Does every dream have a meaning?

[jalef]

In my opinion yes but some are very hard to interpret. its quite obvious what your subconscious does when you wached a film or something and then dream about it. other dreams are that strange that it drives you mad when you try to analyze their meaning...

[CFTraveler]

That's very hard to answer. According to what we think we know about the mind, our subconscious mind only can communicate symbolically, and it's the part that has access to memories. Your conscious mind is the part that has rational discriminatory thinking, and verbal communication. When we are awake we mostly use our conscious mind- I'm hungry, should I make a sandwich? I'm on a diet... I should eat a salad- but that cookie looks good. Here you are using your senses, verbalizing a need, and making a decision. Meanwhile, your subconscious is accessing your memory, where you promised yourself you were going to go on a diet (you used a bit of your subconscious, but not consciously.) Now suppose you eat the sandwich, and a cookie too, and then go on with the rest of the day. Then you go to sleep and dream you are eating a giant cookie, or a giant cookie is eating you. This has meaning (obviously) Your subconscious just told you (without words, because it only has symbolic communication) that you ate more than you should (giant cookie- more than was good for you) or you are going to die of obesity-related problems (the cookie is eating you.) Now, every time you dream you are looking at the pictures your subconscious is throwing at you. The problem is that the subconscious has seen everything you physically (and also possibly nonphysically, but we'll leave that for another discussion) so it shows you in its language (symbolic) everything you perceived. Now, you may be looking at a picture of what you saw today (let's say you walked by a bird and thought it was pretty, and forget about it- Then dream that you were walking down the street and an angel came to you and gave you this important message you don't remember.) Setting aside for this discussion the possibility of a real visitation- you decide to analyze it and remember than when you were in bible class they taught you that doves were messengers from god, so your subconscious connected birds=messengers=angels and now you had a 'visitation' when what your subconscious was merely showing you the bird you saw today.
(of course, the opposite could be said: You were visited by an angel, your conscious mind interpreted it as a bird and your subconscious mind showed you what you really saw.
So, in conclusion, yes, I believe that dreams always have a meaning, but the meaning usually comes from your life/memory, and are not always important in a life/death situation.

[enoch]

After studying my own dreams for a few years I came to realise that, personally, my dreams were 99% made of thoughts, images and feelings I'd had during the day.

It's very important, I believe, that we should be doing away with this dream dictionary interpretation method where it's taken that there is universal language to dreams. I don't believe that for a moment. Everyone is unique and must know their own dreams thoroughly before making sense from the bits inbetween the bits.

I've had a few prophetic dreams but they were only borne from my fears, thoughts and suspicions about the future. In other words instinct was screaming at me in the day and I chose to either ingnore it or couldn't interpret it effectively and dreams gave me visuals I needed during the night to pull it all together.

That's my personal inner workings. I'm sure eeach and every one of us is totally different.