Love Me, Even in Your Dreams.

Freud, Jung, and the Secret Messages Hidden in Your Dreams

There are dreams that vanish with the morning light — and then there are the ones that stay.

The ones that leave you waking with a hollow ache, the taste of something unspoken still lingering.

You turn over in bed and wonder: what if he was dreaming of someone else?

Has it ever happened to you? A dream so real you swear it off as a memory?

It shouldn’t matter. Dreams aren’t promises, and they aren’t betrayals. They come uninvited, stitched together from fragments of memory, fear, and longing. But still, a quiet sting lingers — not because it’s real, but because it feels real. Like an intimacy briefly shared with someone who isn’t you.

Even dreams wrapped in love can carry a strange kind of unease. They reflect what we often push aside in waking life — the doubts we don’t voice, the comparisons we don’t admit, the quiet need to feel chosen, even unconsciously.

In those unguarded hours, the lines between fear and fantasy begin to blur and what rises to the surface often says more about us than we’d like to admit.

For centuries, people have tried to make sense of that blur. 

Freud’s Hidden Doors: Longing in Disguise

Like You and Me, Sigmund Freud believed that dreams were not meaningless either. To him, they were a kind of disguised wish fulfillment — messages from the unconscious trying to make their way to the surface. 

He argued that even the strangest or most unsettling dreams could be traced back to repressed desires, hidden fears, or unresolved conflicts. But because the conscious mind tries to protect itself, these deeper meanings are masked — turned into symbols. That’s why dreams often seem strange or disconnected on the surface.

Freud called this the difference between the manifest content (the actual dream we remember) and the latent content (the deeper meaning beneath it). In other words, what we dream about might seem strange or even meaningless, but underneath, it’s often speaking directly to something we’re not ready to face when we’re awake.

 To him, dreams were like riddles, encoded by the subconscious, revealing what we’re not yet ready to face when we’re awake. He believed that by decoding them, we could better understand ourselves and not just what we want, but also what we’re avoiding.

This is also echoed in many different cultures. In Estonian folklore, dreams were seen as significant — sometimes even prophetic. Symbols like water suggested emotional shifts or transitions. Snakes might be warnings, or signs of transformation. White animals were often considered protective spirits. 

People believed in interpreting these signs communally, guided by village elders or ancient dream books (unenäoraamatud).

I remember my mother asking me to google why her teeth fell out and what it meant. It was just a dream, I told her – but you know how mothers are, 3 seconds later I was googling my fingers off.  :)

Apparently there was even folk magic, like placing mugwort under your pillow to inspire spiritual or prophetic dreams. But  I’m not sure how accurate that is. But I do remember my father telling me to put books under my pillow, so while I sleep,  the wisdom would transfer to my head. :)

Jung’s Inner Landscapes: Archetypes and the Soul’s Game

Carl Jung took this even further — not rejecting Freud, but expanding the idea. Like Freud, he believed that dreams were meaningful, but to him, they weren’t just disguised wishes or repressed fears. They were conversations with the self. A kind of dialogue between the conscious mind and the deeper, unconscious layers of who we are.

Jung believed dreams had a compensatory function — they helped balance us out. If there was something we were ignoring, suppressing, or unaware of in life, the dream would bring it to the surface.

But instead of focusing on past trauma or hidden desire, Jung saw dreams as archetypes. These weren’t just personal symbols, but ones shared by all humans through what he called the collective unconscious.

This is where figures like the shadow, the hero, the wise old man, or the nurturing mother appear — not just as random characters, but as meaningful messengers. 

For example, if a mother appears in a dream, Jung didn’t necessarily think it was your real mother, but rather the mother archetype, representing comfort, intuition, or guidance. If she speaks, Jung believes it might be your own deeper self trying to tell you what you truly need.

If you think about it, then Jung saw dreams like a simulation, almost like a video game created by the unconscious mind. Where you could explore hidden landscapes of the self. 

It had monsters that represent your fears and shadows. 

It had quests about your unresolved conflicts or emotional puzzles. 

Allies too,  archetypes guiding you along the way. 

And just like any good game, there was an end goal. Jung called that journey individuation — the process of becoming fully yourself by integrating all the parts of you that you’ve ignored or buried.

What Happens When We Dream? The Neuroscience

Dreaming might feel like chaos, but beneath the surface, it’s one of the brain’s most intricate processes. Especially during REM sleep, when our dreams really happen. Where they become vivid, emotional, and strangely real.

 The brain is far from resting at this stage, it’s lit up, active, and deeply engaged in building an internal world from fragments of memory, emotion, and imagination.

REM Sleep Mechanics

During REM sleep, something interesting happens to the body,  it goes still. This state is called REM atonia, and it’s the brain’s way of keeping us safe and stopping us from hurting the person who is sleeping next us.

It temporarily paralyzes the muscles so we don’t act out our dreams physically. No matter what’s happening in the dream, whether you’re running, yelling, kissing, or falling — your body stays paralysed. 

Paralysation + emotion

it's a perfect recipe for a chaos cocktail. 

Emotional Brain Activity

Inside the brain, things are far from calm. The amygdala, which helps us process fear and emotional intensity, becomes highly active during REM sleep. That’s one reason dreams can feel so dramatic or overwhelming.

You’re not just imagining emotions, you’re actually feeling them as if they were real. 

Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for rational thinking and self-awareness, becomes much less active. This quieting of logic allows emotions to take over without interference. That’s why dreams often defy logic, skip around, and leave us with feelings that linger long after we wake up.

Fun fact: That doesn’t apply to lucid dreaming— in those rare cases, the prefrontal cortex lights up again, allowing us to be self-aware, to control or reshape the dream in real time.

The Weight We Wake Up With

We all know the feeling — waking up from a dream that shook us, confused us, or lingered long after we opened our eyes. Maybe it wasn’t even that dramatic. But it felt real. And even though you know it didn’t actually happen, your body doesn’t. Your chest feels heavy, your thoughts spiral, and for a second, your emotions treat it like truth.

That’s not your imagination. That’s your nervous system doing what it does best — responding to what feels real. Because in REM sleep, your brain is reacting like it is real. The emotional centers fire up, the rational ones quiet down, and your whole body follows the script. Even if the dream makes no sense at all.

And while all that’s going on, your body stays completely still — thanks again to REM atonia. You can be screaming, sobbing, kissing, collapsing — and not move a muscle. The storm happens entirely inside. Safe, contained. A private theater for your inner life.

This is also why dreams often carry things we didn’t have time or space to process while awake. Maybe there’s something you’ve been avoiding, something you’ve buried or convinced yourself you’re over. But your mind remembers. Your body remembers. And in dreams, those memories come back — not always as exact events, but as symbols. As people. As emotions. That’s your subconscious talking.

It can be tempting to ignore these dreams, or feel silly for being affected by them. But maybe the point isn’t to over-analyze or overreact. Maybe it’s just to notice. To ask gently, Why did that stick with me? What am I still holding onto?What is this trying to show me?

Maybe that’s what makes them so powerful. Not because they’re predictions. But because they’re reflections. Honest ones. Ones that don’t lie.

Not Betrayal, But a Mirror

In the end, maybe the dream wasn’t about him at all. Maybe it was about you. About what you’re feeling, what you’re holding, what your heart hasn’t said out loud yet. 

“The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, opening into that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was a conscious ego.”

— Carl Jung, The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man

Because dreams aren’t always messages from someone else’s mind — they’re windows into your own. And sometimes they show you something you didn’t know was still there. A fear. A hope. A longing. They catch you off guard, not to punish you, but to pull you closer to the truth of how you really feel.

However we choose to see them — whether as symbols, science, memories, or myths — dreams are still windows to the soul. They show us things we don’t always want to admit, but maybe need to. There’s no shame in waking up feeling like trash, or crying over something that didn’t even happen. That’s real. But maybe instead of just sulking or pushing it away, we could ask ourselves why it hit so hard. 

What is it that we haven’t fully let go of? What part of us is still aching, still scared, still unsure? Because dreams don’t just appear out of nowhere. They come from inside. And if they’re showing up, maybe it’s time we show up too — for ourselves.