At least you should consider giving a relationship with this person you dreamed of a try.

Dreams are something very personal. For this reason I think that any form on dream interpretation based on shapes and objects you see in your dreams is nonsense. But if you dreamed about having a relationship with another person and you felt quite passionate about it, it might very well be that you just realized something that was hidden in the unconscious parts of your mind.

If it was meaningless you will find out soon enough and still be able to end this relationship.

So if you don't think that this person is ugly I would give it a try if I would be you. - There's not much that you could lose.

You will find others who disagree, but I personally think it is possible to learn a lot about yourself by paying attention to your own subconscious and intuition, of which dreams are definitely a part.

Whether you can find meaning in a dream 'rationally' depends on how strictly you define 'rational'. I think the appropriate method to study dreams is intuitionally, not rationally. However, in my philosophy, rationality is founded on top of our pre-existing ability of intuition.

I think there is a good 'rational' defense of intuition, and likewise, there is a good 'intuitional' defense of rationality.

The rational defense of intuition is on pragmatic grounds: Intuition, when used appropriately, is useful.

Therefore, if you can see the usefulness in analyzing your dreams using your intuition, then you can 'rationally' find meaning in your dreams.

I do believe that it takes practice to be able to use your intuition to analyze yourself. Most people do not spend a lot of time in introspection, and so they really don't know what makes themselves tick. On the flip side, a lot of people who *do* spend time in introspection do so from a highly rational perspective, trying to find their own flaws and eliminating them. This method is not very useful when trying to get meaning out of a dream. You need to spend time playing with your intuition, letting it go without trying to control it. From this play/practice, you'll develop a few intuitional concepts and skills that will be useful in getting meaning out of your dreams (and other intuitional experiences).

I personally used to completely reject intuition, and I thought dreams were completely meaningless, mere entertainment at best, random and pointless at worst. It took me quite a while to break these assumptions and start playing with my intuition again, rather than constantly trying to stamp it out.

The first thing I learned is the importance of emotions. 2+2=4 is a rational statement that has little or no emotion behind it. But 2 lost children reunited with their 2 worried parents equals 4 releived and joyous people is a completely different 'equation', from an intuitional perspective. To understand your dream, you will need to examine the emotions you felt during the various scenes in the dream, rather than trying to make 'sense' of the dream-logic of the events themselves.

The next thing I learned is that intuition/emotions are of the subconscious, not specifically the conscious. You can be completely unaware of how you are feeling. Your body may be tense, and you don't know why. What is happening is that your subconscious feels fear, but your conscious mind is unaware of it. Your body reacts to the subconscious emotion, making you tense, but your conscious mind is not aware of the reason, and so you don't know why your body is tense. I experience this disconnect very frequently, and it has taken me a lot of practice to learn to identify it.

Another example of this is when you do things without really knowing why. This is very similar to the situation I mentioned with your body being tense. I have often found myself in discussions raising my voice and using aggressive body language, while keeping my words perfectly logical and rational. Why am I raising my voice? At first I didn't know. But then I started to realize that there was a subconscious anger in me that I was suppressing in order to keep my argument rational.

Sometimes, I'm not able to suppress the emotion, and I have an outburst of some kind. Usually that involves insults and other passive-aggressive behaviour, rather than physical aggression. I am rarely physically aggressive, thankfully, but I still 'act out' in my own way. If you asked me at that moment why I did what I did, I would either say "I don't really know," or I would make up some rationalization like, "Well, he deserved it."

When you learn how to tap into the intuition, you need to realize that it arises out of this subconsciousness. Imagine it like a dark stage with a bright spotlight. The spotlight moves around from place to place, uncovering details about the things on the stage, but it cannot light up the whole stage. The spotlight is your conscious awareness, and the rest of the items on the stage, hidden in shadows, are your subconsciousness.

You can also imagine it like your vision. The point of focus where you see most clearly is your conscious mind, and everything that is 'out of the corner of your eye' is your subconsciousness.

The subconsciousness is much vaster, but less focused, than your conscious awareness. A dream arises out of this subconscious 'field' or 'stage'. All the details that you are not aware of directly are products of your subconscious mind. For example, when you talk in the dream, that is mostly your conscious mind. However, when other people talk in a dream, that is mostly your subconscious mind. You are directly aware of your thoughts when you speak, but you are not directly aware of the other person's thoughts when they speak.

When strange things happen in your dream, that's a product of your subconscious. Which leads to....

The third thing I learned is that the subconscious works by intuition. Intuition itself has its own particular way of working. And the most important concept to understand is the idea of 'association'.

Association is how concepts/ideas/people/feelings are all connected within the brain, within the subconscious mind. This is a critical aspect of how our intelligence works, and how our memories work. When I say the word 'apple', a concept pops into your mind. It may be an image of an apple, a taste, or just a vague 'idea' of an apple. What has happened here is that the sound of me saying 'apple' (or the letters you read on this screen spelling out a-p-p-l-e) is *associated* with the concept of 'apple' in your brain. So the word 'apple' evokes (pops into your head automatically) the concept of 'apple'.

Imagine the *association* itself as a rubber band or a string, or some kind of dynamic connection from one entity in your imagination/subconscious to another entity. So the *sound* of 'apple' or the visual *perception* of the word 'apple' is associated with the cognitive *concept* of 'apple'.

All entities in your brain are connected this way. Associations are real. They are manifested via neural connections. However, when I speak of associations, I'm using them in an abstract way, not to denote specific neuronal synapses, since we don't have an exact understading of this yet.

So, when you think of apple, I'm now going to ask you to think of something related to an apple. Pick the first thing that comes to your mind. It may have been 'pie', or 'tree', or 'worm' or 'teacher', or something seemingly random like 'walnut' or 'Saturday'.

It doesn't matter what concept you came up with. What matters is how you got there. There was an association between the concept of apple and whatever other concept you came up with.

Associations, and learning how to navigate them, are critical to understanding intuition, and hence dreams. I have spent a lot of time playing with associations, in an attempt to 'loosen up' my intuition. It's like training or practicing.

The fourth thing I learned is that associations are not just one-to-one, and they are not always logical or the same. They can be quite complex and they can be seemingly paradoxical. Use simple associations to build up more complex associations. And allow paradoxes to flip back and forth without favouring one interpretation over the other. This is where the power of intuition really starts to shine.

In fact, associations can be made from any concept to any other concept. They are like building blocks, or legos, or mechanos, or what have you. You can relate seemingly completely random ideas to each other through a step-by-step association from one concept to some intermediate concept.

This is the realm of metaphors. It is also the realm of rationalizations (excuses people make up to quiet their cognitive dissonance).

Another thing I learned is that some associations 'fit' or 'make sense' more than others. This is because association and intuition are how we make sense of the world. When you learn how to drive a car, you make associations: Push this pedal means 'go', turn the steering wheel this way means 'left', etc. Once you learn these associations, you no longer have to 'think' about driving, it all just 'fits' together and you drive fluidly via intuition.

So, that's like a super-quick crash course in intuition. Like I said, you have to practice it and let your subconscious play a bit, and things will really open up. Everyone can do this at some level, but there is definitely a set of skills that you can learn to get better at it.

So, back to your dream:

#1 is don't analyze your dream rationally. It won't work. You will come up with an interpretation, but it will be forced and incorrect. You have to find the interpretation that 'fits' or 'makes sense'. And by this I mean the one that 'feels' right, not the one that is 'logical'. For example, if I dream about being chased by zombies near my home, it may be 'logical' to interpret that as being afraid of being attacked by a criminal as I come home at night. However, that doesn't 'feel' right to me. It doesn't 'fit' my intuition. However, when I realize that there's an association between zombies, which eat 'brains' and are 'dead', and religious idiots which are 'brain dead', then I realize that the dream has more to do with my fight against religion than it does about some event near my home. In fact, this realization helps me understand that my 'home' in my dream is not really 'where I live', but 'who I am'. I feel like I'm in a desperate and overwhelming struggle against brain dead religious idiots who are trying to turn me into one of them.

So, this is the kind of work you'll need to do for your dream. You find out how the different elements 'feel' to you, how they 'relate' to you, and then you see how they are connected within the dream, with its 'dream logic'. Then you figure out the metaphor that makes the most sense to you, and suddenly the dream will make total sense.

For example, is this girl in your dream really that particular girl, or is she just a convenient stand-in for a more general concept of 'girl', 'girlfriend', 'love', 'mother', whatever. You have to make those associations yourself. Pick the one that feels most right. Go by what you felt in the dream. In the dream you wanted to 'be with her'. Was that a feeling of love, or of fear of loss, or of desperation (fear of being alone), or some other feeling?

You talk about having a 'purpose' in the dream, and not really knowing your purpose in real life. Maybe the dream is ultimately trying to tell you something about 'what you really want' in your subconscious mind, which you are repressing from your conscious awareness. This is quite common, IMO. It could be as simple as 'I want someone to love', or it could be as grand as 'this is what I want to do for the rest of my life'.

You might want to write down the dream. This can help untangle complex associations. Try not to censor yourself. Just write the first thing that comes to mind, and keep on writing until you've written all you want to write. Then read it again a few days later: You may suddenly see the meaning pop out from your own words as clear as day.

Warning: I do not believe all dreams mean something. I think they are the brain's way of untangling worries, fears, confusions, and other subconscious clutter. Sometimes this means that the dream is totally mundane, like: Don't forget to take out the garbage. Sometimes a dream might be completely random, like being so drunk that all that comes out of your mouth is random gibberish. However, I do think it is possible (and useful!) to explore and try to decipher dreams that have a lot of emotional weight behind them. Even if it tells you nothing about a real-world circumstance, it might tell you something interesting about your subconscious mind. "Know thyself", as the Oracle at Delphi says.

Also, it is possible to overdo the analysis, and take away too much literal meaning out of it. The intuition is powerful, but it is also easy to abuse. You don't want to be the kind of person who takes a dream that means 'don't forget to take out the garbage' and turn it into a mystical vision that 'means' you are destined to be the king of the world and should invade Poland as soon as possible. As we've seen from religion -- most religious texts are written in an intuitive/associative manner -- there is a real danger in taking your intuition too seriously. It is a useful tool, but it's not a magical source of Truth(tm). Don't lose your rational mind to intuitional delusions.

There are many people involved in dream research. There is only one thing they all agree on, no one knows why we dream.

Dream interpretation is a scam that can be traced from con artists at the beginning of recorded history to the modern con artist Sigmund Freud and all the rest of the talk your way to mental health school of crime, i.e., psychoanalysts.

Google on vivid dreams and see if that is like your experience. If so follow the links and find many people say it is a learned skill and plenty of people are willing to tell how they learned it without charging a penny.

I have fooled with it off and on over the years and have had some spotty success. My son says he has them regularly. The good news is trying to learn it does not waste any waking hours.

 You tell him ! Never,ever sacrifice college for chasing some tail .Live and learn. 

On a purely psychological level no, you can learn about yourself through your dreams. But make sure that you consider that the dream may not have meant what you are thinking of right now.

From what I can tell, you had this dream after she told you that she would have stayed if only you had asked her out. That is fine by itself. Perhaps the dream has little to do with her and more to do with you overcoming your personal fears.

Had you asked her out when you had the chance, what would have come from that? The fact is that you will never know. Perhaps she would have followed you to the school of your choice? Then you get the girl and the great career. Now you will never know.

Well, let me run with the idea that you have to let go of your fear. Right now, you come off as being afraid that you made the wrong choice. Well, if you let go of that fear, then you can have your fist choice of schools and chase tail there. If you want to, you chase tail that is studying the same or a related field. That means tail that you can have a conversation with. Double win if you want that.

I totally agree.

I got in contact with her

She hates her college, she hates her "friends" there (you have to have some friends despite if you like them or not), she hates her teachers... She just sounded bad and stressed out.

I decided i would try to get the best of both colleges

I told her how i felt and how i made a huge mistake letting her leave... I told her i didn't want to lose any chance there still is (she said "same here" to this) I told her I wasnt going to go to her college but I would wait at mine for her if she chose to transfer next year... (she was somewhat interested in my college to begin with)

She didnt have an answer on the spot (naturally) but she was really happy to hear this.

as for this thread, thanks for the responses...

(I know it must seem like all i do on this forum is ask questions or have some personal issues or whatever but I think this forum replaced my parents as a source for answers. Considering they would give me something about how God has someone planned for me just wait. Or some other fairy tale about whatever issue is going on. Thanks for putting up with me )

Nice one. You were honest, open, and also maintained your personal integrity by not sacrificing yourself for some possible outcome which you could never know how it would go. Pat yourself on the back, there!