Meaning & Interpretation Of Dreams
The meaning and interpretation of dreams has long been an area of confusion. It is difficult to interpret and find meaning in dreams for there is no cut and dry method or dictionary of dreams that works for everyone. It is argued, however, that, “The dream is a series of images which are apparently contradictory and meaningless, but that it contains material which yields a clear meaning when properly translated,” according to The Basic Writings of C.G. Jung (1959) edited by Violet Staub De Laszlo.
Jane Roberts, in her book The Nature Of The Psyche (1979), says about the meaning of dreams, “Often the seeming meaninglessness of dreams is the result of your own ignorance of dream symbolism and organization… When you understand how your own associations work, then you will be in a much better position to interpret your own dreams…and finally to make an art of them.” She goes on to speak about how we occupy more than one reality at the same time, and dreams span those realities, giving us information from each of them and therefore it is seemingly garbled and incomprehensible as to what the dream means. “…You have other minds. You have one brain, it is true, but you allow it to use only one station, or to identify itself with only one mind of many. A mind is a psychic pattern through which you interpret and form reality. You have minds that are invisible. Each one can organize reality in a different fashion. Each one deals with its own kind of knowledge… When you use all of these minds, then and only then do you become fully aware of your surroundings.”
Roberts elaborates on the analogy with the idea of a television station dial: “Suppose that you turned on your television set to watch a program, for example, and found that through some malfunction a massive bleed-through had occurred so that several programs were scrambled, and yet appeared at once, seemingly without rhyme or reason. No theme would be apparent. Some of the characters might be familiar, and others, not. A man dressed as an astronaut might be riding a horse, chasing the Indians, while an Indian chief piloted an aircraft. If all of this was transposed over the program that you expected, you would indeed think that nothing made any sense. In the dream state then, you are sometimes aware of too many stations. When you try to make them fit into your recognized picture of reality, they may seem chaotic.”
Roberts gives yet one more example in this book: “You may have a dream… in which you see a tailor’s shop. The tailor may be dancing, or dying or getting married. Later, in waking life, you may discover that a friend of yours, a Mr. Taylor (spelled), has a party, or dies, or gets married, whatever the case may be; yet you might never connect the dream with the later event because you did not understand the way that words and images can be united in your dreams.”
This explains how the dreams might have no meaning. Too many “stations” at once are being perceived or personal symbology and associations are misunderstood. Once we learn how to interpret more than one reality being presented to us at a time, perhaps then dreams will be quite easy to understand. It is possible to learn your own personal ways of combining all this information, your own personal associations and symbology.
In Elsie Sechrist’s book Dreams: Your Magic Mirror (1968), Erich Fromm is quoted to explain why some people dismiss their dreams as nonsense: “…If all our dreams were pleasant phantasmagorias in which our hearts’ wishes were fulfilled, we might feel friendlier toward them. But many of them leave us in an anxious mood; often they are nightmares from which we awake gratefully acknowledging that we only dreamed. Others, though not nightmares, are disturbing for other reasons. They do not fit the person we are sure we are during daytime. We dream of hating people whom we believe we are fond of, of loving someone whom we thought we had no interest in. We dream of being ambitious, when we are convinced of being modest; we dream of bowing down and submitting, when we are so proud of our independence… But worse than all is the fact that we cannot understand our dreams while we, the waking person, are sure we can understand anything if we put our minds to it. Rather than be confronted with such an overwhelming proof of the limitations of our understanding, we accuse the dreams of not making sense.”
This is so true of all of us. We often think we are something we are not, perhaps thinking more or less of ourselves than we reveal of ourselves in dreams, and our waking perceptions of ourselves are quite different than our perceptions of self within dreams. Dreams are more honest however, than our waking life. Dr. Gayle Delaney says in her book Sexual Dreams: Why We Have Them, What They Mean (1994), “While dreaming, we blurt out the truth about how we really feel and think about the most important issues in our lives… you are much more honest with yourself when you dream than when you are awake. When you dream, you look at your life from a wiser, less defensive, more mature perspective… As you work with your dreams you will find that they are usually several steps ahead of your waking self in the degree and quality of insight they offer.” That is, if we can learn to interpret our dreams.
Elsie Sechrist referring to Edgar Cayce’s opinion in the book Dreams: Your Magic Mirror (1968), “… Unless an individual is seeking to improve his spiritual life by asking for help in terms of prayer, his dreams will primarily be a meaningless jumble. If, however, he is unselfishly seeking God’s will for him, then the higher consciousness will monitor his dreams and give him a clearer sense of direction in his daily life. There is little therapy or value in simply learning the meaning of a dream, especially if it is related to an aspect of behavior, unless an individual wants to change or improve himself.” I am not sure I agree with that, entirely, but I can see how having an intent for self improvement could seriously increase one’s ability to understand dreams. I do not believe that dreams are a meaningless jumble if one is not petitioning the higher consciousness or otherwise spiritually inclined. I believe that the value of dreams is available to everyone who cares to remember them and learn their own symbology.
Jane Roberts has more to say on the meaning of dreams in her book Dreams, Evolution & Value Fulfillment (1986). “…Dreams appear to be staticky objective background noise left over from when you sleep. But that is how physical experience would seem to someone not focused in it, or inexperienced with its organization… The dream world is not an aimless, nonlogical, unintellectual field of activity. It is only that your own perspective closes out much of its vast reality, for the dreaming intellect can put your computers to shame… The intellectual abilities as you know them cannot compare to those greater capacities that are a part of your own inner reality… The conscious mind cannot handle that kind of multidimensional creativity.” This is obviously why we cannot hold all the information in the conscious mind easily. This, I believe is a process of evolution. Perhaps millennia from now the human mind will be able to perceive such multidimensional creativity and attention with more ease than it does now.
Perhaps the real problem with interpreting dreams has to do with the fact that we are trying to interpret and understand dreams from the viewpoint of the waking consciousness. Roberts elaborates in her book The Unknown Reality, Volume One (1977) on the meaning of dreams and why we cannot understand them. “You always examine your dreams…from an ‘alien’ standpoint, one prejudiced in favor of the ordinary waking state… the dreaming condition is consequently experienced in distorted form… By contrast to waking consciousness it can appear hazy, not precise, or off-focus. This does not always apply, because in some dreams the state of alertness is undeniable.” Roberts continues by encouraging us to look at the waking condition from the dream state. From the dream state, the waking condition will appear quite distorted and hazy, just as the dream state seems to us when we look at it from the waking state. In the dream state, the waking self is considered the dreamer.
Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold suggest in their book Exploring the World Of Lucid Dreaming (1990), “The experience of dreaming is not ‘rational,’ but this does not mean that it is not meaningful… [dreams] are primary manifestations of the processes of association from which all possibilities of meaningful self awareness arise in the first place.”
A common reason for the failure to understand dreams is that these events are so multidimensional in nature that they simply cannot be interpreted in the framework of space and time, especially when only fragments of a dream can be remembered. Upon awakening, it is nearly impossible to remember every component of a dream, for even in the telling or writing of it, pieces are lost.
Jeremy Taylor instructs us in his book Dream Work (1983), “It is most important to remember the two basic truths about dream work: 1) only the dreamer can know what his or her dream means; 2) there is no such thing as a dream with one meaning.” This coincides with the analogy by Jane Roberts that dreams are like overlaid TV stations bleeding into each other, each with its own story and meanings. He continues by saying, “Why then are dreams generally so obscure and opaque to waking consciousness? It is because every dream has multiple meanings, and multiple levels of meaning woven into a single metaphor of personal experience. It is the multiple, many-layered quality of dreams that makes them so often appear obscure and devoid of meaning on first awakening.”
The Greek Christian authority, who felt that dreams were useful for spiritual purposes for the common man, was the first to suggest that following dream dictionaries was a mistake. He felt that each individual needed to make his or her own personal dream dictionary, for everyone had different associations and symbols that the individual mind thinks and communicates with through dreams. Helen McLean & Abiye Cole agree in their book The Dreamworking Handbook (2001). “While dream dictionaries can be interesting on a superficial level, their use cannot help but miss the essential meaning that your personal dream symbols will have for you.” This does not mean that a therapist is not useful in this process of finding one’s inner symbols and associations. A therapist can serve well in that sense, assisting with possible interpretations, ideas and inquiry.
Gary K. Yamamoto suggests in his book Creative Dream Analysis (1988), “The first and simplest method is to use the natural psychic ability that we all possess. If we ask our inner intelligence what type of dream we have had, we will receive and answer. This becomes easier as we gain confidence in our own psychic ability.” Almost everyone can agree that when one remembers a dream, it is possible to immediately guess what it is about simply by using the knowledge of oneself and the issues that are on the mind. If the mental body is relaxed enough more information will come in about the meaning of the dream if only a psychic space for an “ah-ha” realization is opened.
This innate knowing is also addressed by Jeremy Taylor, in Where People Fly And Water Runs Uphill (1992): “Only the dreamer can say with any certainty what meanings his or her dreams may have. This certainty usually comes to the dreamer…in the form of an aha experience of insight and recognition – a wordless ‘felt shift’ – when something true and on-the-case is suggested about the possible meanings of one’s dream. This aha is the only consistent touchstone in determining the multiple meanings of a dream.”