How do we link dreams most effectively to waking life? The golden rule is to stay with the dream images. Clarify the detail rather than place the dream in some general category. Sometimes a person prefaces the telling of a dream with an incident in real life. Explore the possible link with them. There are some hypotheses you can keep in mind and be on the look-out for. Dreams may show needs that are habitually going unnoticed or are actively being demeaned or denied by the dreamer’s current attitude or learnt value system. Is the dream voicing an unconscious need? Dreams may show outdated versions of the dreamer that he/she is still trying to keep alive – often revealing the conflict and cost of the struggle. For instance, is the dream speaking about a childish part of themselves when something from childhood appears in the dream? However, this may not be the only interpretation. meaning.
Dreams also shows us parts of ourselves that we are not aware of. Our blind spots, or the shadow as Carl Jung termed the unconscious aspects of ourselves. Not only the dark side, or hidden cruelties we envisage think or visit on others, but also the unconscious way in which we demean ourselves. Sometimes the dream reveals the ways the dreamer has been taught to belittle aspects of himself. This may show up in the dream as people of the same sex who carry talents the dreamer has buried, or been taught to ignore. The dream reminds us the potential still exists.
Dreams will sometimes reveal what habitually goes wrong in a problematic encounters – the “anatomy of what Carl Jung called a complex”. This refers to repeated patterns of behaviour that are triggered by similar issues and that always have the same outcome, but often no resolution - until we become conscious of them. Dreams can show us how these self-defeating patterns work as well as their origins. Dreams tell us the “rest of the story”, revealing for instance why such strong feelings may be engendered by some innocuous person at work. The ‘code person’ the dream uses, or the way the dream depicts the place, can indicate show what story has been activated from the past and what is going on beneath the surface.
Image credit: Charles Lepec (1874) La Tarrasque
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