What are dreams?
Dreams have often been dismissed as ‘processing thoughts, jumble and memory’ from the day, but what if they are more than just that? What if your ex-teacher suddenly morphs into your boss, demands you sweep the sky, and transforms into a cloud of mosquitoes? Could this hold the secrets to your day-to-day life?
Subconscious Clues
Could dreams be subconscious clues to waking moments, and offer key insights you may have missed during the day? Visitation dreams – when a loved one who passed away reappears- hold powerful significance, which not only reminds you of shared memories but also helps you to process grief. It’s your dream world’s way of saying, ‘You’ll going to be ok. It’s healthy to grieve but memories never die, and neither does energy.’
Training Ground
I’m a strong believer that dreams are also a training ground to prepare you for challenging times. Those night terrors that leave you shaking? It’s your subconscious facing your fears and imploring you to assert yourself or even feel unshakable in the face of adversity…and if you need to leave a glowing bedside lamp on afterwards, it’s perfectly acceptable. The lesson has still been imparted.
Shadow people
A menacing entity rocked up recently in a dream. I entered the kitchen, normally a place of creativity, nurture, cooking and relaxation, but in this messenger dream, the lights wouldn’t switch on, and the darkness was an inky blackness that loomed with danger. I felt my legs pulled, and I was instantly flat on my back, being pulled backwards by an unseen entity. Then, the invisible fiend pulled me upwards towards it. At this point, I demanded, “Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?”
I woke, startled, shouting aloud. On the surface, it may appear to be a classic nightmare and something you might see in a horror flick, yet the deeper meaning is symbolic. I’ll generalise to include factors that could be relevant to any similar kind of nightmare. The entity is unlikely to be a Hollywood-style bogeyman, and the meaning would be individual to the dreamer, so let’s look at what it could symbolise.
Shadow aspects of the self: Are there parts of yourself that you are repressing or refusing to face? Your friendly demon isn’t there just to haunt the bejeezus out of you. See it as a cosmic call to examine what part of yourself you need to accept or develop.
A call to assert yourself. When you run from the monster, you may be running from confrontation, situations, or life itself. When you demand the beast to identify itself, you allow yourself to play out scenarios and assert your power. ‘Name thyself beast! Your power is diminished!
That’s why it lingered off into the shadows, and I woke; it met its match.
Reframing dreams:
Unless you are lucky enough to be a rare lucid dreamer and control every aspect of your dream, it’s unlikely that you’ll get the outcome you want every time. So do this instead:
Sit up, close your eyes, and create the ending you desire in your mind. For me, this was using golden lasers from my hands to shrink the shadow figure to imp size and pin it to the wall. In a whiny, snivelling voice, the imp apologised, and I banished it back to the land of shadows, forevermore, and affirmed, ‘From now on, the darkness shall fear me.’
This transmuted the eerie unrest into something more peaceful and empowered. You can do this with any dream, and it’s a great exercise in shaking off those post-nightmare heebie-jeebies!
Not all nightmares include ominous beasts. Some arrive in the form of anxiety dreams. Some of the most common ones are being late for an exam, being in public and realising you have no clothes, your teeth falling out, being back at school, someone you care about dying or someone close to you betraying you. These are neither an omen nor punishments; they are a part of your psyche working on a problem your conscious mind is still trying to fathom out. Instead of fearing the dream training ground if a nightmare or anxiety dream rears its ugly head, ask, ‘What is this teaching me about myself?’
Carl Jung once said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Jung primarily concentrated on his psychiatry, and while his experiments on the subconscious mind were known to those within his field, they were not known to the public, until years after his death, his family agreed that The Red Book, ‘The Liber Novus’ could be published, his final gift to the world.
What dreams are common for you, and what recurring themes pop up? Perhaps your subconscious is trying to direct you in ways you once thought unfathomable.
