Dreaming about laughing

• A joke that does not survive translation, the characteristic feature.
• A physical state crossing into waking.
• Impropriety, in the inappropriate-laughter reports.
• Company, since these are rarely solitary.

Waking laughing is reported as one of the better ways to start a day, and dreamers who have it describe it warmly.

Laughing with the dead is a recognised and comforting form of grief dream and deserves more attention than it gets.

Very little. The inappropriate version produces embarrassment rather than distress.

Some dreamers report laughter that becomes uncontrollable and frightening, which is rare and belongs closer to the anxiety material.

The joke failing to survive is instructive. Dreams generate the feeling of significance, funniness or importance directly, without needing the content that would justify it.

So the joke was never funny; the funniness was produced separately. That is the same mechanism that produces unearned certainty and false significance across many entries here.

The physical carryover is worth noting for the same reason crying is: dreaming is not sealed off from the body.

Laughter is treated as significant in several interpretive traditions, and, as with weeping, some read it in the opposite direction to what a modern reader would expect.

There is little else, largely because dream reporting has historically concentrated on the distressing.

Observed: laughter, like crying, can continue into waking.

Reasonably supported: dreams generate feelings of significance independently of content that would warrant them.

Not established: any meaning for laughter in dreams.

• Were you laughing when you woke?
• Can you reconstruct why it was funny?
• Who were you with?
• Was it appropriate to the situation?

Under-logged in general. Recording the pleasant dreams as carefully as the distressing ones changes what a dream journal shows over a year, and this is one of the entries where that matters most.