Dream symbols are amazing in their scope and variation. They can be revealing or confusing, being based upon association and not upon regular memory sequences. Many dream symbols are puns, like seeing a person on fire might mean they are angry; or if someone is laying beside water and appears out of it, they may be "washed up", meaning having trouble indeed. Dream symbols are metaphors as well, so you have to stretch your imagination if you want to know what a dream symbol stands for. I try to not think in stereotyped ways, because each person is individual and uses symbols in unique ways. Yet there are common themes to be sure, and once you get the hang of thinking in terms of metaphors and such and can be sure that at least one of your interpretations is right, your dreams will become much more clear to you.
I thought about putting in here many different types of the usual dream symbols, but these can be found in virtually any dream interpretation book or website. I wanted to describe something here that might help each person to discover the meaning of their own dream symbols, instead of trying to say that every dream symbol has a certain and unalterable meaning. Since dream symbols are derived from associations, when you are trying to interpret a dream, let your mind wander a bit and let it skip from thing to thing. This will allow your mind to make associations which will help you figure the dream out. When doing this, make sure and have the clear intention of understanding your dream.
Before I go much further, I would like to tie in here what I think is the reason many people fail to understand their dreams. There is a different 'logic' to the way dreams are constructed, which is very different to waking events and thoughts. Dreams are pictures of emotions and psychological states, so that a feeling can be given a physical form, which is called a symbol. It is very much like a pun in some ways.
Dream logic is based on a progression of thoughts which are based on association and not serial time. A chain of associations will then stimulate certain other ideas through further association. Dream logic therefore does not rely on the most important aspect of waking consciousness- temporal sequencing of events. This is another reason why dreams are not well understood by most.
Let's look at the process of remembering and recording a dream, because this will help us to maintain the integrity of our dream symbol-recall. When the waking mind is in the process of recalling a dream, it will examine the level of coherence of the dream in terms of when things happen and in what order. It will also consider the images of the dream, and from these and still other aspects, formulate a judgement concerning the dream and declare the dream either intelligible or nonsensical. This evaluation process occurs simultaneously with the recall of the dream itself, and strongly influences the waking personality�s view of the dream. It is the most crucial part of dream recall and interpretation, because this is the time when the objective characteristics of the waking mind are brought to bear upon the dream symbols and their progression into the light of rational thinking.
This is the time when many very important dreams are dismissed by the waking mind- because the waking mind is not following the kind of logic that the dream is expressing and therefore just passes it off as nonsense. The dream symbols do not seem coherent, in other words. This is a bias which must be understood and dealt with by each dreamer in order to understand his or her own dream symbols. The important course of action is to write the dream down in as much detail as possible without any more prejudging, so that later a new perspective on the dream can be obtained. Quite often even such seemingly mundane dreams carry kernels of truth and hints of future events, but we can miss them thinking the dream is too strange to understand.
The ideas and concepts that are brought to mind by dream symbols do not have what we would call proper names because we don�t have any terms in our vocabulary that adequately describe these experiences. It is similar to trying to describe to someone a place they have never seen before. If the place does not look like anything the person has seen before, then there is a real problem in describing it. Dream symbols can be much moreso in comparison. This is derived from the fact that a dream is actually a representation of an inner non-physical experience- a translation that often is a version of inner events dressed up in the conventional garb of waking experience. Therefore it is very important to try and have fun with the process of understanding our dream symbols because this flexibility will keep our minds open to their true meaning.
Sometimes the translation seems bizarre indeed, as it would if suddenly during the night you were without your knowledge transported to a foreign country which had a language you had never heard before, and met someone at your door and tried to converse with them. To some this would be a terrible experience because of the frustration involved and the seeming bizarre nature of such a scenario. The inner experience itself could have been of a neutral character; it is only in the distortion during the translation process that the person�s consciouness becomes alarmed and frightened by a series of symbols and associations which to the waking consciousness seem definitely out of place and disturbing. This need not be the case, of course, if the waking consciousness can be better informed about the way in which such dream data needs to be regarded. In the case of the above scenario, the symbol may be referring to a feeling in some situations of being out of place, and unable to understand something. This dream of being in a foreign land and trying to carry on a conversation would then be a literal dressing-up of that idea
This suggests that to some degree, the dreaming self can become aware of the waking self�s needs in this regard, and will then take steps to further modify the dream sequence or it�s associations in order that a more correct interpretation can be made.
This page was updated on Sunday May 17, 2009.
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RECALLING DREAMS
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