The Meanings of Teenagers' Dreams

Source: Kelly Bulkeley

The teenage years are a time of “peak dreaming” for many people, when their dreams are most frequent, memorable, and colorful. Compared to childhood dreams, teenagers' dreams tend to have more characters, more social interactions, and more references to the world outside the family. Compared to adults, teenagers recall their dreams more often, with more intense content and relatively high proportions of flying, lucidity, romance, and nightmares.

This adolescent surge of dreaming reflects the developmental challenges that most teenagers face: a growing intellect, changing body, evolving friendships, and emerging identity. Because there is so much to deal with every day, the teenage mind-body system must process a huge amount of material every night. There’s a good reason why teenagers need so much sleep (8-10 hours per night is the recommendation of the National Sleep Foundation). This deep processing of physical and psychological experience is what we do each night when we sleep, and when we dream.

Nightmares

The turbulence of being a teenager often prompts dreams with themes of aggression and violence. Dreams like these can be upsetting, and if they occur repeatedly and/or disrupt your waking life, you should check with a mental health professional. But having strange nightmares every now and then is normal in adolescence. Many psychologists, especially Carl Jung and those who follow his ideas, see these kinds of nightmares as potential gifts from the psyche. In such dreams, aggressive images and energies can be interpreted in symbolic terms as revealing a new, unconscious part of yourself, a part that conflicts with the attitudes of your waking consciousness. Until you expand your conscious mind to include these new energies and acknowledge them as part of your whole self, the inner conflict will continue, and so will the nightmares.

Not all nightmares stem from inner conflicts, however. Many bad dreams are sparked by outer events, by difficult, painful, sometimes even traumatic events in the waking world. These kinds of nightmares are especially frequent in adolescence, too, thanks to the multiple sources of external pressure on the average teenager: from friends, teachers, parents, and social media, along with pervasive anxieties around large-scale issues of gun violence, climate change, and economic inequality, to name just a few.

Part of growing up and becoming an adult is learning to distinguish between these two sources of tension in your life: the internal and the external. It’s important to get it right, so the actions you take are appropriate and effective. Paying close attention to your dreams can help, because dreaming provides you with an honest perspective on both your inner and outer worlds and how they interact with each other.

Friendly and Romantic Dreams

At the other end of the relational scale, teenagers’ dreams often have strongly positive social qualities, with numerous friend and family characters who are engaged in enjoyable activities together. This, too, reflects the developmental challenges of adolescence. The increasing social complexity of dreaming for teenagers reflects the dramatically expanding network of people they are getting to know and deal with on a regular basis.

Dreams offer a surprisingly accurate portrait of our most important personal relationships, and this is especially valuable for adolescents for two reasons. First, dreams can give important clues about how you’re getting along with your friends and what to do if you have an argument or misunderstanding. Even if the images of your dreams are bizarre and otherworldly, the emotions are often directly connected to something actually happening in your waking life. This means that dreaming can serve as your own personal resource for greater emotional awareness and sensitivity toward your friends.

With adolescence come the bodily changes that prepare the way for adult sexuality. These changes have a big impact on dreaming. It is perfectly normal for teenagers to have physically vivid dreams of sexual encounters. However, the contents of these sexual dreams may or may not fit with their expectations or the expectations of their community. It can be incredibly positive to have a romantic encounter in a dream with someone you like in waking life, but it can be disturbing to have a romantic encounter with someone you don’t or shouldn’t like—or someone who is morally “taboo” or off-limits. The important thing to remember here is that dreaming is a work of the imagination; it envisions new possibilities and alternative ways of being, but it does not tell you what to do or how to behave. Dreaming provides you with honest self-knowledge about your romantic desires, and this knowledge can support you in making conscious decisions and choices that are true to who you are and who you want to become.

Transcendence

Many people experience the most intensely spiritual dreams of their lives when they are teenagers. Amid all the stress and anxiety of adolescence, it is also a time of fresh insights into the deeper dimensions of life, truth, and reality. Teenagers are often eager for such insights, hence the appeal of drugs, alcohol, dancing, music, and gaming, all of which work to alter ordinary consciousness and open the mind to new perceptions and ideas. Dreaming can have this consciousness-altering effect, too, especially when we experience what Jung called a “big dream"—a dream of special power and wisdom that feels realer than real. Most of the world’s religious traditions have taught that dreams are a valuable means of connecting with the Divine, and in some cultures teenagers are specifically taught to be on the lookout for these kinds of spiritual revelation in the dream state. If you have a dream of unusual intensity and vividness, with otherworldly images and mythic, larger-than-life characters, it’s worth paying close attention. You might record it in a journal or express it in a work of art—something to give the dream a respectful place in your waking life. If you take good care of this dream now, your future self will be grateful.