Human and humane

Everyone and everything in a dream represents something about the dreamer, and when you think about your more worrying dreams, that may feel scary.

You might be happy to acknowledge the things that flatter you: the wise old woman you met in a dream as your wisdom, the exciting new rooms you discover in a dream house as the exciting new ways in which you’re growing in the world, the soaring eagle as your ability to fly high and rise above.

You might be happy to acknowledge the things you already know about yourself reflected in your dreams: the steep dream staircase you climbed as the steep challenges you set yourself, the dog that follows you everywhere in your dream as your loyalty, or the dark and broody dream clouds as a dark broodiness that you know besets you from time to time.

But what about the bitchy gossip, the snapping crocodile, or the knife-wielding killer in your dreams? You don’t see yourself as a bitchy gossip, you’re the last person to snap at anyone, and you’re not even going to think about how a killer of any kind might relate to you. How do these fit with the prompt that everything and everyone in a dream represents something about the dreamer?

I’m using simple examples here, and it may come across as a dream dictionary approach, with dogs representing loyalty, eagles representing soaring, and steep staircases representing challenges.

Dream symbols cannot be interpreted by consulting a dream dictionary. Dream dictionaries can be extremely misleading.

Symbols are as unique as the dreaming minds that create them, and the dog that follows you in your dream might have a different connotation to the dog that follows me in mine. My feelings about dogs, their personalities, and why they’re following me are likely to be quite different to yours. If you see dogs as loyal they may represent something about your feelings and beliefs about loyalty. If I see dogs as dependent they may represent something about my feelings and beliefs about dependency.

It takes work to uncover the meaning of a dream symbol. An eye for seeing the big picture, the way the dream symbols interact, the dynamics within the dream drama, helps. There are many tools and techniques to apply in this work, but that bottom line, that everyone and everything in a dream represents something about the dreamer, is worth courageously adhering to.

It’s courage, especially in looking into those apparently darker symbols, the bitchy gossip, the snapping crocodile, the killer, that nourishes personal and spiritual growth. As someone who recently explored a dream with me wrote:

“I gained insight into my behaviour, which only helps me gain insight into others, so when I interact with them I can do so with more compassion than criticism. This is what helps me become human and humane.”

I agree. Compassion is the greatest gift of understanding our dreams, compassion born of illuminating our shadows in all their human heartfelt glory, compassion born of embracing all that makes us human.

So what might that bitchy gossip represent, for someone who never gossips? She might represent the bitchy gossip you hold down or deeply repress. You might have been raised to believe you shouldn’t gossip, so every bitchy gossipy thought you couldn’t help having has been bundled down into your unconscious, where it can occasionally be heard in your dreams.

The danger here is that what you repress within yourself you readily see and harshly and critically judge in other people.

When a dream awakens you to the bitchy gossip in your unconscious basement, you begin to understand why you are so carefully pristine in your communication. Such a dream will usually help you to identify the origin of your harsh self-judgement, and this new awareness begins the shift toward accepting yourself for the wonderful human you are, and extending compassion toward yourself for the original situation that caused you to repress certain feelings. Awareness helps release your prisoner, and from that point on, the bitch is gone. So is the careful applied pristine approach to all your communications. Your communication style becomes more vibrant, more real, freer in its expression, and naturally free also from any hint of bitchy gossip.

Once you have compassion for yourself, you have greater compassion for others.

That crocodile might represent your fear of real or imagined unseen dangers lurking beneath the surface of a situation, or it might represent a snappy aspect of your personality, an instinct to bite when you find yourself on the defence. That snappy side might be something you know about, or it might, like the bitchy gossip example, be something you’ve buried deep, in horror, determined to always be sweetly embracing and accommodating. When you acknowledge what your snappy dream crocodile represents about you, compassion grows.

Not all is as it seems. That wise woman you were happy to acknowledge as your wisdom might, when you analyse the dream, turn out to be a know-it-all, or you might discover, when you look at the overall dream, that your wise woman is stagnating in your basement, repressed in favour of a belief that you should appear naïve or defer to the knowledge of others.

That knife-wielding killer may represent a way you’ve got of killing off a great idea before it gets started, or killing off a budding relationship for fear of intimacy, or a tendency to be two-faced, to ‘stick the knife in’ when a person’s back is turned. You may recognise the knife-wielding killer as someone who you feel is out to get you, to stick the knife in your back, but even if you’re right, ask yourself why the situation has come to this. What might the killer represent about you, and how can understanding this throw light on your current situation?

Dream analysis, while sounding perhaps dry, gives the gift of life.

It reveals the shadows in your basement that hold you hostage, the bitchy gossip that drains your voice of colour, the knife-wielding killer that leaves you defenceless or fearful of trusting, the wise woman whose expression is stifled.

It helps you to acknowledge, embrace, and free your shadows from their hold over you. It brings you easeful vitality, authenticity, and greater compassion for yourself and for others.

Dream analysis makes us more human, and humane.

 

You might also enjoy