What does it mean when symbols from a dream start appearing in waking life? Here’s what usually happens.
You have a dream featuring, for example, a red bucket. You wake in the morning and trip over your toddler’s toy red bucket in the hall. You dismiss this, thinking you must have seen the bucket there before you went to bed. Later that morning, you find a flyer tucked under your windscreen wiper. It features a red bucket, and turns out to be an ad for a hardware store. You smile and think, “That’s odd!” Stopped at the lights, a boy asks if you’d like your windscreen washed. He carries a red bucket of water. And when you go to the movies that evening, you are presented with a complementary giant serve of popcorn in a red bucket-shaped container.
By now, the appearance of so many red buckets in one day seems eerily significant and deeply meaningful, only you have absolutely no idea what they mean. This phenomenon is synchronicity.
The interesting thing is that some dreams produce far more synchronicities than you might normally notice. The theme of a dream is its ‘motif’. If you look deeper, you’ll often see your motif dream symbol repeating the next day in modified or cryptic forms. Here’s an example.
Imagine you dreamed of a ‘memory stick’ computer accessory. The next day, you hear someone on the radio talking about memory sticks, then you see an article on memory titled ‘When memory sticks’. An hour later, you notice a child playing a memory-improving game featuring stick-like figures. At work you keep getting someone’s name wrong (as if your memory is stuck), and at home in the evening a CD sticks, repeating the same piece of music. Only one of these synchronicities looks anything like a memory stick, but the others are equally significant echoes of the dream motif.
Sometimes you experience the synchronicities in the absence of a dream, or so you think. In these cases, it is most likely that you have simply not recalled the dream. So what does synchronicity mean?
When you experience synchronicity, go back to the dream and interpret it thoroughly, because the dream theme is so powerful that it is already symbolically manifesting in your life.
Many people think of synchronicity as a positive sign to follow. They will follow red buckets and memory sticks as if they lead to pots of gold. But synchronicity is not necessarily a sign to follow. It is a symbol shouting loudly from your dream, spilling into your waking life. It is the symbolic beginning of a manifestation. If you interpret your dream and you like the way the wind is blowing, follow the signs. If you don’t like the way the wind is blowing, apply some dream alchemy and change your future.
[Extract from 101 Dream Interpretation Tips, Jane Teresa Anderson]
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