Types of Dreams & Their Meanings

Wikipedia describes dreams as successions of images, emotions and ideas that occur during sleep. What are dreams really? Can we control them? Do you remember all of your dreams when you wake up? Why do some dreams seem so vivid? Some feel so familiar and realistic, but when you wake up, their intuitive significance may start to rapidly fade. And why do some people have nightmares? Are they primarily rooted in stress and anxiety, or are there deeper reasons behind them? In the video below, Sadhguru talks about the different types of dreams and explains the significance behind them, even delving into how one’s karma can be related to some kinds of dreams.

Discussing dreams in terms of four different categories, he says: “90% or more of the dreams are just a release. When I say release, most human minds are made like this; they cannot help it. Whatever they recognize as good, beautiful, attractive, valuable, they cannot help desiring. it. So the multiple desires that the mind generates through the day, most of the desires are not even conscious. It’s simply happening because mind is in that mode; if something is good I must have it. So dream is working for you in that sense, releasing these desires in the night when you’re fast asleep, because the body is at rest, so there’s a whole lot of energy available for the activity of the mind. Mind is using this time and energy to work itself out.”

“Another manifestation of the dream is, there is something called as Prarabdha. This is something that we refer to as the karmic structure or the karmic body. Karmic body is just memory body. If all that memory comes into play, now in your life, your mind will break for sure. It’s too much memory for anybody to handle. So Nature has devised a way, or your own system has evolved a way, of taking up one part of the memory as the allotted memory to be dealt with right now. This is called as Prarabdha. When you wake up in the morning if you observe very carefully, not just the muscular structure of your body, you will see every day it will be different because Prarabdha plays in a certain way creating everything that happens. So this is Prarabdha finding expression and the same is happening in the night in the form of a dream… This could have some meaning. In the sense, you don’t have to observe the images of the dream, you have to observe the residue of the dream. When you wake up in the morning how do you feel? If one is able to watch it, especially if something is concerned with your health or the possibility of destruction or damage to your body, Prarabdha is a good place to watch.”

“So the third layer of dream is, if you touch certain states of experience in your life, after you went through a powerful experience, let’s say you were initiated into Shambavi or you went through a Bhava Spandana or you went through a Samyama program or you went through some other initiation process, the dream patterns seem to have changed after that. A powerful experience means, somehow you cross some kind of threshold within you… So this storehouse of memory or storehouse of karmic substance is called Sanchita. So something from that entered your life. That means this life has become a larger scope than what it was before… Once Sanchita begins to find expression in your dream, it will become completely, absolutely meaningless dreams. One spot here, one spot there, one this, one that, nothing will be continuous. It will start happening, wild dreams without any meaning, you cannot ascribe any kind of meaning to it.”

“There is another kind of dream which is not really a dream. You dream it up in such a way that it becomes a reality, or in other words this is a dream to establish your consciousness and your energy in a certain way. I was mentioning the other day also, down under in Australia, the aboriginal people call the time of creation as dream time. Creator dreamed it up. The whole science of what we are referring to as Tantra is just this, that you dream of something and slowly you bring it into reality…”

“This is creation and that also is rooted in your dream because if you cross the boundaries of Sanchita then you’re touching the dimension which is the source of creation. There, usually when you touch it, mind will be so overwhelmed, unless it’s trained, that it just becomes pfffff. This probably some people are describing as no mind. Right now, your mind exists the way it exists only because there is memory, do you understand? When you cross that boundary where the terrain of memory is over, only perception is there. Most minds, I would say, 99.999 percent of the minds will be frozen if they have no memory to operate. What you’re doing as yoga is to train the mind to a place where tomorrow if memory falls down, your whole karmic structure just fell down, still you have a mind. Then if your body falls down, that means if you fall dead, you still have a mind. Now you can navigate yourself where you want, otherwise you go by your tendencies.”

“So one thing that I must tell you as advice is whatever the dream, learn to ignore it, because if you start looking for meanings in dream, you will lose meaning for your life. You will become hallucinatory.”