The First Dream Pathway: Symbolic Dreams

This might be the path you take most often with your dreams, especially in the beginning. These are the symbolic dreams from which you gain all manner of support, ideas, guidance, suggestions, nudges, pats on the back, or boots in the behind, as the case may be. Always remember, it is you doing the guiding, supporting, patting, and booting. I will repeat this often: dreams come from your own Dream Self, from You to You.

Why Symbols?

People often ask why dreams can’t come in simple everyday language. Why speak to us in symbols? I can think of three reasons.One is that the language of the Soul is symbology. Visions come in symbols, intuition often comes in pictures, which are the form symbols usually take. It is the language of the non-material world. If you think about it, verbal language is not all that simple either. How often do we get tangled up in misunderstandings with others because one person’s understanding of a word or term is different than someone else’s understanding of the same word or term? Both everyday language and symbols require some thought, effort, and awareness.

Second, we have free will in this dimension. If we choose not to listen to our Dream Self, we do not have to do so. It is easier to ignore a coded message.

The third reason dream messages come in symbols is that we have become so enmeshed in this material world that we have long ago lost touch with our Souls and the more natural way of communicating. We have become so outer-directed that we look to outside authorities of all sorts, from TV to other people, and have forgotten the value to be found in our own internal wisdom.

Symbols

There are two kinds of symbols, personal and archetypal. (pronounced ark-uh-type-al ). I discuss each below.

Personal Symbols

Most of the symbols in your dreams will be personal in nature. This means that while they may have some common meanings they will have specific personal associations for you.

For instance, a house typically represents your self, with the first floor being the waking state or daily life, the basement is thought of as the sub-conscious mind, and any upper floors as the super conscious or higher mind. But any given house will have specific meaning for you in terms of your experiences in that particular house. You may have been very happy in that house, or very unhappy; if it was your childhood home it will mean something different than if it was the first home you and your spouse bought together. As another example, eating an orange in a dream will mean something very different to someone who is allergic to citrus than to someone who is not. Dreaming of the Mississippi River will have a different association to someone who lived near it than to someone who has never even seen it.

"What does this mean to me?" This is a question that you will begin to ask yourself frequently as you begin your adventure in dreams and dreaming. Notice what comes to mind first when you think of, say ... bananas, roses, spaceships, bicycles, or Great Aunt Bertha. This is called associating to symbols, which is how you discover what any given symbol means to you. Remember it is all about You.

Archetypal Symbols

Archetypal symbols are ones that have no particular association to you personally. They are more general, in that they have meaning to anyone and everyone on the planet.

In the case of people such as mother or father, it is not your particular mother or father, but an unknown mother figure or unknown father figure that makes it archetypal in nature. Everyone on the planet has a mother and a father, but not everyone on the planet has the same experience with mother or father. So, in the general sense, there is a description of what mother is, that is usually thought to be nurturing, gentle, loving, affectionate, compassionate, feeling, and wise. This is the mother energy that the Universe or your Dream Self may be conveying to you, not the experience you had with your own birth mother, which may not have been all of those things. The archetypal father can be thought of as strong, assertive, moving forward, taking action, conquering, and knowing, while this may be far from your personal experience with your father in this life.

So, when the archetypal mother or father appear in your dreams, it is going to be an unknown figure, a man or woman who you really do not know in your waking life. And it may be said that when they appear you are being asked to seek the universal aspect of that ENERGY in your life. You are being asked to create or allow this energy from within your own being -- in the case of the archetypal mother or father, to parent yourself, or to allow the Universe, or God, to parent you. It might be asking you to look at where you need to add, remove, soften, or strengthen some aspect of these energies in yourself, based on the exact nature of the imbalance that you have acquired along the way. Or maybe it is congratulating you for having already done so. The exact intention of your Dream Self depends what else is going on in the dream.

Of course, mother and father are not the only archetypal symbols. There are many things we all share in common anywhere on the planet that we happen to be. We all look at the same moon, feel the warmth of the same sun, see the same stars, there are oceans, wind, fire, the very earth we walk upon. We may encounter the wise old man and wise old woman, the trickster, the child, geometric shapes, doorways, pathways, rivers, religious figures such as Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, or other great prophets, numbers, and letters of the alphabet. Also you may find substances such as gold, silver, sulphur, mercury, characters from old myths and legends, gods and goddesses, certain animals such as the lion, lamb, eagle, bull, horse, the snake shedding its skin, common human experiences like birthing and dying... the list goes on and is quite long, but this gives you an idea of how it goes.

There are many good books written about various systems of symbology with rich stories that reach back into the distant past, wherein one can come to see the heritage of humankind as it is passes from generation to generation. It is also awe-inspiring to realize the same human experience is shared by every culture, the themes repeating across the centuries and civilizations and in all truth it brings one to wonder why we insist on continuing the conflicts and competition even into the present. But such is the nature of life on this planet, and it is these planetary-wide themes and dramas that are reflected in our dreams, whether through personal or archetypal symbols.

What Do We Do with the Symbols?

Now, we have a dream full of these symbols, what do we do with them?

There are some basic concepts to begin with. They are the foundation, and from there we can move out into the world of our own meanings and understandings. Some will say that all symbol books should be thrown out, but I do not agree. I am reminded of the saying that you should know the rules so that you know how and when to break them. There is a lot of truth in that statement. We shall look at some of these foundation precepts.

HOUSE. A house typically represents yourself. The main floor, or ground floor being your waking life or daily life, the basement being the subconscious mind, and the upper floors as the super-conscious or higher mind. An attic can also be the subconscious as so much is stored there, usually old forgotten things. An attic can be a place to find clues to past lives, depending on what is found there.

ROOMS in the house. The kitchen is usually a place of nurturing, where you cook food, the sustenance to nurture yourself; it is also an informal gathering place. The bathroom is used for various forms of cleansing oneself, the bedroom for rest, as well as sex, rejeuvenation. The living room is more formal and also more public; you may invite company into the living room but no further inside your house.

CAR. A car can also represent yourself, or more specifically, your body. It is, after all, a vehicle in which we get around in life. If we are driving the car, we are in charge of ourselves, or we may want to consider who IS driving, or is anyone at all driving the car? Is it, in fact, moving? Is it stuck, in disrepair? Moving too fast or too slow? This gives some easy clues to what you are doing in some part of your life.

PEOPLE. When we encounter people we know in our dreams, it rarely means we are dreaming about that person. A rule of thumb is that everything and everyone in your dream is an aspect of yourself. I repeat, you are probably not dreaming about your friend Milton, or Cousin Edith, you are dreaming about yourself! Ask yourself what you think of this person, and notice what comes to mind first. Then ask yourself “In what way am I like that?” Note here that dreamwork requires honesty with yourself.

Essentially, what we do with symbols is to make notes about our associations to each symbol and then fit the associations together like the pieces of a puzzle to reconstruct the dream in terms of the meaning.

In other words, you have on the one hand the actual story that was your dream, and you also have the story retold as the meaning BEHIND the original story.

For example:

Woman Dreamer writes:

I am sitting on the deck, there are a lot of people around, and a lot of noise. A woman comes toward me and asks me, “Do you know anything about children’s books?” She then proceeds to talk about children’s books. She talks on and on, mentioning things about children playing and why they do what they do, although I am not at all sure what she really is talking about. Suddenly she excuses herself and leaves, but I have the impression that she intends to come back and continue. After she is gone I turn to someone sitting beside me and ask “Do you know what she wants?” End of dream.

The dreamer looks more closely at what is going on in the dream, amplifying her memory of each element. She remembers her feelings of being confused, feeling unable to do anything because of the noise and confusion all around her, too much going on. She feels she can’t get inside the house to do what she needs and wants to do. She then feels detained by this woman talking for so long without being able to understand what she wants, if anything.

We discuss children’s books. The dreamer is very familiar with children’s books, she is a mother and has read many, many of them to her children, as they are a family of avid readers.

We talk for awhile about the view of life from the perspective of a child and the books that her children tended to like, keeping in mind the few things the dreamer recalls from the dream woman’s dialogue, children playing and why they do what they do. What comes to mind is the observation that children tend to do what is important to them with a single-minded purpose. Their play is their work, they do what they do because they love to do it. If they tire of what they are doing, they stop. This is how they learn and grow.

We note the house is probably herself;

A deck is outside of the house or the self, and yet has another factor of being a place to relax;

The dreamer smiles. She understands the dream now, relating the feelings from the dream and the discussion of how children approach life to her recent wondering how she might simplify her life and enjoy it more.

She then re-writes the dream in terms of the meaning she feels she has now uncovered:

I am outside of myself, out of touch with myself, distracted by too much complexity all around. Another part of myself comes along and calls my attention to another way of approaching life, known well by children. That seems to involve making choices about what is most important to me, and being free to abandon certain things when I lose interest in them. I can let go of some of the rigid ideas adults clutch onto about obligations and having to finish what they start. What this woman wants is for me to see how I can start to simplify my life and enjoy it more, while still being responsible in other areas.

The dreamer still has to put some thought into exactly how she will integrate this new approach into her busy life, but she taken a big first step by finding the answer to her question. She now has a clearly stated solution and the sense of assurance born of listening to her own inner wisdom. For this reason, she is more likely to use what she has learned.

Re-stating the dream in terms of the meaning you have discovered helps to bring it back into a linear, practical world where you can begin to implement what you have gained. Otherwise, you are left with a lot of ideas that may float off into the sunset when you get up from your journal and get on with your busy and active life. It is a matter of integrating, we go off into the creative realms of our being, but then we have to bring it back and ground what we learn “out there” into the reality of our waking life, if we are going to see any real benefits.

(After reading this information about symbols, it may be helpful to return to the article Opening the Doorway and re-read the example dreams and analysis given there. )

Note: Although these articles can help you a great deal, many of the concepts are best learned in person from Julia herself. If you are interested in a workshop, class, or an individual session, please contact Julia!

Do you have a dream you would like some help interpreting? Call Julia and she will give you analysis or just a nudge in the right direction. Read on for more information!

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Note: for more information on dream symbols, see Symbolic Dreams.

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