Spooky Dynamics

“To me dreams are part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive but expresses something as best it can.”
Carl Jung

Spooky Realms

Dreams are rooted in the unconscious, and they burst into our conscious mind when it is turned off.  That means it is completely impartial, objective.  Not constrained by what we might personally think.  They are, as Jung says pure nature, an “enigmatic message from the nocturnal realm of the psyche”…which is what I will professionally call just a spooky ass way to put it.  

So why do we have dreams?  Is it our body regurgitating everything that has happened during the day?  If so, why does it choose that specific moment?  Why sometimes does it have nothing to do with the day, or even about you at all?

Well, everything in life happens for a reason, and just because you don’t know the answer doesn’t mean there isn’t one.  So we have to look for it, we have to see what the dream is trying to say.  So our first precept to looking at a dream is to realize that it is expressing the unconscious.  Everything in it, is in you.  The second precept is that they are not to be taken literally.  You don’t actually need to go build go-karts with your old landlord.  They are symbols of parts of yourself and the dynamics within your life.  

The main reason why I waited so long to get into this is because I feel that you have to know about what’s in our psyche before we go just interpreting our dreams.  A way to understand these symbols inside us is to realize that the different parts of us will also be in our dreams.  They are the archetypes, the universal patterns and tendencies in the unconscious that form us and everyone else.   

These archetypes take the place of symbols in our psyche, just as fire produces heat – we produce symbols. You are very likely to meet the archetypes that make you up in your dreams. So the archetypes that we have talked about before, such as your shadow, persona, anima or animus, etc. will be there.  We have to remember that all the other archetypes are inside you also so there might be a recurring cast, even though they might look throughout your dreams.  I have had dreams where the Luckdragon Falkor from the Neverending story represented the Great Mother archetype to me, just like dreams where that figure was represented by a maternal older woman I didn’t know who lived behind a bus.  The archetype of the Wise Old Man that is represented in movies so well might be Gandalf or Merlin in your dreams, or it could be a wise old owl.  We need to figure out what these figures are, and for that I am going to use mainly Andrew Samuels 4 step process he outlines in the book Inner Work.  This is the most direct and most helpful way I can find, and is how I personally interpret mine.  It starts with writing the dream down, the more real we make it, the more helpful it will be.  

Dynamic Associations

So the first thing we need to do is get our associations with the things we see in the dream.  If I have a dream about me being in a blue hued room, the first thing that I’m going to look at is the idea of blue.  I come up with  clear blue sky,  blue jeans, and being sad immediately.  This is where we need to do two things.  First, we need to remember that everything is energy, so we need to go where the energy is.  Jung calls this his, “It Clicks” method.  We choose it because its the one that moves us.  If I went through those and being sad “felt” more right than the others, we should look at that.  That is the right one.  We get filled with doubt because dealing with the right answer can be scary and uncomfortable.  Just see where you go when you trust yourself.  

So always return to the root word,  e.g. blue.  If we do a free association with it, it leads us away from the image.  If I say “Blue…that means sad…im sad about my aunt being sick…My aunt used to make me chicken soup when I was sick..i threw up that chicken soup once and….” and it gets us so far removed from blue you just need to pack that dream away.  Both are important, but going back to the root is the important one in dream interpretation.

We have to understand though that in dreams, everything means something.  Everything matters, as it is all dynamic. Our second step is to look at the dynamics of the dream, what is happening. In the dream and in you? The colors in the dream, the setting, the characters, what they are doing, what you are feeling.  All of this matters.  A road trip in a lush, green setting will mean something far different than one with dry, yellowing vegetation in a desert. 

Remember the blue room, we need to do that with all the major parts of it.  You decide what’s major, and that’s the reason working with an analyst or counselor is so important because you can’t see everything in you.  

Then we look at the dynamics in the dream, what is happening.  What is happening in the dream and what is happening in you?  What do we do with those associations?  So if we find that blue is most associated with sadness for us, then we have to ask, where are we sad? 

We also have to look at the dream.  So there is a blue room in the dream, do we know whose room it is, whose house we are in? Is it our grandmothers? Then it might be the archetype of the Great Mother, is it ours?  Then it’s probably our ego.  Is it some random dictator?  Then maybe its about our will to power, our dominance over someone or something. 

Our we on the porch enjoying some coffee? Does it feel positive? Then it is.  However if I am at the gutter of my grandmothers house and being hit with water, then it probably means the negative version of the archetype has me.  

Ceremonious Realization

Our third step is the actual interpretation, we put this all together.  We try to find the central message that the dream is trying to communicate.  We put the first and second steps together. 

You have to find the interpretation.  IT”S YOURS TO FIND! Only you can find it.  However, some good tips are:

• It should be something you don’t know about yourself, if it’s something you already are familiar with and living with, you might not be looking at it the right way. 

• It shouldn’t be something that inflates you, that is self-congratulatory, that makes you feel great about yourself (unless you normally don’t feel great about yourself)

• It  shouldn’t be something that shifts responsibility away from you, it is your task to do (unless you normally put too much responsibility on yourself).

The 4th and final step is the ritual, where you must answer what you are going to do about your dream.  This is where we find a small way to honor it.  This part sounds weird and it is only something I realized the importance of recently.  This makes the dream, and your response to it, real.  I don’t mean really big, you don’t need to make it public, you don’t need to tell anyone.  This is for you.  Maybe you say a little prayer or enact a ceremony.  Maybe you bury some junk food, or recite a haiku, or do a little prayer with your eyes closed.  Maybe you dance like a maniac.  Do what you need to do to make it physically into your life.  To enact it.  

 We need to concretize it, making it real, to show the unconscious And that’s the brunt of it  So all together now:

1. Associations
   “What do I think about what’s in my dream”
2. Dynamics –
   “What part of me are dream images referring to?”
3. Interpretation –
   “What is the central, most important message that this dream is trying to communicate with me”
4. Ritual –
   “What are you going to do about your dream?”
   

*This is basically me regurgitating what I said for one of my Ground Floor Cafe presentation that I have at my house. I am sorry I got too excited and didn’t give y’all like any breaks with this one, but thanks so much for everyone that made it and the other ones. You are really helping me make my dream a reality and I can’t ask for anything more than that.

Pics are by our esteemed Gentleman.