“Last night was a night of bad dreams and ambiguous visions.” ― Sophocles

“For the night is dark and full of terrors.” — George R.R. Martin

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” — Edgar Allan Poe

It was nearly 20 years ago, after the death of her husband, that the dreams came for Diane Bruni. 

“After he passed away, I was seeing him,” Bruni says, “but he would always be on a bus or in a car. He was always in front of me and I could never catch up with him.” 

The symbolism was striking. Bruni was having trouble coping with the loss of her husband, clearly, but she didn’t want to go to grief counseling. Instead, a friend suggested that she join a dream circle where she could talk to others about those dreams and maybe get a better understanding of what her sleeping mind was trying to tell her. 

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“It was amazing,” says Bruni of Windham, nearly two decades after her foray into dreams began. “And it put me on a path where I really wanted to learn more about dreams and to work with people who are open for it.” 

Bruni worked with an active dream circle for three years. She also went on to run her own dream workshops and to further her studies of the phenomenon that so confounds even the brightest scientific minds. She worked with Jeremy Taylor, the famed minister who founded the International Association for the Study of Dreams. And she studied alongside Robert Moss, the Australian historian, author and creator of Active Dreaming, described as a synthesis of “dreamwork” and shamanism. 

Bruni has a better understanding of dreams than most, so I was thrilled to have made her acquaintance – I was thrilled in particular because I had detailed descriptions of more than two dozen dreams that had been sent in by our readers and I had no idea what to do with them. 

Some of those dreams are real doozies. 

“For years I had a reoccurring dream that I fell into hippopotamus-infested water and they tried to kill me,” wrote Jamie Thomas, a perfectly sane office supervisor from Greene. 

“As a young child, I used to have nightmares of Ronald McDonald chasing me with a knife,” wrote Annamarie Pair, of Lewiston. “He was trying to slice off my butt cheeks for burger buns. And there was one where I was in a small yellow hovercraft and I was trapped and Freddy Krueger had the remote control.” 

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“I have had quite a few dreams about Tom Brady,” wrote Celeste Yakawonis of the beloved Patriots quarterback. “Really strange ones – he is not exactly saying he’s leaving Giselle, but it is a possibility. I have no idea why I have these dreams – I am a true fan of Dan Marino.” 

Jennifer Ritchie, 40, of Lewiston, described her childhood dreams of zombies rising out of graves after seeing the Michael Jackson “Thriller” video for the first time. 

Sheila Gurney, of Auburn, had reached the age of 65 before she dreamed she was having a torrid affair with Ernie “Turtleman” Brown of “Call of the Wildman” fame. “I don’t know why God permitted it,” Gurney wrote, “but I remembered that dream so vividly, I wondered why I was being punished.” 

There’s even a nice lady from Rumford who dreams in the form of Jumbles — the newspaper word game — to be solved later, when she’s awake. “A favorite was EPOCATORE,” wrote Dianne Pratt. “I finally got it – COOPERATE.” 

Crazy stuff. Clearly I was out of my league with all this and I needed someone who could help interpret our readers’ crazy dreams and vivid hellscapes. So with a newly discovered dream authority at my disposal, I asked Bruni to go ahead and interpret some of these dreams.  

And she immediately said no. 

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“I have some concern about that,” is how she put it. “Because if you don’t know the person and you don’t really know anything about them to just then say ‘This is how I would interpret it,’ there’s risk there. It would take it out of context.” 

I found that refusal assuring – all over the Internet you can find page after page of websites that claim they can analyze our dreams no matter how bizarre or intricate. Dream interpretation programs, dream dictionaries, vast lists of common dreams and exactly what they mean. To hear these websites describe their services, you’d think it was as easy as feeding in the details of your dreams, and waiting for a complete, 100 percent accurate analysis of those dreams to come spitting out moments later. 

Anyone who has studied sleep and dreams knows it’s not that simple. Bruni knows it’s not that simple. Sigmund Freud himself, who wrote a giant book about dream interpretation, understood that it’s not that simple. 

Dreams are mysterious and elusive by nature, even to those who work within that realm every day. Studies of the brain have revealed WHERE they occur and at what phase of sleep, yet nobody knows for sure why we dream at all, although theories abound. 

If you dream that a talking banana with the face of your father is chasing you through a poppy field while singing “Ain’t We Got Fun,” run the other way from anyone who tells you they know exactly what it means. 

Bruni says that when she works one-on-one with someone, her aim isn’t to interpret that person’s dreams but to help that person understand it better on his own. It’s the same in a group setting. 

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“What happens with the dream group is that someone will share a dream,” Bruni said, “and the protocol in interpreting dreams is a person will say, ‘If it were my dream . . .'” 

After listening to the other person describe a dream, Bruni will imagine that she had the dream herself. What might that dream mean within the context of her own life? What might the details represent? She can then express those ideas to the dreamer for consideration. 

“And they can either say, ‘Wow, that really makes sense to me,'” Bruni says, “or ‘No, that doesn’t seem to fit it.'” 

One way or another, Bruni said, “The dreamer owns the dream.” 

SOMETIMES A CIGAR IS JUST A CIGAR 

Interpreting dreams is a tricky business, especially given the fact that the very definition of dreams is difficult to pin down.  

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“Dreams are understood to be recent autobiographical episodes that become woven with past memories to create a new memory that can be referenced later,” according to one Harvard paper, “but nightmares are simply dreams that cause a strong but unpleasant emotional response.” 

“Dreams are a universal human experience that can be described as a state of consciousness characterized by sensory, cognitive and emotional occurrences during sleep,” medical writer Hannah Nichols wrote in a peer-reviewed article for Medical News Today. “Reports of dreams tend to be full of emotional and vivid experiences that contain themes, concerns, dream figures and objects that correspond closely to waking life.” 

Freud suggested that dreams are fragments of undesirable memories that are repressed within the waking mind. Dreaming allows those memories to be unleashed, albeit in strange, symbolic form. 

What do local sleep specialists say about dreams? We don’t know because not a single one of them was willing to talk to us about the topic for this story. 

Specialists out of sleep labs at both St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center and Central Maine Medical Center did not return repeated inquiries. At the Maine Sleep Institute in Portland, a woman who answered the phone refused to put a specialist on the line.  

“Our only concern with dreams,” is all she would say, “is that people need to fall into REM sleep for memory consolidation.” 

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In Bangor, at Northern Light Sleep Diagnostics, a technician said he would love to talk about the enigma of dreams, but he needed a supervisor’s permission first. The technician then went off to speak to his supervisor and never came back. 

The sleep clinics deal mainly with sleep disorders. They definitely don’t dabble in dream interpretation, so you can understand their wariness about talking to a reporter about those things. There’s a risk of being misrepresented and giving future patients a false idea about what they do. So we forgive them for so arduously ducking us. Well, we ALMOST forgive them. 

We still have Bruni, however, and although she was reluctant to take a whack at our readers’ dreams, she still has plenty to teach us.  

In her waking life, Bruni works as a career consultant. When it seems appropriate, and if the client is open to it, she’ll introduce dreams into the task of finding new career paths after a job has been lost. 

“I will ask them to pay attention to their dreams, because it’s a way to process,” Bruni says. “They might be going through such turmoil of losing a job, losing the relationships and the fear about what’s next for them. So if they’re open to it, then we can start working with their dreams while we’re doing their career search.” 

Bruni had one client who was trying to start a new business. The client kept dreaming dollar signs and other symbols related to money. Were those cash-infused dreams good omens? Warnings? Bruni approached the matter as she always does. She said, “Well, if it were my dream . . .” and by the time she and the client talked it out, the client was able to work through whatever it was that had her dreaming in dollars and cents. 

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Bruni helped me with my own dreams, as it happened.  

For about a year, I went through a strange period where in my dreams, I was somebody else. One night I was high school football player having trouble connecting to his girlfriend’s parents. Another night, I was a Mexican laborer who got shot in the butt with a nail gun. Night after night, I was someone else and there was no connection at all to the identity I’m stuck with in my waking hours. 

It troubled me, and when I searched for answers about what it might mean, I came up empty.  

Bruni couldn’t tell me what it means, either, but she did offer some sound advice, which started with, “Well, if it were my dream . . .” 

The trick, Bruni suggested, was to forget the fact that I wasn’t in the dreams for the moment, and to think about the people who WERE there. The athlete, for instance. What qualities does an athlete possess that I might identify with or hope to embody? The same could be asked about the laborer or about any of the characters I became during that weird period of dreaming. It was a nice, logical look at the dreams and it wasn’t one that had occurred to me before. 

“Even though you’re not in the dream,” Bruni said, “every dream on some level really is about you.” 

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DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? 

But what of our readers’ dreams? How do they look in the lucid and logical light of day? 

A good half of them could be described as nightmares, while a third would likely be categorized as classic stress dreams – one man dreams frequently that he’s back in college and can’t find his way to the final exam. One woman dreams of running away from the wreckage of a plane crash, while another said she often dreams of showing up in school without a bra on.  

Take that one on, Freud. 

A good number of the dreams we heard about featured animals both large and small, while a sizable handful starred well-known characters, some real, others fictional. Only one of the people who responded to our query claimed to have prophetic dreams, while two others shared a dream that, as it turns out, is quite common: loose or missing teeth. 

“I have this recurring dream,” wrote Bonnie Waisanen, of Auburn, “that I’m brushing my teeth and they all loosen and fall out in the sink.” 

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Erica Edwards, a 35-year-old from South Woodstock, dreams about spitting her teeth out in a sink, only to touch her mouth and find her teeth intact again.  

“The teeth falling out dream usually starts with walking through a maze of some kind,” she says. “It changes, but always ends up at the same sink and mirror.” 

So, what do dreams about loose or missing teeth represent? 

As is so often the case with dreams, it depends on who you ask. Bruni points out that to some, teeth represent wisdom, which might be a good place to start. Hannah Nichols, the science writer, suggested that dreaming of losing teeth may be related to social concerns or fear of embarrassment. 

The online group Healthline opines that losing teeth in dreams could be related to anything from religious ambivalence to the loss of a loved one, jealousy or stress over major life changes. A dental group, meanwhile, feels that the teeth dream could represent anything from a major life change to lack of self-esteem. Or possibly the fear of getting older, money issues or regretting something you’ve said. 

For Edwards, some of that speculation is not too far off. She broke down her dream of fly-away teeth on her own, with this analysis: 

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“I usually have this dream when there are changes I have no control over happening in my life,” she says. “It usually signals to me it’s time to figure out what is going on to cause so much unconscious distress.” 

As dreams go, that one was perhaps easy to interpret. But Edwards has had no such luck figuring out the source of another bad dream: “Being chased by a giant broccoli,” she says. “Now THAT was a scary dream.” 

You can kind of see why Bruni doesn’t want to dabble with straight dream interpretation, although she does point out that there is value in all dreams, no matter how weird or terrifying. 

“Dreams come in (when you’re dealing with) health and wellness and healing,” she said. “So even when somebody has a nightmare, there’s good out of that.” 

In dream work, the aim is to explore the various images, emotions and themes of a dream rather than trying to come up with a literal interpretation. It’s not a new concept. 

“There have been studies of dreams way back to the Jungian days of beginning dream work and what the subconscious means,” Bruni says. “I think that we know so little about the brain and the other realms that are really part of our lives. And I think dream work is a way to help us get there and to understand that there’s more than just what’s happening here on our conscious level.” 

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After her husband died, Bruni continued to dream of him wandering ahead of her, just out of her reach. In the beginning, it was a car or a bus ferrying him along. Eventually, the dream evolved so that Bruni saw her husband on an airplane and now he really was out of reach. The symbolism of that was pretty clear, and ultimately Bruni stopped having the dreams altogether. 

Oneirology is the scientific word for the study of dreams. It mostly involves making connections between dreams and our current knowledge of how the brain works. It has little to do, really, with making sense of the strange and elusive imagery that plays out in our heads night after night. 

One way or another, every culture through time has had its own beliefs about dreams. The ancient Egyptians thought dreams exist in the realm between the living world and the hereafter. The Greeks believed that in sleep, the mind is liberated and thus capable of its purest form of wisdom. The Chinese asserted that dreams are messages – or perhaps warnings – from deceased ancestors.

In modern times, there are those who suspect dreams are glimpses into parallel universes, and who can say that any of these theories are wrong?

It’s weird stuff and we may never have a thorough understanding of the nighttime dalliances of our sleeping minds. But we can take solace in the fact that most of us, no matter how long we live or how much we sleep, will never dream of being chased by giant broccoli.

Although I may have just cursed your brain and you’ll dream of that very thing tonight. If that were my dream . . . I’d run like hell.


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