Dreams Like Bubbles
God has used dreams throughout history to communicate with people. We see this in the Exodus account of Joseph interpreting Pharoah's dreams and Daniel's interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar's. The Holy Spirit has deigned to work through dreams. However, besides the Holy Spirit, there are many other sources of the content of dreams. Much of the time the content of our dreams is composed of the aggregate of our daily experiences. Our dreams are often filled with things that confound and befuddle us. Our experiences, both ordinary and traumatic, are fair game for dream-fodder.
The ever-mysterious human subconscious is the fount of all sorts of strange and unruly nocturnal musings. All of our traumatic experiences, those that remain incomprehensible, and those not processed rationally ultimately end up as stored in the subconscious. The subconscious is the privileged filter of all our personal experiences. Like a brain colander, it automatically sifts all that we understand and experience in the present moment. We process our experiences, subconsciously throwing out some things, and adding others with this finicky, inborn filtering technique.
Many of our traumatic experiences happen at a very young age. This unprocessed trauma is reenacted in the subconscious through the production of dreams. Our dreams, and worse: our nightmares, are reflective of some incomprehensible bit of brain food that we have yet to properly digest. Dreams do not present themselves as easily convertible tidbits of information given to rational analysis. They are often metaphorical, expressed as pictures, sounds, sensations, and actions.
During sleep the primitive portion of our brain which separates the conscious from the subconscious becomes relaxed, allowing items to bubble up from the subconscious into the semiconscious dream state. We are often aware of the content of our dream during the semiconscious dream state, but we are not actively using our cognitive facilities to analyze the content. Simply put, we are not thinking about our dream while we sleep. Instead, the dream more or less is uncontrollably happening to us. If we can remember the content of the dream when we awaken, we may be able to use our logical powers to process its contents.
God works through our experiences, growing us in grace and godliness. As we mature in faith, we are given the ability to understand our experiences in the light of godliness. This allows us insight that we did not previously possess. That which was once inaccessible due to its storage and suppression in the subconscious may be brought to the conscious understanding and processed rationally. Thus, we are enabled to use our dreams as a means to identify the things that irritate our souls. These are oftentimes things that hinder our ability to productively live to its full potential.
Dreams do not only express negative and traumatic experiences. Many times the contents of a dream are indicative of some yet unattained desire. These unprocessed items come up into our semiconscious like the bubbles in a bottle of champagne. As the cork is popped loose from the neck, the bubbles rapidly form and surface. These bubbles were previously just gaseous carbonation in solution while the cork was fastened in the bottle. Being released from their pressurized state, the bubbles begin to form and ascend; up and out fizzling as they go. Accordingly, while one sleeps, the conscious faculty no longer suppresses the items in the subconscious. The dream state allows unprocessed information in the subconscious to bubble up into the semiconscious and take form as the contents of dreams.