When we first start working with dreams — intentionally remembering them, writing them down, and reflecting on them — a lot of dreams seem to be about conflicts, tension, or worries from our waking life. The characters in our dreams are often people we know or once knew. The scenarios we find ourselves in are close enough to waking life for us to be susceptible to thinking we know what the dream “is about.”
In fact, I often hear from friends or family, “Yeah, that dream was obviously about ….” And, perhaps, on some level there is some resonance between last night’s dream and a waking life conflict, stressor, or concern.
However, even when there seems to be an apparent link between a dream and waking life, there is always a deeper way into the dream that may make us aware of a more profound inner truth about ourselves, or how we relate to others.
Even experienced dreamwork practitioners can be fooled into thinking the dream they had the night before was simply an “anxiety dream,” for instance, reflective of waking life problems or challenges. This happened to me this week, in fact, when I had a dream about one of my children and woke up feeling worried I was handling a waking life situation poorly or that some big confrontation was about to unfold as a result of my unwillingness to face into it.
However, because I am now more aware of my tendency toward associating a dream about my children with waking life circumstances, I took some more time to reflect on the images and encounters of the dream, as well as to feel into the images more deeply. In doing so, I also allowed for the possibility that the dream was trying to show me something about myself I am not already aware of, rather than amplifying a challenge I already know about.
This requires a willingness to let go of our assumptions, which isn’t always easy, especially when the dream seems to be alerting us to a dynamic that causes us concern. (In this case, my immediate and reactive surface layer understanding of the dream suggested I may be being negligent in my parenting and that a waking life situation required more serious attention and action.)
We also must be willing to give the dream time and space to reveal its deeper knowledge and for us to receive it.
What do I mean by reveal and receive?
Oftentimes in waking life, we perceive an event and immediately think we know what has happened. We respond or react quickly based on that knowing.
And oftentimes, we are wrong. I’m sure you’ve experienced at some point in your life receiving a deeper understanding about an encounter or a conversation days, months, or even years after it happened. Despite making a lot of effort to slow down my reaction time in waking life and take in more slowly what I am perceiving, I still find myself misunderstanding or reacting too quickly multiple times a day!Â
The same goes for dreams, and even more so, as dream images, perceptions, and the way we experience time can be so very different from what we are used to experiencing when awake.
Another way of understanding how we can receive a dream image and allow it to reveal itself across time and space is to consider a song you love, one you first heard as a teenager, but continued to reveal its deeper layers of meaning as you grew and knew yourself and the world differently over time.
When thinking about our dreams in this way — as images and encounters to savor, to dwell in, to feel into across time — doesn’t it seem a little silly that we so quickly assume we know what a dream “is about?”
Dreams speak in the language of feeling, and of the senses. We bring into our dreams our typical highly reactive, meaning-making ways of interpreting the data we perceive all around us. Dream images are meant to be taken in more slowly, experienced sensually, received deeply.
Even though our left brain (logic, analysis, sense-making) is not as online during sleep, it’s not completely offline. We do a lot of story-making and mental gymnastics still in our dreams, trying to make sense of the strange images.
Later, while awake, we can re-enter a dream slowly, and receive these images again. We can sit with even one encounter, just one, and receive it. Imagine a dream in which you are in a grocery store and the elderly female cashier says something strange to you like, “My orthodontist told me this is the cause of my digestive issues.”
While working a dream, you could just sit with that encounter, hear her words, see the elderly cashier again, look at her face, her hair, her skin, notice how it feels to see her, to hear her words, listen to them, take them in. Does she seem familiar? Foreign? Kind? Wise? Frightening?
This is how we can receive deeply the dream image, and in doing so more is often revealed to us: typically through a feeling or an associative image that is full of feeling.
A dream that you may have taken to be about your current stresses around your teeth or irritable bowel syndrome can suddenly reveal something much more potent.
Assuming we know what a dream is about, then brushing it aside or forgetting it, is a missed opportunity to be in connection with our inner self, which likely possesses a deeper knowing that once conscious can not only reminds us of whatever waking life challenge we think the dream is about, but also shed light on a more pervasive way of being that is causing us pain, harm, or disconnection from our self and others.
