I’ve always been amazed with the existence of the subconscious ever since our Religion teacher Fr. Gascon discussed it in class back in High School. He told us that the mind is composed of the conscious and the subconscious. The former stores the details of everything that we are aware of while all the other stuff that we process at the back of our minds while not being aware of it go to the latter. Then when we go to sleep at night, we are shown the contents of the subconscious through our dreams.
That explanation for dreams made a lot more sense than the other explanation being that dreams are prophetic. Thus, I don’t freak out when I dream of someone dying or something terrible happening. To me, it doesn’t mean that whatever I had dreamt of would come true but rather, that I was not aware that I feared these events or some other it had some other hidden psychological meaning. Take, for example, a dream I used to have in the past. It baffled and bothered me that I kept on dreaming of my teeth crumbling to pieces in my mouth. Finally I decided to google it and discovered that this was actually one of the most common dreams that people had. I came across this interpretation from Dream Moods:
Teeth are used to bite, tear, chew and gnaw. In this regard, teeth
represent power. And the loss of teeth in your dream may be from a sense of
powerlessness.
I realized that I always had these dreams whenever I was feeling helpless at work, so the explanation made perfect sense.
Aside from these dreams with deep meanings and connotations, there is also the average dream that is quite easy to interpret. Like notice how, when you remember a friend for a short moment during the course of the day and then forget all about her, that same friend will inevitably show up in your dreams later that night? It’s your subconscious reminding you about something that you had thought about but forgotten during the day. And then the person that occupied your thoughts the whole day whom you want to see even in your dreams will not show up at all, why? Because he was at the forefront of your thoughts the whole time and therefore has no place at the back.
I remember one time, after I got home all a tingly from a date, my roommate bade me sweet dreams of the guy. I said, “I’m sure I won’t, because I’m thinking of him too much.” But that night I did dream of him. In the dream, he asked me out on a second date, and we drank Vodka Cruisers. The next day I told my roommate about the dream, confused about what it meant. She in turn was confused about what “Vodka Cruiser” meant. “Is it a cruise ship?” she asked. That’s when it clicked. My date had mentioned that he had gone on a cruise ship. Apparently, while he told me this, my subconscious mind had made the association between that and the like-sounding drink and that was what showed up in my slumber.
Unfortunately not all my dreams are that easy to interpret. Not a night goes by that I don’t dream, and they are always very vivid and very weird. I forget most of them unless I write them down the moment I wake up or I tell someone about it. I’ve always wondered why they are always haywire like that, I mean, could I possibly have that many thoughts unaware during the space of one day? And while on the bus this morning, the answer suddenly came to me. I was reading a book and had sped through three paragraphs before I realized that I had not understood anything I had read and needed to start over. Aha. This was where all my unexplainable dreams came from! Whenever I read books and was in a hurry to get to the exciting part, I had a tendency to skim the lengthy boring parts without really understanding them. The thing is, my conscious mind may not have understood a single word, but my subconscious one had absorbed it all and would then give me information overload at night. Mystery solved.
But what intrigues me most regarding the subconscious is that not only is it very powerful and can remember so much more than your conscious one, but it also works not only while you’re asleep. Like why you and your friend would suddenly start singing the same song out of the blue, when it did not play anywhere, and you’d freak out about being able to read each other’s mind. What you don’t realize is that both of you may have seen the same thing which your subconscious mind then linked to that song.
A concrete example happened over the weekend. We watched the movie Seven Pounds and in one scene, Ben shows up at Emily’s house and feeds her dog. Emily gets upset instead of being grateful because he had given meat to her vegetarian dog. Seconds later, I joked about calling out to an imaginary pet dog. “Fido! Here boy!” I said, holding out my hand to pet the air. Everyone laughed and we would all join in the game for the next few days. It bothered me, though, why I came up with that particular name. We have a lot of dogs and I have read a lot of books with dogs in it; I could have used any of their names. The next day, after a lot of digging, I realized why the name Fido (pronounced as Fay-do) had sprung to my mind yesterday. Back when I was a child, I used to watch this looney tunes episode of a dog named Fido who was called by his owner to eat food which looks like normal dog food but is actually made of vegetables. Since a lot of time had passed since my childhood and that particular episode was not exactly a favorite nor something that I made a point to remember, my aware self did not make the connection. But my subconscious, which remembers everything, including the mundane, had immediately made the connection between the only two episodes of my life which had a dog eating vegetables. Amazing.
Psychologists do have a point in saying that there is much potential to tap in this powerful yet uncontrollable part of our minds. Imagine if we could all use this to our advantage. The possibilities are endless. For now, though, the only thing I can make use of it is to understand myself more. So starting tonight, I am keeping a dream diary by my bedside. Care to join me?