Dream Logic Helps Decision Making

If you can figure out how to get out of a problem in a dream, this will help you get out of problems in real life.  Why is this?  Because it's harder to get out of problems in dreams than in real life. (Well, that's what happens in my dreams, anyway.)   In real life, you have a lot of ways to get out of a problem.  But in dreams, you are often limited in choices.  Sometimes, the choices are taken away from you.

Last Night's Dream Problem

A nightmare I had last night shows how dream logic works.  My childhood home was given everything for a great party for 24 hours every Sunday.  The giver was a supernatural source like a demon or god or something like that.  But when time was up, everything vanished, including doors and the electricity to run the elevators.  Why my house had two elevators, I don't know.  That's just the way dreams work.

The party goes well for the first Sunday but more people show up the next week and I have a hard time convincing the party-goers that everyone has to be out at a certain time or everything vanishes.  So the time comes and we're stuck in a house without power, furnishings, water, food or a door that open up to let us out.  We're trapped for the week.  But the people that may die in that week are those stuck in the elevators.  We basically vanished off the face of the earth for a week.

Figuring It Out

We tried tunneling out of the house but that didn't work.  We tried leaping out of the windows but would land right back inside of the house.  (Again -- that darn dream logic for you.)  By this time the folks in the elevators were panicking and screaming for help.

I thought about what I could do and had to sit on the hardwood floor to do it.  Suddenly, I realized what to do.  The whole situation was supernatural.  Therefore, we needed a supernatural solution.  We had to propitiate the party-giver spirit.  I had to be killed as a sacrifice.  I'm not sure if this worked because I woke up right as was being stabbed to death, but I had the sense that it would work.  (Again -- that's how dreams work.)

In Conclusion

This dream logic (or lack thereof) may be a symptom of either/or thinking which gives us false choices.  They're called "false choices" because we mistakenly think we only have two choices to choose from. We either choose black or white and not realize there are far more colors out there.  Either/or thinking during dreams could be due to lazy thinking or just our brains being too stressed out during the course of a dream to think of more than two choices.

Image of a stairway in Milan from WIkipedia.