t immediately analyse or Google. Avoid just getting up. Don’t start scrolling. Stay still for a moment and ask: ‘What am I feeling?’ Not ‘What happened?'” A physical response could be equally revealing. “Sometimes the body remembers the emotional truth of a dream after the conscious mind has forgotten the storyline.” Write it all down Recurring dreams may be particularly worth examining, Viviers said, especially when the same person, place, situation or emotion keeps appearing. “Ask yourself, ‘What hasn’t changed in my waking life?’ Because sometimes the dream keeps returning because the emotional situation hasn’t been resolved,” she said. Changes in the dream could be equally revealing, as if there are changes to the script. “The person who frightened you no longer frightens you. The animal stops chasing you. You finally open the locked door. You turn around instead of running. The dream hasn’t necessarily changed because the dream changed. It may have changed because you did.” Recurring dreams Viviers also cautioned against turning to artificial intelligence for an instant interpretation. “AI can produce an extraordinarily convincing interpretation that sounds profound while actually being based on generic symbolic associations rather than your personal experience,” she said. “A beautifully written interpretation can feel true. And feeling true isn’t the same thing as being true.” Ultimately, an AI interpretation remains a large language model serving up what could be little more than a pipe-dream. Viviers said ownership of the interpretation should remain with the dreamer: “The dream belongs to you. Not to Google. It does not belong to a dream dictionary. Not Jung. Also not your psychic. Only to you.”