It is a truth universally acknowledged that nobody wants to listen to your dreams. As a vivid dreamer, I bemoan this fact of life, because I spend so much time subjected to the nonsense of my subconscious that I feel I should be allowed to talk about it. But even my partner has put a moratorium on telling him my dreams unless he’s “doing something cool” in them. (He seems strangely unbothered by how few I’ve shared since.) There’s no doubt that we’re seeing, hearing and feeling big things in our dreams. Neuroimaging during sleep has identified spikes in activity amid the parts of the brain that control emotions, make memories and process visual and auditory stimuli. The question is how this tangle of content is meant to be interpreted. Science has offered no shortage of theories, none of them quite in agreement. The American psychologist Calvin S. Hall, for instance, claimed that dream logic relies on symbols just as language relies on figures of speech and idioms, as a way to “convey meaning with precision and economy.” But another psychologist, Dylan Selterman, has argued there’s no universally held meaning for a given symbol. In her aptly named 1974 book “The Dream Game,” the psychologist Ann Faraday dedicated several pages to how we might encode messages in our dreams through homophones, word reversals and visual puns. Ms. Faraday described, for instance, having discovered her true feelings about a book she was reviewing after dreaming about an overpriced meal of wild boar and a free drink. “My heart presented its feelings on the subject very clearly — that while the ‘food for thought’ contained therein had a certain amount of ‘spirit,’ the heavy presentation was a ‘bore’ and certainly not worth $12,” she wrote (at a time, it should be noted, when $12 got you more than a grilled cheese at Panera). Lately, many people have been dreaming about Mall World. The figurative and punning possibilities abound: Could it mean you’ve met your soul mate, as in “If you’ve seen The One, you’ve seen the Mall?” Are the mall’s contents predicting your future, in that things lie “in store” for you? Or is it, much like the malls of waking life, just a place you’re loitering in to pass the time? Rather than working out our hopes, resentments, hurts and desires in word and picture puzzles, it could be that we’re actually working out, in a way. Some researchers have characterized dreams as jogging for your brain — like a warm-up for consciousness. Others propose that dreams serve to purge the brain of extraneous connections made throughout the day that aren’t required for rational thought — a KonMari of the mind, if you will. If any of these arguments resonate, or if you have your own take, feel free to send it my way at crosswordeditors@nytimes.com. Don’t feel the need to decide right away. In fact, why don’t you sleep on it? Solve Today’s Capture
Puzzle of the WeekThis week, check out today’s puzzle by Kenneth Cortes. In his constructor notes, he wrote: “Happy Pride Month! The weeks leading up to this puzzle’s release have been challenging and nerve-racking for me, but support from my loved ones and my excitement to share this puzzle have gotten me through. The best part of creating crosswords is sharing them with my friends, family, co-workers and school community at large. Shout-out to you all!” Solve the puzzle, and then read more of Kenneth’s story in the Wordplay column.
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