On Dreams

Dream imagery can be so over the top sometimes, it’s all too easy to dismiss it all as nonsensical, meaningless, absurd. On the other hand, perhaps you awake from an anxiety dream or nightmare, and are so relieved that it was ‘just a dream’?! Did you know that dreams are part of our internal guidance system? In fact, Law of Attraction guru Abraham-Hicks suggests that dreams themselves are manifestations even!

Since Freud’s seminal Interpretation of Dreams (1899) was published at the turn of the century, dreams have been an important part of the cultivation and exploration of the modern mind. Although Freud’s essay offered a basic interpretation of dream symbolism, since his theories on psychosexual development favored a highly eroticized, gendered, and thereby binary analysis, popular culture has since reduced the Freudian interpretative lens to that of unconscious wish fulfillment. While it may seem archaic, if not problematic to our contemporary sensibility, it should be noted that other essays Freud wrote later in his career, such as the Theme of the Three Caskets (1913), Thoughts for the Time on War and Death (1915), and The Uncanny (1919) suggest deeper self-exploration, introspection, and evolution on the subject.

Image credit: While the colorful lithograph above appears in an early edition of Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott illustrated by Brett Lithographing Co., 1881, it is unaccompanied by text, apart from the Middle English inscription, God spede ye good, which may be a reference to the “two young lovers lately wed" in the poem, who appear to be eloping by boat in the background. Since The Lady of Shalott is depicted meditatively combing her hair, the image also connects her with the cult of the daydreamer throughout Victorian art and poetry— indeed, Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) completed a similar portrait called The Day Dream, 1880. In Rossetti’s version, a disengaged female figure is seated in nature with a book, or as one art historian put it, “escaped from the seasonal cycle and its vagaries into a world of her own!"

Freud’s student Carl Jung’s definition of dreams, meanwhile, was more expansive and inclusive. To Jung, dreams were the language of the soul and its eternal journey, consisting of universal symbols and archetypes accessible through the collective unconscious. His unique, holistic theories, which drew from a myriad of disciplines including anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, and religious studies set him apart from Freud's new science of psychoanalysis, and would later culminate in the C.G. Jung Institute of Analytical Psychology. In the later part of the 20th century, Robert Detzler (1926-2013) a Unity minister who channeled an energy healing system called Spiritual Response Therapy (SRT) also posited that some dreams had no inherent spiritual significance, but were simply a method the High Self used to release excess tension. This suggests that we may spiritually evolve beyond the need for night dreams once we reach higher levels of consciousness. Similarly, contemporary spiritual author Eckhart Tolle has also described an expanded state of “deep, dreamless sleep.”

Regardless of how we interpret them, dreams have rich symbolic meaning. Dreams may be latent, lucid, prophetic, healing, or recurring. Anxiety dreams and nightmares, meanwhile, sometimes featuring phobias, and deeper shades of our shadow self may be confronting and stressful. More mature souls may dream of past, parallel, and even future lives. While the wild, crazy, unknown of the dream realm still eludes most, those who recognize the unique perspective dreams provide may work with dream commands to try to gain insight into unconscious behavioral patterns. While it may seem illogical to our conscious, thinking mind, the purpose for subconscious language and symbolism is our psyche or higher self’s way of helping us work through our karmic patterns and problems while ensuring that we get our rest. Indeed, the more literal and lifelike the dream, the more likely we are to awake from our slumber!

While it may seem illogical to our conscious, thinking mind, the purpose for subconscious language and symbolism is our psyche or higher self’s way of helping us work through our karmic patterns and problems while ensuring that we get our rest. Indeed, the more literal and lifelike the dream, the more likely we are to awake from our slumber!

My own dreams used to be so vivid that I would write them down for artistic inspiration. Now, as a clairaudient empath and multidimensional healer, my dreams are rare for the reason that I receive most of my guidance directly through my channel or through signs and synchronistic messages in waking life. Before I had honed my channeling abilities, however, I kept a dream journal for many years and had become rather adept at dream interpretation. Using several dream dictionaries, including Jung’s own landmark Man and His Symbols (1968), for sometime I would record the definitions alongside the dream symbols followed by my analysis. If the meaning still eluded me, I would also integrate tarot and oracle cards to clarify, a practice which I continue to use with my clients.

Later replaced by inner child work, active imagination is another conscious technique drawn from Jung’s therapeutic experiments which may aid dream interpretation. Employing creative imagination to bypass the thinking mind, the technique meditatively guides the dreamer back into a dream to procure more information from the subconscious by directly interacting with dream archetypes. Yet another related practice that is nonetheless distinguishable from night dreams and signs and synchronistic messages from waking life, the colorful Lady of Shalott lithograph reminds us above, is the immersive daydream. While daydreaming has since acquired a negative reputation given its passive quality, itself a maladaptive form of dissociative absorption, like night dreams it also has therapeutic merit on account of its restorative benefits, which Abraham-Hicks would argue allows access to a receptive mode. Indeed, when the added component of intention or goal-setting is introduced, contemporary psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has gone so far as to connect the daydream wth the “flow” state of consciousness, a trancelike frequency whereby the daydreamer may achieve states of inner-motivation, inner-clarity, inner-confidence, and inner-knowing—a transporting, if not transpersonal experience!

While daydreaming has since acquired a negative reputation given its passive quality, itself a maladaptive form of dissociative absorption, like night dreams it also has therapeutic merit on account of its restorative benefits, which Abraham-Hicks would argue allows access to a receptive mode.

While dream language is often heavily symbolic, learning to distinguish between the literal and the figurative is a key component of dream interpretation. For example, if you dream of your home, school, or workplace as the setting, this may not be symbolic because these are places where we regularly spend time. As a general rule of thumb, if something seems unusual, out of time or place, however, chances are it’s symbolic. In the fragment below from my journal, for example, a child wouldn’t drive a car except in a storybook, cartoon, or video game. While the symbol of the house represents the feminine (Freud) or the self (Jung), the car generally represents the direction we are headed in life, a direction which if unknown may yield dreams of losing control. While I have long since had dreams as an adult of being driven by a driverless or haunted car, itself symbolic of places where we may have been abdicating our personal power, in this case the detail of feeling expected to drive an adult car at the tender age of three borders on nightmarish and is certainly as symbolic as it is disturbing!

While dream language is often heavily symbolic, learning to distinguish between the literal and the figurative is one of the key components of dream interpretation... As a general rule of thumb, if something seems unusual, out of time or place, chances are it’s symbolic.

I used to have this recurring dream where a childhood friend and I would drive a car, lose control, and crash.

The dream was so true to life that I would wake up thinking I were dead. I can even recall going so far as to pat my body down to check my vital signs! While there may have been news of a literal car crash around that time, and I can remember riding the Wind in the Willows (1908) themed ride at Disneyland that summer, featuring Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, later I learned this imagery and intensity had a lot to do my parent’s separation. Although my subconscious had already registered its imminence, I was only three when this disruption occurred. Since much of this imprinting was prelingual, my night dreams were the best way of processing what I sensed was occurring around me, but was often hidden and denied by my family’s contradictory behavior. Most of the therapists I later saw as a young adult told me it was unusual for a child who was so young to recall such vivid dreams.

Other ways our higher self and guide team may communicate with us through subconscious dream language may include common rhetorical devices such as allusion, analogy, irony, and paradox; conflict and power dynamics, and other elements of structure or style, such as repetition, emphatic or exaggerated use of color, texture, shape, and size. Colors themselves have different symbolic meanings, and may be researched. For example, in one dream I had while studying photography in college, I was gifted a golden camera case. Considering that I understood photography to be one of my soul’s gifts, the use of gold, a color associated with understanding, wisdom, wealth, and royalty seemed like a significant confirmation from the angelic realm!

Other ways our higher self, and guide team may communicate with us through subconscious dream language may include common rhetorical devices, such as allusion, analogy, irony, and paradox; conflict and power dynamics, and other elements of structure or style, such as repetition, emphatic or exaggerated use of color, texture, shape, and size.

In another dream fragment from around this same time, there was a storm and my family grabbed rocks to anchor themselves down; alas, the rocks would not hold me! I needed the trunk of a tree, a shaggy bark hickory tree to be exact. There was also the detail of a large-bodied spider with a red thread as though trying to suture the wound on the tree.

The shaggy bark hickory tree was significant because it was used on an old land deed to demarcate where our property ended. Since there had been a property dispute with the neighbors, this reflected the internal conflict I had with my family (man against man), and given my eccentricities, with the world, further affirmed by the presence of the storm (man against nature). More specifically, the dream imagery also recalled a photo where my family was sitting together on a large piece of driftwood, unaware of my internal struggles as though ‘bumps on a log’ or ‘peas in a pod.’ While I appear in the same image, I sit on my own, apart from them. The dream revealed that they still functioned as a dyad, a mother-child unit; whereas, I was a child of the universe. That the rocks couldn’t hold me reflected how much further I had to go on my soul’s journey to clear and (re)balance my karmic load given the more advanced age of my soul. Their rocks were sedimentary or igneous at best, whereas I needed something more deeply rooted to secure me.

In hindsight, since roots are also a metaphor for our ancestry, I now take this dream to indicate that our shared ancestral karma had perhaps trauma bonded them, but when compounded by my considerable past life trauma had dissociated me. While I have always been deathly afraid of spiders, which may represent a fear or hate of women (Freud), since they spin intricate webs they also symbolize creativity (Jung). The red spider is either something loathsome or something sacred. In this case, like a lucid dream or choose-your-own-adventure book, the interpretation is in the eyes of the beholder. Indeed, we can continue to identify with the wound and give our power over to the perpetrator, to our families, to authority, to society, to the other gender, etc. Interestingly, we may inadvertently enter a spiritual bypass or indulge in blind faith by giving our power over to God even. We can go on identifying with being a victim of unfortunate fate or circumstance, or we can transform fate into destiny and grow through by choosing to heal and forgive. We reclaim our sovereignty when we wake up from the pantomimic dream of life, and recognize that we are creating our own reality in co-partnership with the Divine and with our higher self as our faithful guide!

In this case, like a lucid dream or choose-your-own-adventure book, the interpretation is in the eyes of the beholder. Indeed, we can continue to identify with the wound and give our power over to the perpetrator... or we can transform fate into destiny and grow through by choosing to heal and forgive. We reclaim our sovereignty when we wake up from the pantomimic dream of life, and recognize that we are creating our own reality in co-partnership with the Divine and with our higher self as our faithful guide!

In a more uplifting example from waking life, following my twin flame recognition event I would regularly manifest signs and synchronistic messages to help me keep the faith during separation. Aside from universal number syncs like 11:11, 2:22, feathers, coins, flamingoes, birthday number sequences, and signs of both of our names, another more idiosyncratic sign of alignment I would receive was a scottie or westie dog. This spirit animal messenger I understood to be a pun on my twin flame’s name. One day when I was feeling down on my luck and doubting whether I would ever hear from him again, I resolved to ask my guide team to show me another sign. To prepare myself to receive more, after setting my intention, I practiced raising vibration by getting off the subject. Can you believe that later that day while out on a walk, I manifested not one, but three giant schnauzers before my very eyes?! What was especially uncanny about this encounter was that I had never seen these dogs in my neighborhood before or after this incident, as though they had been put there by Spirit just to prove a point. If you aren’t acquainted with this breed of dog, it’s essentially a scottie dog on steroids. I was taken aback by the repetition, size, and scale which our higher selves had used for emphasis—just like they do in the language of dreams. "Now do you believe?!" I heard one of my guides inquire.

In another dream from a few years ago, my twin flame and I were at a special black tie event, and a waiter came to take our order. My twin ordered a piece of chocolate cake, but the waiter disappeared before I could place mine. There was also the detail of a strange dachshund-shaped cat-dog creature rushing around the perimeter of the room.

While the waiter’s assumption was that my twin would ‘have his cake and eat it too’ since I wasn't so sure, the dream reflected my fear that perhaps our feelings weren’t mutual, after all. Although Freud would probably argue that the dachshund was phallic (yang) and the sinful chocolate cake was a wish fulfillment (yin), the symbolic meaning of the animals add further dimension. Since dog is about loyalty and cat is about feminine power, it’s not just a polarizing battle of the sexes; indeed, a more holistic Jungian interpretation might connect this symbol with the lesson of the TEMPERANCE (XIV) card in the Tarot deck—the patient, careful, moderate harnessing of potentially volatile factors; harmonization; integration of opposites, the sacred union of the inner masculine and feminine. While I awoke before the cake arrived, of course, time would tell if my twin flame shared it with me!

Dream symbols and angel number sequences have universal meanings which may be researched in a dream or numerology dictionary; however, some may have a more idiosyncratic meaning... This is where the techniques of free association and active imagination may greatly enhance dream analysis.

Dream symbols and angel number sequences have universal meanings which may be researched in a dream or numerology dictionary; however, like the earlier example of the scottie dog I used form waking life, some may be more personal. While the cat-dog creature could be likened to something out of Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland (1865), especially with the detail of the ‘eat-me’ cake, it turned out to have a more idiosyncratic meaning to this dreamer yet. This is where the technique of free association and active imagination can greatly enhance dream analysis. To this end, as I was interpreting the dream, interestingly, what came to mind was a quail I once saw rushing around the perimeter of a butterfly conservatory. Quails are iridescent, a transcendent color connected with the eighth chakra, or soul star chakra, yet also defenseless and vulnerable, and butterflies represent metamorphosis and transformation. When we put all this together, there was a structural connection my higher self appeared to be making between the chocolate cake and the elusive cat-dog creature—not only was I being guided to embrace the fear of the unknown, the vulnerability needed to be transformed into something beautiful!

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