Listen to Your Dreams

Do dreams have any meaning?  Are they useful in self-understanding?

A woman once confessed to a friend that she had been lying to everyone about her deep depression and her abuse of cocaine and alcohol.  She had been in a tailspin since separating from her husband, even driving to a hospital to have herself committed, but changing her mind at the last minute because she remembered her young daughter’s need to be cared for.

She related this dream:  “I am in a friend’s house.  A man has strangled her.  I watch it again and I can’t do anything about it.  The police come and take him away.  I feel very sympathetic for him.  I leave in a car, lots of traffic, I look in the rear view mirror and see five children hanging on the back bumper of the car.  I’m concerned about their safety but the traffic is so heavy I can’t open the door and help them.”

Reflecting, she saw the following things:  Her awareness of the turmoil in her life was fleeting, clouded by drugs, and it all usually seemed unreal to her.  This matched the fact that the violence in the dream was happening to a friend, and not to herself; and that the children were strangers and not her own.  Still, she could recognize that her husband was very dominant (like the dream husband of her neighbor), and tried to control her thoughts and words, and living with him had felt strangling.  The loving sympathy she could feel for him was part of her stranglehold.

The dream traffic was like the chaotic, crowded pace of her daily life, with which she keeps herself from facing her real situation and feelings.  The dream children were vulnerable and in danger, something that was very true emotionally for her daughter (“even five-times over,” she said) although she had been keeping her back to that fact.

A man in his mid-20s dreamed that he was back in his childhood house and was tearing up an audio tape belonging to his older brother.  The brother comes in and declares that there is nothing on the tape, anyway.  The man is filled with helpless rage.

Thinking about it when awake, the man realized several things: although physically an adult and living far from the town of his childhood, in the realest sense he still inhabited that situation, still tied emotionally to unresolved issues from those years.  The same angry sense of inferiority that he felt toward his brother now colored his feelings about many people whom he saw as stronger or more advantaged than himself.  He could see in many of his fitful plans and angry outbursts, an inner drama of rebellion and certain defeat, leaving him feeling futile and bitter.  He noted that a kind of “tape” was still running in his life, repeating these frustrating old themes, and he longed to destroy it.  In a recent confrontation with his brother about old grievances, the latter had declared smugly that all that was imaginary and hadn’t really happened (the tape was empty, from his point of view).

A man who was feeling emotionally stronger than he had in many years was working with great creativity and productivity.  A sense of zest and purpose had gradually returned and was growing every day.  He dreamed that he was visiting a couple as their house guest.  They take him outside to show him a gorgeous sunset, and he realizes that they are exceptionally wise and balanced, having gone through much suffering and struggle but somehow refining it all into a deep humanity and spirituality.  They then go inside and lead him downstairs to a basement, then deeper into the earth.  They emerge into beautiful moonlit fields.  They sit on a grassy slope and converse with deep clarity, and a sense of beauty and meaning suffuses the scene.  Reflecting when awake, the dreamer realizes that he was healing from a long period of confusion and loss, and that his own reawakened creativity was leading him down into areas of himself that felt unexplored but hopeful.  Still, it all seemed new and strange to him (as reflected by his being a guest and stranger in the dream.)

These examples were picked at random.  The fact is every dream is a clear mirror, not for one’s face, but for the shape of one’s life.  No clever interpretation is required, only a respectful questioning of the dream, letting its themes, action, feelings, and situations speak simply for themselves.

Sometimes it is proposed that dreams are meaningless internal noise, the random chatter of a brain that is idling in sleep.  This is hardly the whole truth.  Dreams are meaningful in their own right.  If you want to know yourself more clearly, waken to them.