Every once in a while I will come across an old high school notebook or an email sent to a friend, and inside, there will be a dream. I love these discoveries!
I didn’t formally keep a dream journal until I was in my early twenties, and even then I only kept one for a short time until my late thirties, when I began recording my dreams regularly.
To find a dream tucked randomly into an old email to a friend is a little like finding a Polaroid photo you forgot you used as a bookmark in a book that subsequently sat on the shelf for years. Except unlike the photo which captures one moment in linear time, the rediscovered dream is a snapshot of inner time, which is timeless.
What do I mean by that? Our dreams, as you’ve noticed, do not operate in time the way waking life events do. Most often — when you really pay attention to the details — you find they don’t reflect an environment that even reliably exists in a particular time.
How do you tell time in a dream? By clock? By the calendar? No, we usually determine the period of the dream by some sense of knowing based on what you’ve interpreted about the environment. Consider a recent dream for yourself: How did you know what time it was? How did you determine the day, time of day, or era it took place in? I bet it was based on the lighting of the room, or on the presence of a particular person, building, or landscape you associate with a particular time.
When you start paying more careful attention to sensory details in dreams, you find that for the most part, dreams actually exist outside of singular time. Instead, they are multi-layered. They deal both in now and in then. They borrow images from the past — and sometimes the future — and overlay them onto the present of the dream. We use perception, so honed from waking life, to make sense of the dream world, but we are typically not tuning into feeling, which is often the driving force of the dream.
Attempting to make sense of a dream based on the mind’s tendency to organize and categorize perceptual data is often a cause of confusion for dreamers (both inside the dream and while awake), especially those who believe dreams are meant to function the way waking life experience does.
They don’t.
When I am working with someone new to dreamwork, a dreamer will often make many assumptions about the timing of a dream, and their assumptions are what lead to the confusion. “It’s strange,” a dreamer might say about a dream. “We were in my childhood home, but it was my husband in the kitchen, not my mother.”
Dreams may be reflecting a feeling state from a particular moment in time, but more often than not, a dream is also attempting to evoke in you a feeling that exists in the vertical of your experience: a feeling from the past, present, and possibly also the future. These types of feelings — the ones that travel with us across time — are often the ones that require the most attention and healing work; feelings like shame, grief, anger, jealousy.
When I discover an old dream inside a notebook or an email, I am reminded of just how challenging and long-term healing work can be, especially when it involves trauma, loss, grief, or shame.
This happened recently when I came upon an email letter to a friend from 2016 that had a dream braided into it. There it was: first, the shame around it being ten years since I dreamed that dream and still I am struggling with (and dreaming about!) this particular topic. Then, however, there was something else that arose: the recognition of how much healing has in fact happened in the years since that dream as a result both of my dreamwork and my waking life work on “my stuff.”
Next, I found myself smiling. Rather than criticize my (subconscious) self for still dreaming that same old dream, I felt some compassion and admiration for the Me who is willing to be aware that the pain, grief, or shame still exists, feel it, and work with it! That’s not a given, trust me. Most people forget their dreams, suppress their feelings. Many who remember their dreams, or are aware of their feelings end up distracting themselves away from rather than head right into the storm of them.
So… if you are someone who has a recurring dream about a person, a time of life, or an event that happened long ago in linear time, be kind to yourself. First of all, yes, the dream may be speaking on one level to a particular event, loss, or trauma from long ago, but likely it also is speaking to a deeper feeling that you carry within you still unknown or unexpressed that may be resonant with that particular person or event, but not limited to that person or event.
The dream (or dream character) keeps recurring not for you to relieve the emotions from that experience, but rather for you to gain some insight into how those feelings drive your personal narrative and your behavior NOW. Even simpler than that, perhaps the dream simply wants you to feel.
Just feel. No understanding. No insight. No improvement.
Just feel.
Sometimes simply feeling the pain or shame a dream evokes is enough.
Dreamwork enables us to become more aware of our own particular strategies for NOT feeling.
Over time, with regular dreamwork, you can also begin to see those strategies at play in a dream and “try again” to be in the scene and really feel it. Sometimes, re-entering those dream scenes — that you previously turned from or reacted to — can lead you to a deep well of feeling if you are willing to be with them without too much judgment or self-criticism.
Please stop criticizing yourself (if you are) for not being “over” a certain time period, person, or event that keeps coming up in your dreams. Rather, consider whether there is a feeling in the recurring dream that stirs in you an association to something in your present life.
In a dream that seems to be “obviously” referencing a challenge or issue in your present waking life, consider if the feeling from the dream is a new feeling or one that has been around for a long time. If it’s been around for a while, perhaps the dream is not about the obvious, surface-layer issue from waking life, but rather something older and more hidden.
