I'm not so sure I agree with you Eri. There is no doubt mind and body are interelated, and that dreams depend on your mental weather as well as your physical geography. But I think that looking for clues in dreams, like some kind of psychopuzzle, is a waste of time. The whole idea of dreams being a symbolic representation of your mental state, that snakes mean...anything...is just too simple to be right and too easy to be true. At the risk of straining the metaphor, what if you're like me and LOVE snakes. Am I hardwired to use them symbolically the same way everyone else does?

I can accept that if you have a lot of very bad dreams, that they may be related to some mental problem you're having--like veterans having nightmares of combat. And if you have the same dream over and over, maybe it is related to something that is on your mind. Even the best clue, one you didn't mention, that people with similar neuroses have similar dreams, doesn't mean you can cure or even identify the problem by studying the dream. Even if that were true, we have no way of knowing it is true, much less proving it.

Having a dream is like feeling a pain, or throwing up. It may be a symptom of something, or it may only be obliquely related, or maybe it is totally unconnected. After all, when I was working, my dreams were not intolerable, or horrifying, or even very different than they are now. I described the differences between my earlier dreams and now, I recognize that difference, but I never suspected my earlier dreams of being a symptom of any pathology. In fact, they were quite tolerable, sometimes distinctly pleasurable.

I see patterns, but it's hard to pick out any significance. For example, in all my dreams about driving, it is always in a Volkswagen beetle. I owned three of them, between 1964 and 1980, but I've been driving other cars for the last 30 years. What does it all mean? I suspect, like Mr Natural sez, "it don't mean sheeeit."