What Does Dreaming About Your Brain Mean?

Psychologically, the brain is the organ of the mind — so it most often touches the mind, intellect, and thinking: reason, knowledge, ideas, mental processing, intelligence, and your capability to think and understand. A brain dream often centers on your mental life: how you're thinking, your intellect and problem-solving, and your relationship to your own mind (its clarity, confusion, sharpness, or overload).

This carries several charges. As intellect and thinking, the brain touches reason, intelligence, knowledge, ideas, and the capacity to think, understand, and solve problems. As overthinking and overload, the brain can touch a busy, overactive, or overloaded mind — overthinking, too much going on mentally, or being 'in your head.' As mental state, the brain's condition mirrors your mental state: a sharp, clear brain (clarity, sharp thinking) versus a foggy, fried, or damaged one (mental exhaustion, overload, confusion, or 'losing your mind'). As exposure, an exposed brain can touch feeling mentally vulnerable, your thoughts laid bare, or 'losing your mind.' Whether the brain is sharp and clear, busy and overloaded, exposed and vulnerable, or damaged and 'fried' usually mirrors the mind and intellect, thinking and problem-solving, overthinking and mental overload, your mental state and clarity, and intelligence and capability.

A Freudian reading would attend to the brain as the seat of reason and thought — the organ of the intellect and conscious mind, bound up with thinking, knowledge, and the rational, and (in its overload or damage) with the strain on the mind. The brain can embody the intellect and the conscious, reasoning mind, and the strain, overload, or vulnerability of the thinking self.

Its sharpness or its overload carries the charge of the intellect and of mental strain. What the brain evokes — the clarity of sharp thought, the strain of overload, the vulnerability of the exposed mind — tends to point at the dreamer's relationship to the intellect and the mind: the reasoning, thinking self, the strain and overload of too much mental activity, and the vulnerability or clarity of the conscious, thinking mind.

While the brain as an organ is not a focus of Scripture (which locates thought and will more in the 'heart' and 'mind'), it touches the tradition's theme of the mind and its renewal — 'be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind,' the love of God 'with all thy mind,' and the call to a sound mind ('God hath... given us... a sound mind'). The brain, as the organ of mind, touches this theme of the mind, its renewal, and soundness.

A brain dream, read this way, can touch the mind, thinking, mental clarity or overload, or the renewing of the mind. A biblical sensibility might weigh the brain as an image of the mind — and recall the call to be 'transformed by the renewing of your mind' and the gift of a 'sound mind' — reading the dream as a prompt to tend one's mental life, to seek clarity and soundness of mind over overload and confusion, and to renew and fill the mind with what is true and good.

In Islamic sensibility the brain, as the seat of the intellect ('aql), touches the great honor the tradition gives to the intellect and reason (a gift to be used rightly, distinguishing right from wrong), the seeking of knowledge, and the soundness and right use of the mind. The brain evokes the honored intellect ('aql), reason, and the right use of the mind.

A brain dream, in this frame, might point to the mind and intellect, thinking and reason, mental overload, or clarity. Held with humility, the brain can invite the right use of the God-given intellect ('aql, highly honored in the tradition) — reasoning soundly, seeking beneficial knowledge, and tending the clarity and soundness of the mind — while guarding against mental overload and confusion, and using the gift of the intellect toward the good, the true, and the beneficial.

In a Hindu frame the brain touches the mind and intellect — the manas (mind) and buddhi (intellect, the faculty of discernment and reason) that think, process, and discern — and the state of the mind (clear and discerning, or agitated and overloaded). The brain evokes the mind and intellect (manas, buddhi), reasoning and discernment, and the state of the mind.

A brain dream, in this frame, can point to the mind and intellect, thinking and discernment, mental overload, or clarity. The tradition's note attends to the mind and its clarity: the brain as an image of the manas (mind) and buddhi (discerning intellect), and the state of the mind (clear and discerning, or agitated and overloaded) — an invitation to cultivate a clear, discerning mind over an overloaded or agitated one, to the right use of reason and discernment (viveka), and to the calming and clarifying of the thinking mind.