Bet you don't need my help figuring out this visual pun..
Let us pause to impose some order on the haphazard chaos that is my usual posting style. If we're going to talk about dreams and how to interpret them, we should lay out some kind of conceptual map of what we are talking about.
First, as I said in the first post of this series, it's important to point out that everybody dreams. Newborn infants dream. Ever seen your dog twitching its paws and whimpering, or maybe softly barking? It's dreaming. People with very scientific attitudes may quibble with this, or reject it outright. And some people insist that they do not dream, ever, at all, no matter what. OK, then, you don't dream, but everybody else does. Happy now?
Second, let's make solid the obviously implicit point that I believe dream symbols have meaning and these can be discovered.
Where do dreams come from? Elsewhere I have mentioned that there can be multiple sources of your dreams. The main source is the personal unconscious, which is a part of your mind. In terms of your dreams, this is the primary "filter" of what you experience, providing images and directing content. Your rational mind is dormant while you sleep, so you cannot expect the unconscious mind, which is irrational, to play by daytime rules.
What I'm saying is, things will be difficult to understand until you learn how your unconscious mind operates.
This would be an impossible task if not for one convenient fact -- the content of your dreams will ALMOST ALWAYS involve things that are happening in your life RIGHT NOW. Your dreams will very rarely, if ever, have reference to things going on in the wider world. You will probably not ever have a true "precognitive" dream -- even dreams that seem like predictions are simply an illustration of how your unconscious mind can be quicker on the uptake about some things than your rational mind is. The unconscious mind is all about making associations and recognizing connections. It also does not have a certain liability that the rational mind does, namely, the power of denial -- an important evolutionary tool, by the way -- so it really does see some things much more clearly than we do in our waking minds.
I totally came up with that sheiza. In your face, Jung.
Let's talk about that power of denial. Here's how it's important in an evolutionary sense. For the problem with having our wonderful rational minds is that we can use them to forecast the probable outcome of future events. That's an important skill, but it does have a certain downside.
Imagine yourself a simple cave-person, waking up in the morning, alive and unharmed, in your happy and warm cave.
So warm and inviting out there.. until the sabertooth gets you.
The moment you step out of that cave, everything wants to kill you. Maybe not everything, but it sure seems like it. Most human beings in this era are dead by the age of thirty, so the odds are really not very good you'll survive today, and with your rational mind, you understand this. How are you going to go out there and do what must be done to keep the species alive? How?
Ok, you tell me.
With the power of denial!
Nothing can eat me, I'm Captain Caveman!
This wonderful evolutionary trick allows us to have that rational mind, which animals (apparently) do not have, and still face the world that so obviously wants us dead yesterday.
Yay denial!
Unfortunately, there's a downside to denial, too. It's rather indiscriminate. It is very easy for us to abuse it, and not even know that we have, because denial works by knocking conscious thoughts into the unconscious.
This is where your unconscious mind is your friend. Don't forget, your unconscious mind is YOU, even if you don't really know that part of yourself real well. It has your best interests in mind (though as an irrational mind, what it considers "best interests" and what you can recognize as such might be in conflict, often enough).
One of the main purposes of your dreams is to puncture through that denial that you have built up but which is not useful for you.
The unconscious mind is also good at making those connections that your waking mind has missed. So connecting these ideas you can say that your dreams are mainly all about making you conscious of things that you have either missed or denied.
OK. That's what dreams are mostly all about. There's nothing spooky about them. They seem strange because the unconscious mind is irrational and uses a different language to communicate. This language is symbolic, associative, and, believe it or not, playful.
Puns and other forms of word play are woven into dreams.
Most people miss the wordplay element of dreams, but this is one of the easiest ways to get to the meaning. If you have read about my dream "Jesus in the peas," you'll remember that it took me years to understand why Jesus would be found among the peas.
Peas --> peace, see?
It's such a common pun, you'd think that I would have figured it out sooner. But I hadn't realized that dreams use wordplay like that. But it's not a joke to your unconscious -- this is how it thinks. Through associations, connotations, and connections. We need to understand that in order to really get to the meaning of our dreams.
The take away is this -- dreams USUALLY help us to understand what we have either denied, or just plain missed, in our every day life. It does this through the language of the unconscious, which is not like ordinary waking consciousness. The language is associative, symbolic, and playful. We can learn this language by connecting the dream back to circumstances in our waking life.
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