I occasionally wake up and think, “Wow, I was just dreaming about something that was really wild and intense”. But then I can never quite remember exactly what the dream was about and generally I forget about the whole thing. I can vaguely recall having common dreams about falling, forgetting my high school homework or nightmares involving being chased. I have always assumed that these dreams were just expressing a part of me that I couldn’t let out in everyday life, like the “Dreamologist” name Joi explains here.

I have never wanted to figure out the meaning behind my dreams by interpreting them. But I’ve talked with many people who are very interested in dream analysis as a way to find out more about themselves. Even the famous Psychologist Carl Jung considered a dream to be a dramatic story that includes important symbols in a person’s life. You can read about Jungian dream interpretation on the blog The Third Eve and more about dreams as theatre here. There are even people who believe dreams are a way to predict the future. For instance, this blogger discusses dreams as being religiously prophetic. Wow!

I think my interest in dreams is different from most people. I am fascinated by the vivid, creative images that my mind can conjure up which are completely out of my control. I am sleeping after all. I’m more into the experience of having and feeling dreams. I even think nightmares and bad dreams can be a intriguing experience – maybe that’s why people like horror movies. In fact I can compare it to listening to music or watching a movie. I don’t really care what the music “means” because all I know is I like it and it’s amazing.

That is why I love the website Dreamlines by artist Leonardo Solaas. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to dreaming outside of my own mind. I can just enter any word I want to try dreaming about and start watching a day dream online. The artist describes this piece of web fine art best himself as, “The system looks in the Web for images related to those words, and takes them as input to generate an ambiguous painting, in perpetual change, where elements fuse into one another, in a process analogous to memory and free association.”

This is a screen shot what I got when I entered baby dream into Dreamlines. But remember, this is an ongoing piece of video art and this is only one frame:

Here is one frame of an interpretation of a falling dream by the Dreamlines machine:

Here are some reference books at Amazon about dream meanings, symbols and analysis: