here is my answer to someone who asked why i write out most dreams i have ...

first, i like them as autonomously generated pieces of abstract writing that i can exercise my ability of description on.
reporting very strange things but nevertheless only having that static source to report as best as i can, without deviation

second, i believe that subjective experience has inherent value. in fact it may be considered the
primary currency of life. i fear death because i want to experience things. & dreams are kind of like
a pinnacle of subjective experience, i imagine parallel to hallucinogenic drugs but i've never used those

some, or really most, or really all dreams are subjective to a degree that they can't possibly be described
in full detail. sure, it's not possible to describe even a real past event, or literally anything for that
matter, in "full detail" as i imagine "full detail", but dreams reach a different level of subjectivity

a dream is any possible combination of qualia, infinite even way beyond the other factorial infinities of
the different permutations of pixels & audio samples, & even beyond the permutations of the innumberable
variables of any real life experience. & it's experienced exclusively by me. i can never fully describe
one, but by archiving it for myself, i can reread it & Deeply Understand it like nothing else

i also provide abstract descriptions for other people to construct their own imagined versions
of, & make of those what they will, in a way that i imagine is different from reading a normal
form of fiction. because dreams have a trait that i feel was maybe only replicated semi-recently
by text-generating neural networks:

aside from how the person who had the dream adapts it, you know the content of the dream can be considered to have
no conscious author, despite clearly dealing in semi-coherent juxtapositions of recognizable human experiences & ideas
& feelings, that could be considered to have some buried meaning, following a hidden web of logic, but only if you
choose to assign meaning to the images people's brains create if they're functioning perceptually but unconsciously,
following autonomous biological routines that happen to leak into their awareness in comprehensible ways

another layer of subjectivity to dreams is a phenomenon where any given qualia can be associated, in a hard-to-describe way,
with any other qualia, opening things up exponentially. you could, i don't know ... dream about going into a very cold room, &
the sensation of coldness could also "be" the idea of a house you used to live in, or some other feeling i could try to improvise
here that is really too specific to properly describe even as a random made-up example. just linked together in a very raw way

so umm yes. a dream is like being gifted a memory, free of the "charge" of having to have
been in the specific, maybe impossible situation needed to create it organically. & it can
then mean anything to you! although i guess this could all also be provided by a book hehe

the notion of cleanly mapping certain events in dreams to certain meanings feels sort of absurd to me. not worth entirely discounting,
like, the idea that maybe people who are anxious gravitate toward certain clusters of qualia is interesting. & things can have meta
meanings. if your mother appears constantly, it's not anyone's place to tell you what her presence means, but it's likely that it
means that it means something. but it doesn't have to mean more than "i have lots of dreams about my mom", if you don't want it to

but the point to me is that. you have to recognize only what was in the dream, no extrapolation, but you're free to take what
you want to from it, within those constraints. & there are not many constraints to your interpretation of abstract images anyway