The first step in making sense of a dream is to own it. It isn't somebody else's or random drivel. You made a story up that reflects you. It isn't intrinsically truthful, rather the dream operates in the realm of what seems to be. Don't dismiss it as "just a dream", rather it is a picture of where you are. Your dream is your story about you. Where you were today. How today fits into your whole life, the universe, and everything. Last night's dream is a window on your psyche, where it is, what's happy, what's not and where it can be going.
The dreaming mind doesn't operate with daylight logic. Dreams do not obey the laws of physics. They are not bound, like the body to here and now. The dream mind is an analogical engine. It is a more primitive mental state.
More than any other single mental tool, the dreaming mind uses the analogic of metaphor.
A simile is a comparison between two things using "like" or "as". I feel like a computer.
A metaphor is a comparison at a higher order, wi thout "like" or "as". I am a computer
Analogic takes off from the "computer" and goes on to reveal how that feeling is related to everything else. The dream is a picture of a sense or a feeling, and experience, or attitude expressed metaphorically in the form, "I am a ..." Your mind chooses its images with great care. The metaphors reveal layers of likeness to the topic. The dream uses fuzzy logic so things appear in the dream because they share a quality with the core issue.
The dreaming mind is making pictures of thoughts. the images are often based on puns. You may groan when you figure it out. For example, I had a dream walking through a museum, past two large urns. They seemed out of place and I was moving the urns. The dream was resolved around the pun on earn. I had changed my stable employment, I was moving my earn.
A dream student reported going into a room full of guilded golden objects The dream resolved around the thin surface of guilt his mother had spread over his life.
The object image may be a pun on another idea that sounds the same. A dreamer reported an image of his head being cut open without any pain. He resolved the dream around the theme of "keeping an open mind."
Sometimes single words will take on larger-than-dream characteristics. They stick out. They are word play ways of showing an idea that is hard to picture. A woman reports the word "Carmine" standing out from an otherwise simple story. The who le story popped into place when she thought about "Car Mine" and her quest for a driver's license and her own car.
Acres of textbooks have been written about symbols. Something is standing in for something else. The symbol shares some property of the source material and some difference. Look at the image and ask what is this standing if for. What does it remind me o f. These are your symbols. You can make sense of them. It isn't as though a dream dictionary has the answer. The answer is in your life history and your imagery. The best dream dictionary is your own dictionary.
You made them up over a lifetime of drinking in images, sounds and ideas. You have a rich repository of images to go with every situation you have ever been in. The people, places and objects that populate your dreams are your personal images taken from your life to represent your experience.
Yes, they are all your individual unique symbols or masks on the archetypal symbols. It is your great uncle, but it is the dream world's wise old man archetype behind the mask. Something is standing in for a great core concept of the cult ure or humanity in general. The great mother is universal, so it the wise one and the hunter and other core concepts.
There there is revelation in each morsel. Each image is rich and deep. Each image was chosen by your mind and drawn from your memory. It is not random and chaotic, rather it is speaking to you in the ancient language of the dream, a language more primitive than logic. Like a holograph, each turn of the image reveals more. Every bit contains the essence of the whole.
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