Finding meaning in my own dreams?

French Prime Minister pumping gas...

Last week, I experienced a series of what I would say were senseless dreams. One of them was my meeting at some gas pump (???) with Francois Bayrou, the current French Prime Minister whom I mistook for his boss, by saying “Good afternoon Mr. President!” and I started to cheer him up in my own ways as he’s currently badly politically embattled. 

This prompted me to wonder, after all the years following Carl Jung’s theories on the subject, what was modern psychology and psychotherapy saying about the deep meaning of dreams? Evidently, I had not followed much of the aggregated knowledge on the subject since Jung’s time as the landscape of dream interpretation has evolved dramatically, but still the fascination with dreams as windows into the psyche remains with us. 

In his time, Jung saw dreams as expressions of the collective unconscious and symbolic messages from deep within, often carrying archetypal meaning. Today, many psychologists still value dreams for their symbolic and emotional content, but they’re more cautious about making interpretations of them as their focus has shifted toward personal meaning instead of fixed symbolism. 

In addition there have been biological theories suggesting that dreams are the brain’s attempt to make sense of random neural activity during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. Yet, even this “randomness” often reflects emotional themes like fear, longing, or unresolved conflict, which can give dreams some psychological relevance. 

More recently the Finnish neuroscientist Antti Revonsuo proposed that dreams evolved to simulate threats, helping us rehearse responses to danger. Others see dreams as a form of emotional regulation, helping us process grief, trauma, or stress. For example, PTSD nightmares often reflect unprocessed trauma and are sometimes used as therapeutic targets in EMDR therapy, that stands for “Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing”, a psychotherapy technique designed to help individuals process and recover from traumatic experiences and other distressing life events. 

While dream analysis is rare in today’s therapy, some psycho-dynamic and trauma-informed approaches still explore dreams, especially when clients bring them in. When this happens, the client’s own interpretation is prioritized over the therapist’s reading. Dreams are seen as metaphors for inner states, not puzzles to be solved. 

So, rather than offering universal truths, modern psychology treats dreams as personal narratives shaped by memory, emotion, and subconscious processing. They’re also viewed as symbolic reflections of current psychological states, like grief, anxiety, desire, or transformation. During change or crisis, dreams can also be seen like creative expressions of the mind’s attempt to make sense of things. 

In other worlds, while dreams still might be meaningful, their meaning is us to discover and not imposed from the outside. As for me, I take them as the result of my mind conducting some serious house-cleaning inside my confused and overstuffed gray matter!