This post is part of an ongoing effort to make sense of my dreams:
I was in a strange city, staying in a beautiful hotel. My room was beautiful, but suddenly I had two roommates. They were young women, and talkative. I left the room to get some peace. I went outside. My husband and youngest son, Brian were there. Brian was about twelve. We all decided to go for a walk to a playground. The playground was down a long gravel road. We stopped short because we saw a baby crocodile walking up the road. There was another animal in the bushes, very large. In the dream we called it a badger, but I don't know what it was. To the right were homes, and I heard a mother calling a young child. I thought, what a dangerous place for children.
The part that I left out: When I first entered the room, there was a beautiful young African-American woman on my bed. She was masturbating. I shouldn't have left this part out, because I think it says something about vitality. I was talking about vitality in one of my classes that day. And, symbolically, sex is vitality.
Also, I had shown The Power of Myth to my Imaginative Writing class. Afterwards, my friend Sally and I had talked about mothering by example, showing children how to be compassionate in a world that is sometimes dangerous and cruel. Sally and I had also talked about vitality. About participating fully in the world, as Joseph Campbell discusses in Power of Myth.
In my experience, depending on the individual`s state of mind and psychological makeup, there are three levels of interpretation that can be analyzed from some but not all dreams. The level of interpretation is directly related to the depth that the dream may reach before the individual`s anxiety tolerance forces wakefulness. A person`s ability to tolerate anxiety while dreaming seems somewhat fluid, depending on their mental state while awake. A person feeling relatively stress-free, with a good mental outlook, will be more open to experience deeper levels of the dream experience. It is also my belief that individuals who have been open to the creative process are more amenable to experience their dreams at the deepest level.
ReplyDeleteThe first level of a dream generally is referenced to the individual`s daily life. The happenings of the previous days present themselves to the dreamer in fairly undisguised form, easily open to free association. However, if the dreamer remains sleeping, his/her personal unresolved conflicts become part of the dream pattern. It is at this level that many of us experience repetitive dreams as the ego continually tries to remove the cathected [bound] libidinal energy from earlier unresolved conflicts in our life. Dream interpretation through free association is especially valuable here as these unresolved conflicts and their cathected energy constitute much of our defensive posture. It is the unresoved, anxiety arousing earlier experiences that define our personality, that posture that allows others to define us and helps narrow our exposure to similar experiences. In dreaming, we are generally awakened at this point; the cathected energy often appears as anxiety, causing nightmares and/or restlessness. Finally, and rarely, there is a level of dreaming that is archtypical, that is part of all of us, the stuff of thousands of years of animal experience. Only the most courageous and those most open to the creative experience will generally see more than a glimpse of these primitive id strivings before nightmares drive us to wakefulness. These are the dreams of the human unsocialized, dreams that reveal our strivings toward immortality. Dreams that define us as human and condemn us to death and finiteness.
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