Sarah LaBaire
Have you ever woken up completely disoriented, feeling incredibly emotionally charged, or just totally confused by a dream? Or maybe you've had a dream so vivid, it's hard to believe it really was a dream at all. 
These reactions upon waking are likely an indication that a dream was significant to you and your life in some way. Recurring, haunting, and provocative dreams are all worth investigating for the curious. Intuition is a powerful source of wisdom, and the imaginings of your sleeping brain can offer valuable insight. Scientists at the University of Rome have discovered that bizarre and vivid dreams are strongly connected to the amygdala and hippocampus in the brain, which are the hubs of processing short-term, long-term, and emotional memories. In fact, researchers at the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at UC Berkeley found that reduced REM sleep- the dreaming phase- can affect our understanding of complex emotions and social functioning.
When you choose to unravel the meaning behind your nightly vision, it is again your intuition that will tell you when an interpretation is accurate; you may feel a sense of relief or have a moment of recognition seeing how it all fits. Depending on the specific details of your situation, it could even be quite upsetting to confront your subconscious thoughts and feelings as they relate to your life.
This may be because of the purpose of our nocturnal reveries; they act as a sort of emotional filter. According to Scientific American, "dreams seem to help us process emotions by encoding and constructing memories of them... [Our] dream stories essentially try to strip the emotion out of a certain experience by creating a memory of it. This way, the emotion itself is no longer active... [When] we don’t process our emotions, especially negative ones, this increases personal worry and anxiety."
Though sometimes the honesty can be difficult to contend with, as an intellectual dreamer you do have control over what interpretation to trust- if an explanation simply doesn't make sense to you, than don't apply that one to your life! Perhaps a different approach will make sense. Many psychologists are aware that talking through the details of one's daily life will reveal fitting truths and connections, and the first answer might not be the answer. When you reach it, your accurate dream interpretation will offer peace of mind, greater ease in decision-making, deepened insight into the people around you as well as better understanding of yourself.

Sources
Sander Van Der Linden, The Science Behind Dreaming, Scientific American, July 26th 2011
Gillian Holloway PhD., Complete Dream Book, Sourcebooks Inc, 2001

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