The faces you meet in your dreams

“I dream of people I’ve never met, faces I’ve never seen. Who are they, and why are they in my dreams?”

Most people remember dreaming of friends, relatives, work colleagues, people from their past, and people they’ve seen around but haven’t spoken with, and most of us have chatted with celebrities and other famous people as if they were old friends, only to wake up rather surprised, but it’s those faces we’ve never met before that can mystify us in the morning.

You might dream of a generalised man, woman, or child, someone who plays a role in your dream but you don’t really notice details of their face, hair, or dress. Let’s put these to one side. It’s those other dream people we want to focus on, those whose facial details strike you in the dream and are memorable when you wake up.

In other blogs we’ve explored the dream lover or soul mate whose face is etched on the dreamer’s mind for weeks afterward, a face they feel exists out there, somewhere in the world, waiting to connect with them. People have told me they have searched for years for the person they met in their dream, without success. Typically these dreams are about connecting with a lost aspect of your self, integrating it into your being. The dream has all the clues you need to identify those lost aspects, and working with the dream and dream alchemy gives you everything you need to facilitate that integration and feel more whole. It’s at that point that the dreamer will often find their ideal partner, and that partner rarely looks like the lover in the dream.

How do we come up with those dream faces?

While it’s enticing and exciting to think that we might be connecting with other people while we sleep, perhaps meeting on an astral plane somewhere between worlds, or previewing faces of people we will encounter in the future, these are unlikely explanations.

Those dream faces may be selected from faces we’ve glimpsed and forgotten, faces that seem appropriate to the dream character, or they may be created by our sleeping minds in more of an Identikit fashion: this personality type would have a nose like this, eyes like that, and a mouth shaped like, hmm, like the old guy who used to live next door.

If you doubt the ability of your sleeping mind to be creative enough to invent amazingly realistic different faces, take a moment to think about how creatively your dreaming mind comes up with totally new scenarios, buildings, landscapes, and stories. It’s the stuff of dreams.

Some of the never-met dream faces are, when you take time to reflect, composites of people you know. You might notice Karl’s nose, Peter’s eyes, and Brent’s mouth. In that case, ask yourself what these three men, Karl, Peter, and Brent, have in common. As a dream symbol, what meaning might this communal face capture?

Faces, people, everyone, and everything in a dream, represent something about the dreamer, so as to the ‘who’ these people are, that’s easy to answer.

They’re aspects of you, the dreamer. As to the ‘why’ these people are in your dream, it’s because you’re processing issues around those aspects.

If you’re trying to figure out the symbolism of a totally unique dream character face, break it down: what does a nose like that mean to you (what kind of personality do you associate with a nose like that?), what personality do those kinds of eyes portray, what does the set of those lips suggest about what the person is thinking or feeling? Does the face remind you of someone, and what do you associate with that person?

You might later see elements of a dream face in someone you meet in waking life, but be careful not to jump to conclusions and align them with the character in your dream. Take a deep breath, return to your dream, and apply all the dream interpretation skills you’ve learned so that you can gain insight into yourself. When you are clear about your inner world and the facets of yourself those faces represent, you see your outer world in a new, and better, light.

PS

If you’re a little spooked by some of the faces you see in your dreams, and concerned about what some of the more sinister faces reveal about yourself, read What’s in a face?

 

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