Dreaming about work

How often do you dream about work, what are the most common work dreams, and what do they mean?

Yesterday I was on Today Extra to talk about work dreams. You can watch the video at the end of this blog, but I thought I would write this article to extend the topic.

The Today Extra team had found the results of a survey of the most common workplace dreams. I’m not sure who did the survey, but the results generally fit my expectations. How many of these have you had?

 

Being late/forgetting you have work (64%)

Unprepared for a presentation (58%)

Realising you are naked (47%)

Having sex with a colleague (42%)

Trapped in the toilet/lift (38%)

 

I’ll explore what these might mean, but let’s begin with why we often dream about work.

If you are fortunate to have a job, career, or business, work is where you spend most of your day, whether that’s at a physical workplace, your home office, or somewhere in-between. If you are currently out of work, you probably spend a good proportion of your day thinking about getting work, reflecting back on a previous job, or exploring future work possibilities. In short, we spend a lot of time at work, or thinking or worrying about work.

Since the main job of dreaming is to process our recent experiences (conscious and unconscious) to help us understand them and to understand ourselves more deeply, it’s perhaps no surprise that many of our dreams are focussed on processing what’s happening for us around work.

Other dreams may seem to be about work or the workplace but are more about our personal issues. Interpreting them helps to distinguish the difference.

Dreaming is also a potent time to solve problems and resolve issues, drawing on our deeper, more unconscious creative problem-solving abilities, so some work dreams may be focussed on delivering career-changing insights and breakthroughs.

So, what do the ‘five most common workplace dreams’ mean?

The best way to approach each of these common dream themes is to look for the parallel feeling in your waking life. Where does the feeling you have in your dream relate to your life?

Asking yourself the kinds of questions I pose below will guide you toward what your unique variation of these common dream theme means.

 

Being late or forgetting you have work

The chances are that you are never late for work. How do you feel, in the dream, about being late? Are you worried, in the dream, about letting people down, or being seen as incompetent or unreliable, or not being able to get other priorities sorted? Or do you simply feel, ‘I’ll never get there!’ Be as precise as you can be about nailing the feeling in the dream, then ask yourself where you feel or fear this in your life. Often this dream reflects conflicting priorities, having too much to handle, or being a bit of a perfectionist and unconsciously wanting to delay getting the job done. You might find it easy to directly relate to the dream feeling, ‘Yes, I am worried about letting people down’, or your dream may be revealing your unconscious fears, for example, a fear of letting people down, a fear that drives you to be super-reliable and overly attentive, perhaps to the point of overkill and exhaustion. On the other hand, your dream feeling may alert you to another area of your life, for example, that “I’ll never get there!’ feeling may relate to a personal goal that seems ever-more distant.

 

Unprepared for a presentation

So how did you feel in the dream? Did you decide to jump in anyway and deliver a spontaneous presentation? Or did you worry because you didn’t have every single detail at your fingertips? What was the potential outcome in your dream, and how did you feel about that? Were you feeling tested? Where in your life recently have you felt or feared being unprepared, or unready for something? Name the feeling more closely: fear of uncertainty, lack of confidence, the need to follow a set way of doing things, fear of being judged. The list is endless. What did your dream bring up for you? Does it relate to work or to your personal life? How does this insight help you to put this situation in perspective? What changes might you make?

 

Realising you are naked

How did you feel about being naked in the dream? Did you feel exposed, or vulnerable, or proud of dropping your cover? Don’t just pick one of my words. Pin it down. Exactly how did you feel? Where in your life in the last 1-2 days did you feel like this, or fear this feeling? If you feared the feeling, what did you do to try to prevent it? Our dreams show us our unconscious feelings and fears as well as our conscious ones. Such a dream might reflect your feelings about being exposed – people seeing the real you – or it might reflect your fears of being exposed. Either way, the dream highlights your discomfort with exposure (in this example) and offers you the opportunity to explore this discomfort, where it originated, where it might be holding you back at work and/or in other areas of your life. In simple terms, perhaps you feel or fear that people can see the real you, beyond the role you are playing or the image you are trying to project. In some situations, might it be better to be more authentic and find a way to feel more comfortable with that?

 

Having sex with a colleague

No this doesn’t mean you have an unconscious attraction to this person. (You may have a conscious attraction, but if you already know this you wouldn’t be asking what the dream means.) It’s more often the case that the colleague you’re intimate with in the dream is someone entirely inappropriate, or someone you don’t like. Think about the personality or attributes of the colleague in waking life: your dream shows you are attracted to bringing these attributes into your working style. Are these attributes going to help or hinder your way forward at work?

 

Trapped in the toilet or lift

How did you feel about being trapped in the dream? Were you freaked out, feeling claustrophobic or smothered, feeling stuck, worried about not getting to where you needed to be, grateful for the excuse for time out or time to reflect, or relieved to be saved from getting to where you were supposed to be? Pinpoint the feeling then ask yourself where you felt or feared this in the day or two before your dream. Then think about what a toilet or lift means to you. Perhaps a toilet is a place to let go, to have privacy, to have some of your basic needs met. Are you feeling stuck in sorting through your basic needs, unable to progress until this is done? Maybe a lift is a playful dream symbol for being uplifted (except, in the dream, you’re stuck, not getting the upliftment you desire), or maybe you feel you are trapped at a certain level in your career or in another situation in your life.

 

These questions are beginnings, helping you to relate your dream to your life and explore possible meanings. The next step is to interpret the details of your dream (or consult a professional dream analyst or dream therapist) to get accurate insight into your unconscious mindset and how it is affecting your life, so that you can make changes if you wish for better outcomes at work or in life in general.

Here’s the video of yesterday morning’s TV segment on Today Extra, Channel Nine, speaking with presenters David Campbell and Sylvia Jeffreys:

 

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