Dream analysis
Jun. 5th, 2008 02:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marydellSomeone in bloglandia mentioned having a dream that's bothering her, and I thought I'd email her to say how I generally interpret dreams. Then I figured it'd be better if I wrote something in my LJ about it, in case anyone else is ever interested. Also because unsolicited advice is frequently obnoxious, although I will probably send her a pointer to this.
I have vivid, symbol-saturated dreams--less as I get older and mellower, but I still have them. What I find is that if I pay careful attention to the symbolism of every single dream, the narratives kind of end up explaining themselves, because my subconscious uses the same symbols over and over.
I have a couple of re-occurring dreams about houses. I read, a long time ago, that if you dream about your house, you're dreaming about your mind or your personality. The act of reading that interpretation made it true for me--ever since then, houses have appeared in my dream as an obvious stand-in for the space in my head. For example, during a time when a family member was sick with cancer, she was on my mind more than usual. I had a dream that she was living in my house (in fact, I woke my husband up to help find her, because I was still kind of dreaming when I woke). In later years, when I started having to make some medical decisions about my aging parents, I dreamed that they moved everything from their house into my house. I've had dreams about secret rooms, dreams about water seeping in through the roof, dreams about water filling the basement. They all had clear equivalents to things going on in my life, considering, anyway, that water is a symbol for emotion, in the vocabulary of my subconscious.
It's not that dream symbolism is necessarily consistent across humanity, although Jung would say that it is. But I really believe that dream symbolism is consistent within a single mind. And my experience has been that as I've worked on mapping the symbols in my dreams to their meanings, my dreaming makes clear, obvious use of those symbols--usually within a couple of nights--to show me more of what I need to see.
For me, the whole point of dreams is that they allow me to have an internal dialogue without having to open my eyes to all of the implications if I'm not ready. How many of us have soldiered on through a bereavement or trauma without letting ourselves feel too much, and had bizarre, showy dreams every night as a way of coping? When I am ready to understand or change something about myself, though, I find that dreams give me an easier way to grapple with life--a way that's creative and emotional, when I'm sleeping, but safely analytical when I'm awake.
So, in practical terms, what I do is write down my dream(s) as soon as I wake up, without analyzing, and then when it's all written down, I step through the dream and look at each symbol, thing, person, etc. And I just ask "what is that, really?" without trying to figure out the meaning of the narrative bits until later. A lot of times the answer is intuitive; sometimes I fall back on things I've read over the years, or I use context to figure it out. Nowadays, for the majority of symbols in my own dreams, I can fall back on what I've gleaned over the course of 20 years of paying careful attention and mapping things out as they crop up. And once I've identified the symbols in a dream, I can often understand the narrative that my subconscious has placed them in.
Yes, this is a completely made-up system, but it's not woo-woo; dreaming is a creative process like any other, and just like writing or painting or dance, if you engage with it analytically you can begin to control it. It's no different than deciding that poppies are a symbol of addiction and throwing them into all of your paintings to make a private statement to yourself about addiction. But instead of throwing them into paintings, you throw them into your dreams. Your mileage may vary, but this works like clockwork for me.
I have vivid, symbol-saturated dreams--less as I get older and mellower, but I still have them. What I find is that if I pay careful attention to the symbolism of every single dream, the narratives kind of end up explaining themselves, because my subconscious uses the same symbols over and over.
I have a couple of re-occurring dreams about houses. I read, a long time ago, that if you dream about your house, you're dreaming about your mind or your personality. The act of reading that interpretation made it true for me--ever since then, houses have appeared in my dream as an obvious stand-in for the space in my head. For example, during a time when a family member was sick with cancer, she was on my mind more than usual. I had a dream that she was living in my house (in fact, I woke my husband up to help find her, because I was still kind of dreaming when I woke). In later years, when I started having to make some medical decisions about my aging parents, I dreamed that they moved everything from their house into my house. I've had dreams about secret rooms, dreams about water seeping in through the roof, dreams about water filling the basement. They all had clear equivalents to things going on in my life, considering, anyway, that water is a symbol for emotion, in the vocabulary of my subconscious.
It's not that dream symbolism is necessarily consistent across humanity, although Jung would say that it is. But I really believe that dream symbolism is consistent within a single mind. And my experience has been that as I've worked on mapping the symbols in my dreams to their meanings, my dreaming makes clear, obvious use of those symbols--usually within a couple of nights--to show me more of what I need to see.
For me, the whole point of dreams is that they allow me to have an internal dialogue without having to open my eyes to all of the implications if I'm not ready. How many of us have soldiered on through a bereavement or trauma without letting ourselves feel too much, and had bizarre, showy dreams every night as a way of coping? When I am ready to understand or change something about myself, though, I find that dreams give me an easier way to grapple with life--a way that's creative and emotional, when I'm sleeping, but safely analytical when I'm awake.
So, in practical terms, what I do is write down my dream(s) as soon as I wake up, without analyzing, and then when it's all written down, I step through the dream and look at each symbol, thing, person, etc. And I just ask "what is that, really?" without trying to figure out the meaning of the narrative bits until later. A lot of times the answer is intuitive; sometimes I fall back on things I've read over the years, or I use context to figure it out. Nowadays, for the majority of symbols in my own dreams, I can fall back on what I've gleaned over the course of 20 years of paying careful attention and mapping things out as they crop up. And once I've identified the symbols in a dream, I can often understand the narrative that my subconscious has placed them in.
Yes, this is a completely made-up system, but it's not woo-woo; dreaming is a creative process like any other, and just like writing or painting or dance, if you engage with it analytically you can begin to control it. It's no different than deciding that poppies are a symbol of addiction and throwing them into all of your paintings to make a private statement to yourself about addiction. But instead of throwing them into paintings, you throw them into your dreams. Your mileage may vary, but this works like clockwork for me.
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no subject
Date: 2008-06-08 04:40 am (UTC)It's getting late and I'm about to turn in, but I wonder if your dreaming that dream in terms of an exit interview, even though you had never given one, even though you had only heard others talk about those, might be a sign that you are good at picking up and internalizing information into knowledge.
As for your going from being Homer Simpson to IT manager at a financial institution... Since you've been there for 10 years, I guess you're not quite Homer. Had you been he, the world would probably have ended, like in that episode where he was put in charge of the nuclear power plant's Y2K compliance.