15 Minutes Past Sagittarius

Dreams are simply our own thoughts while asleep, our souls going about their business of assimilating our experiences in this world. While we are each both spirit and soul, our thoughts are predominantly about who we are as individuals, our personal experiences, and our hopes and fears; this is, after all, why we are here. Thus, unless one is a saint or prophet, his dreams represent the temporal thoughts of his soul much more than the universals of his spirit. The truth of a dream is the truth of what we believe and feel. As when awake, we have only an approximate understanding of our circumstances, and our feelings about them may be appropriate or not. But dreams offer a unique perspective on what those feelings are, and can be powerful tools in self knowledge.

Most of us require a couple of decades to mature enough to live more or less independently of our parents. During the formative time we develop our fundamental concepts of what the world is and who we are within it, both as individuals and as social creatures. Experience channels these concepts, and more often than not it’s through uncomfortable experience than they are modified. But we have psychic censors built into us; when something presents a challenge to our self- or world- views, our minds naturally resist so that we can absorb the information more slowly and have a better chance of fitting it in with whatever we had believed before.

Dreams censor by hiding whatever we are really thinking about behind a symbol. During the dream we sense all the emotions associated with whatever the actual matter is, but in a relatively safe way because we’re confronted with a substitute, not the actual circumstances that motivate those feelings. This is the same process by which we can be entertained by loathsome things in stories; as an audience to a movie or to a dream we can comfortably project ourselves into such circumstances because at some level we know it’s not real, that soon enough we will leave the theater, or awaken, having imagined what we would do and feel in a dreadful experience.

Dreams routinely censor, whether or not we really need to avoid facing whatever actually motivates our thoughts, and even when the true subject is comfortable and pleasant. But normally only the basic subject is disguised, and in developing its symbol a dream will ignore other internal censors. One needs to know this, because he will often witness or participate in taboo activities in dreams, and may wake wondering if something within him is profoundly corrupt. The most common example is awakening from some really nasty bathroom scene; this doesn’t mean that one is a pervert, but simply that the bladder is signaling that after a long night it needs to be emptied. This is an ‘external’ stimulus intruding on our thoughts, but no censorship restrains how we exaggerate its urgency. One has only to consider how often Native American myths of the coyote end with urinary excesses to recognize how common the image is. (It’s noteworthy that so many myths have the quality of dreams.)

I learned of a common example through a blog; a woman wrote that during her first pregnancy she often awoke with a guilty glow beside her husband, having dreamt of sexual encounters with former flames. A surprising number of women commented that they had done the same, involving old boyfriends, celebrities, or fictitious men – and generally the dreams were quite satisfying, sometimes ignoring glaring shortcomings of a partner with whom they were painfully familiar. This is evidently quite common with first pregnancies, but the theme subsides with subsequent babies.

Dreams routinely present their true subject symbolically. Thus, while sex occupies its share of our thought, when a dream features sex the subject is most likely something else. Sex dreams during a first pregnancy almost certainly reveal that a woman is realizing the commitment demanded by her upcoming role as a mother; the different partners she takes in her dreams are simply her speculating about the pleasures of other experiences she might have explored, but feels she has ruled out by becoming pregnant. (It’s not meant to imply that once one becomes a mother she can pursue no other role in this world, but it is hard to imagine anything more life-altering.) When such dreams don’t occur during later pregnancies, some of these women worry whether their libido is diminishing; but, already being mothers, there’s no longer the same need for the profound self-questioning. Anyway, dreaming of multiple partners says nothing about whether a woman is promiscuous in her soul – her mind is simply using the men as symbols of different experiences she feels have become denied to her. These dreams say nothing about her libido; there’s no cause for guilt – even if she dreams of enjoying activities she would never consider in real life, this is simply her mind twisting a symbol to fit its real meaning.

An interesting sidebar is that several of these women also dreamt of getting their teeth knocked out, or losing them in some other way. This could mean that a woman feels completely unprepared for motherhood, or that pregnancy and motherhood threaten a severe blow to other aspirations she has, or (if her appearance is emphasized) to who she believes she is. Dreams featuring eating often refer to our ability to absorb knowledge; thus the expression, “Let me chew this over,” means “Let me think about this.” Spitting out or choking on something suggests knowledge we are rejecting; in like manner, losing teeth suggests feeling unable to “bite into” an idea – the wordplay in dreams is often just this droll. But there’s another possibility – this may be the dream equivalent to a pregnant woman’s food cravings; as her subconscious recognizes that she needs certain nutrients by stirring lust for foods which contain them, the same stimulus may affect her dreams, telling her that her body is sacrificing tooth and bone for the baby because she’s not taking in enough calcium.

Another overtly sexual dream is to envision oneself indulging some favorite fantasy in which everything is perfect, except that during the dream he feels disappointment or shame for taking this particular partner. This represents nearing the attainment of some cherished goal – a job or promotion, perhaps – but the feeling is growing that it’s not going to be what or how he imagined it after all. He may not yet consciously recognize or may be resisting these feelings, but the dream reveals that he is at least subliminally questioning. Symbolizing the feeling as sex shows how deeply one has invested himself in the goal. Understanding the feeling that the dream portrays can help one get perspective – in some cases the dream is simply mental adjustment of one’s concept from the ideal to the actual, and in others it may be the dawning realization that he’s been pursuing the wrong thing all along.

Some dreams, like some of our waking thoughts, are quite pleasant. But we tend to think about things which challenge us, and sometimes things trouble us deeply. While in my early twenties I experienced a summer of nightmares – the standard type in which one awakes trying to scream but can’t find the air to do so. It became so regular that I dreaded going to sleep. At the end of that summer, while desperately waking to escape the terror again, at another level I also voiced, “I’m not ready to know this yet.” Afterwards there was not another nightmare. I don’t recall any of those dreams, nor do I know whether I’m now ready or have learned whatever threatened me so when I was young.

The rescuing message of this voice revealed that the demon disturbing my sleep was simply knowledge – some thought or realization was growing and threatening to reach the conscious level. Usually when dreams actually present monsters doing harm to us, these are just unpleasant; however, in the extreme case of nightmares we sense the approach of a monstrous thought but escape to wakefulness before ever actually seeing it. The terror of these thoughts is not necessarily that something threatens real harm to us, but rather that it poses a profound challenge to our self- or world- concepts, or our hopes – something our minds are designed to resist. We don’t see the monster because we are refusing the thought.

As an example of why a thought may be repressed, a man dreamt that his mate had stolen something, and that she had arranged things so that if the theft were discovered he would look guilty rather than she. Infidelity is often represented by a theft ( it’s worthwhile to reflect on why.) The dream shows that he’s becoming suspicious of her, though this may not have yet reached the conscious level. That she had made him look guilty shows he feels that her (suspected) indiscretion is somehow his fault. The dream doesn’t reveal whether his suspicion is justified – only that it exists, along with the sense that she’s causing him to doubt or judge himself. These are thoughts he is naturally inclined to resist, but will affect his relationship even if suppressed.

The interpretation of dreams is a literary skill. Dreams are especially prone to wordplay, and one has only to research poetic devices to appreciate how varied this can be. The artistic devices of our sleeping thought are sometimes brilliant and sometimes waggish. Some dream symbols are universal, but many depend on the dreamer’s personal understanding of his own language. And it’s certainly useful to know a bit about someone to understand his dreams – his age, gender, and so own. As an artistic skill, interpretation is obviously subjective. The interpretations of the dreams mentioned in this post are generic, and could be very different for any particular person.

But one must approach the matter reverently when interpreting someone else’s dreams – his dreams are the concerns of his soul, and it’s often the case that what seems mundane to one is a profound matter to someone else. If you should happen to get it right, and the subject is something troubling to the dreamer, it’s a natural response for him to identify you with the threat and reject you with the same energy with which he is resisting the thought. And the dreams of someone who is not generally well in mind or soul are matters for a trained counselor.

That being said, often enough the key to a dream’s symbols lies innocuously in the background. In the dream described in my post, The Sinkhole, the real concern was exposed by there being a nude dance club housed in a ‘strip mall’ at the periphery of the sinkhole on which the dream focused. The image expressed my concern about media encouraging licentiousness, but during the dream what was near the sinkhole seemed only incidental.

That dream illustrates the perspective one should take in interpreting. The dream is not a revelation of any absolute truth about what behavior standards should be, but rather the truth of my beliefs and feelings on the matter – how I feel my culture corrupts the realization of my ideal in the pretty gender. Understanding that, it’s up to me to determine whether my quaint romanticism is something I should surrender or support – admitting that there’s also a rascal within me who appreciates a naughty girl.

Not all dreams are important – no more than are all our waking thoughts. Those which ramble on and on are just our minds wandering. However, those which are short or vivid, and especially those which continue to nag our thoughts after waking, are worth interpreting – these expose beliefs and feelings about matters which are important to us, and recognizing them is a significant part of thinking through past or anticipated experience.

The primary assignment in a dream interpretation course which I attended many years ago was to write down every dream as soon as waking each day. This was a good exercise – it’s surprising how recording one scene can stir the memory of so many more which had preceded. Plus, although generally dreams should be interpreted the same way one interprets literature, they are especially inclined to present a literal picture of a figure of speech, and so verbalizing what one sees can often expose the thought that the image actually represents.

I awoke chuckling one morning during that course. The dream had been a cartoon: Mickey Mouse was chasing Pluto and poking him in the butt with an umbrella, saying, “Take that, Pluto,” over and over. Hmm. Well, I dutifully wrote it in my journal, anticipating standing to share it with the class later – after all, it was my dream, and I have more than a comfortable estimate of the worth of my thoughts.

Until.. still thinking about it while driving to work I suddenly realized that I had had a Mickey Mouse dream, which (to an American of my generation) means fluff – entertainment without any substance. If imagining my mind as a fire station (where I worked), one firefighter (the story-teller) had played a joke on another in my company (my ego), waiting for me to record it ever so seriously, only to ‘get it’ later. Okay – I’ve been properly prodded. But if Pluto is not the most noble representation of my self-image, he is a well-meaning dog.