Almost everyone has had the experience of waking up from a dream and thinking, now that was really weird! But weirdness is relative. If you compare your dream experiences to your waking life, of course your dreams are strange. In waking life, time moves forward, space is 3-D, and the world operates according to the physical laws of nature. In a dream, none of those rules apply.

Does it really make sense to compare two completely different experiences of reality and call one weird? Wouldn’t it be better to compare our dreams to each other to determine which ones were truly strange?

You are the only person who has full access to the range of dream experiences that you’ve had. So you are always the best judge of whether or not your dream was weird. For example, if you dream about eating frogs with your great-aunt and that has never happened to you in real life, you might call that dream weird. On the other hand, if that’s something you did every Sunday of your childhood, then maybe we wouldn’t consider it a very strange dream. 

The Truth About Weird Dreams

Most people don’t actually pay close enough attention to their dreams to know whether or not a dream they had was truly weird in comparison to all the others. And yet many people still describe their dreams as deeply strange. Over the years of working with dreams, I’ve recognized that often when people say their dream was very weird, it indicates that a particular dream had a strong effect on them.

In this sense, when we describe a dream as very weird, we might really be saying that the dream was powerful, because it was able to stay in our memories and even prompt us to talk about it in our waking life. When you consider all of the dreams you have forgotten over your lifetime, the simple fact that you remember a dream at all means that it is relevant. And if you remember it enough to say that it was truly weird–well that makes it all the more likely that there’s something resonating for you in the dream. 

But, when we say something is weird, that doesn’t typically motivate us to dig deeper. We often judge things in waking life as weird when we want to distance ourselves from them. Also, if we think something is weird, that implies we believe we won’t be able to understand it. Naming our dreams as weird can create a block between us and our dreams and keep us from the guidance they wish to provide us. 

Confusion and Dreams

Another subtle way we can distance ourselves from our dreams is by telling ourselves our dreams are confusing. On one level, dreams are confusing, because they don’t follow our typical mental patterns, where things go from from A to B in a rational way. 

At the same time, our dreams are almost always deeply resonant with us, often on a non-intellectual level. By simply being present with how the dream makes us feel, we can often glean profound wisdom from the dream. When our minds are telling us that our dreams are incredibly weird or confusing, it makes it easy to judge our dream and give up understanding it on an experiential level. 

Even if we are struck by a dream and want to understand it, our first instinct is to interpret or figure out the dream, rather than just being present with it. This can lead to google searches that turn up tidbits with some resonance, but don’t truly get to the heart of the dream. When we try to fit the dream into patterns our mind is used to, i.e. a clear narrative structure, a distinct moral lesson, or clear direction about how to achieve a goal, it often comes up short. Pretty soon, we give up, assuming that the dream is meaningless, not considering that there is another way to understand things beyond the intellectual level.

Understanding Your Dreams More Deeply

The bottom line is, if you are consistently thinking that your dreams a very strange or deeply confusing, it’s worth considering whether this is actually true, or whether these are just blocks your mind is creating to keep you from just being with the dream and what it is offering you. 

This consideration is worthwhile because as Carl Jung taught, dreams can be understood as compensatory. This means that they arise to bring balance and a more holistic understanding of ourselves and our lives. The act of bringing balance, though, necessarily implies that something may need to change. That can be the hard part to accept–and the piece that your mind, or your ego, will try to resist. 

There are a variety of definitions of ego, but one way of understanding it is the part of your mind that mediates between your conscious perceptions and subconscious experiences. The ego is always trying to ensure that things fit into a cohesive story about who you are and how the world works. Many times, we confuse this story with who we truly are are. So, if the story is threatened, we feel threatened and want to defend ourselves. 

Dream experiences often challenge the ego’s story, and thus we often meet our dreams with resistance. The two most popular forms of that resistance is judging the dream as weird or confusing. 

How do we move past this? First, by recognizing that the resistance is natural and will always be present on some level. Opening up to our subconscious aspects and being willing to let go of the old egoic stories that are no longer serving us isn’t easy. But the tender and gentle guidance of our dreams is always there to help. By refusing to judge our dreams as strange, confusing, or weird, and simply being present with them as they are, we can have profound experiences with our dreams. It’s as simple as putting down the dream dictionary and just listening to the guide inside. 

What’s the weirdest dream you’ve ever had? What fascinates you about dreams? I would love to hear your experiences and stories!