What does a dream mean?

Transcript

Welcome to Dream Auguries

Tonight, we explore the question of: "What a Dream Might Mean?"

The archetypal psychologist, Mary Watkins, writes in her book, "Waking Dreams,"

When we experience an image in a dream or waking dream, we usually want to know what it means – how it is connected to our lives. It seems apparent that there is some relationship. We want to seize it and place it on a shelf easily viewed in our daily lives. Then we would be able to say, “This here, this one, this is the same as that one over there”…

Images describe – They do not say go get a divorce, or go into analysis, or quit school. The total image states a situation. It may include cause and effect, but it does not usually include dictums as to what one should do. Even if it does give a dictum one must realize, first of all, that the image’s landscape is not the same as that of the “real” world.

I think what Watkins is warning here, is that we can kill a dream by literalizing it. The first temptation is to drag it out into the harsh light of day and interrogate it.

While dreams may portend some future event, some change in our lives, what if we were to approach a dream the way we might approach a friend: talk to it, understand its own meaning? Perhaps it’s an insight into something our waking consciousness has yet to learn. Perhaps as in the following dream, it isn’t about understanding the final destination but the anxieties of the journey itself- take again

Last night I dreamt I was on a tour boat in some foreign city. Instructions were being given to different groups in different rooms, but I did not know what room I was supposed to be in. (Just days before, my wife and I had wandered through the halls of our child’s school, to find her a new teacher. I recognized that feeling of odd disorientation.)

Remembering those rooms now as I write about them, the dream feels more like a nightmare as the boat slipped from the dock and I was unable to find my family, much less know where the ship was headed.

Like a piece of abstract art, this dream seemed to be more about a feeling – having brought my family on a tour for which I don’t even know the destination.

The psychologist Erich Fromm called dreams, The Forgotten Language. In book of that title, he explores ways of connecting dreams and the myths and fairy tales in our culture. As Fromm put it: "both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. 

To return to Mary Watkins, listen to the way she likens the experience of dreams to that of a poem or a piece of music. 

Think of a poem or a piece of music that you hear over and over again.

As the poem moves to be the tawny cat, the room behind the store, that feeling is dusk draws the shade down. As it changes location and emotion, you travel with it. Its images transform you as they pile one upon the other.

You exist in the present moment with all the experience that has come before. Layer upon layer. The larger image comes into being within you. It comes not just on its own, as a single set of words on paper, but rather as the poem streams through you, it collects likenesses among other images of your soul. It draws to it, casts out memoria- landscapes. Actual and imaginal. Emotions. It ferrets out your hopes and your fears. All this, it pulls through you, separating out some of the images and – Again.

All this it pulls through you, separating out some as the images become more specific, drawing more along as it widens. The poem pulls you into its world, through your own world. 

I think what she’s saying here is, what if we really let dreams speak to us? What if we were to listen rather than interpret? What would we find if we repeated the dreams to ourselves?  

Dream Auguries is a weekly reflection series for insomniacs, lucid dreamers, oracles, soothsayers, magicians and conjurers of all kinds. It's bonus content for the film, Dreaming Grand Avenue, now streaming on cable, written and directed by Hugh Schulze.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Tony Scott Green and sound design by Kevin O’Rourke. 

Good night.