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Comment by gnosis | Hacker News Reader

"An uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter."

Dreams often have many layers of meaning. You might want to try keeping a long-term, detailed record of your dreams, and spending some time each day trying to make sense of them and relating them to your life and to other dreams. You might be surprised to find just how rich they are with meaning.

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You can read meaning into anything. For the most part though, dreams are just synapses firing randomly. I wouldn't read too much into them, or at least not take the interpretations too seriously.

What's that movie with Eddie Murphy where he's an alien spaceship? It like this team of little people (cells, proteins, DNA, whatever) trying to make sense of all the stupid stuff you, the lumbering gene robot, got up to during the day. All I gave them to work with was a bunch of words on a webpage. Doesn't make for the most interesting or coherent storyline for a dream. One can imagine them saying, "When is this guy going to get off that stupid website and give us some real material to work with?" :)

not entirely randomly, but processing stuff that's been "on your mind" and not packed away in long-term memory.

I imagine it (non-scientifically) as the brain's trash compactor, finishing up all the half-completed thoughts of your day, not necessary in any sort of logical way, like mashing the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together regardless of how well they fit, to get something that just barely fits together at a glance.

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