You may say I'm a dreamer...
…but I’m not the only one! Wise words, John Lennon. Wise words.
If you ever sleep, then you too are a dreamer. That’s right, folks! Everybody dreams. Even the people that claim to have never had a dream are simply losing the memory of the dream the moment the alarm hits their ears or their dog’s morning breath hits their face. Every person (and almost every mammal!) has had the experience of images, physical sensations, ideas and feelings emerging during specific (REM) stages of sleep and today, I want to talk about it.
At this point, you might be wondering what on Earth dreams have to do with counselling. To that, I would calmly answer, “OMG EVERYTHING!!!!”. The fact is, most of the conscious activity we experience throughout the day is only a tiny slice of the brain-activity-pie! There is a LOT that is going on behind the scenes within our unconscious mind, which influences our behaviours, thoughts, urges, emotions, preferences, memories, and health, all without us knowing. How exciting and terrifying at the same time!
Dreams are exceptionally valuable from a mental health perspective because they provide a link between the unconscious and conscious mind. Dreams give us alternatives to ordinary reality and may allow us to think in new and creative ways. They present stories that open the way for us to see things in a new light and can potentially reveal answers to important questions we have while awake. The kicker, of course, is that dreams can be pretty irrational and therefore ever so difficult to interpret. That, my friends, is why I bring you this blog post. Allow me to outline a very generalized and brief guide to dream interpretation, so you can stop loathing your spouse for yelling at you in last night’s dream.
Did that last line resonate with you? I have had dreams about someone being a jerkasaurus and then not spoken to them for a week. Did that person actually do me any form of harm? Absolutely not! However, the intensity of the dream elicited enough emotion that I was put-off by the person in my waking life. Sound familiar yet? This theme is something I have encountered in my own life and see often in my clients: confusing the image of a person in our dream with the human we know in waking life. Often we interpret a person’s actions in our dreams as being a warning or literal representation of what that person is doing while we are awake. With the very rare exception, this method is dangerously wrongo. Not only does that approach result in us resenting (or admiring!) someone who hasn’t earned it, but we also lose sight of the more likely reason a particular person is present in a dream. Let’s pause and review a Carl Jung quote, shall we?
“The whole creation is subjective, and the dream is the theatre where the dreamer is at once the scene, actor, prompter, stage, manager, author, audience, and critic.”
What our pal Carl is saying is that every single aspect of a dream has been fabricated by the dreamer. Thus, each contextual detail, including the people we see in a dream, is a representation of a part of the dreamer. When you see a person in your dream, ask yourself what that person represents to you. Were they present at a formative stage of life? Did they join you in specific adventures? Do they represent an experience? Do their personality traits match or differ from yours? Do their actions in the dream go along with or against your values? The same goes for the places we see in dreams, the colours of our clothing and even the weather! What do each of these dream details mean to you in waking life? Analyzing the personal significance of images we see in a dream provide us with the insight we need to understand a general theme or even specific messages.
The beauty of all this is that dream analysis can be done by YOU! You are the dreamer and therefore you are the expert that can interpret the images most accurately, according to your own personal experiences. Sure, an ambitious counsellor can help to guide the process, but you are the only person on Earth that has access to the wealth of information you know about your own life.
Let’s run through a quick example from Betty and Felicia, two made-up clients who conveniently have the same dream of a pillow fight with their sister:
Betty, who has a resentful relationship with her sister in waking life, has this dream to help express bottled aggression, as well as alert Betty that her early resentments need to be processed. In Betty’s dream, her sister represents unfairness, weakness, and cruelty, which Betty ‘fights’ within herself by faking a smile every day. Felicia, on the other hand, has a loving relationship with her sister in waking life, and this playful dream inspires her to revisit memories of joy and cultivate more fulfilling relationships in waking life. In Felicia’s dream, her sister represents love, connection, and hope, which Felicia yearns for but is 'fighting’ as she ruthlessly pursues her isolating career.
Do you see what I did there? Remember that the same images may mean vastly different things to different people, so it is best to assess your personal relationship to an image before consulting an analyst (or google).
Well, there you have it. A very basic approach to analyzing dreams without the catastrophic effects of attributing a person’s actions in dreams to their waking character. The truth is, many of us focus our attention on knowing other people in our lives far better than we know ourselves. Analyzing dreams can give us a daily dose of introspection to help guide our waking lives based on what is happening behind the scenes. Go forth, and dream on.
