Tara contacted me about a dream she had been having for years, occurring weekly, sometimes up to three times a week. The fact that a dream could repeat this frequently and for that long a period of time is interesting in itself, but what happened next was the most amazing part of this story.
Recurring dreams are one of the most fascinating phenomena of our dreaming experience. Almost everyone has had a recurring dream at some point in their life. Why do they occur and what causes them to suddenly stop?
When someone sends me a dream I begin by sending them a few questions about the dream in order to be sure I have all the important elements needed for the dream interpretation and analysis. I want to know details of the setting, who was in the dream, any dialogue, the emotional tone of the dream, what happens in the dream and then how the dream ends. With a recurring dream I also want to know which of the dream contents or dynamics are repeating.
By translating and interpreting these dream elements, we are able to gain an understanding of what the psyche is circling on or where it is stuck in an aspect of its processing. However, the images and situations in our dreams are rarely literal representations of these processes. These contents are usually symbolic and it takes some work to translate them through archetypal pattern analysis, the model with which I interpret dreams.
I asked Tara several simple questions to gain context of the repeating setting, dynamic, and the people and relationships present in her recurring dream. She sent her answers and I set about translating and interpreting her dream over the next week. When I sent her my full dream translation report I was shocked to hear back from her that since answering my questions the dreams had completely stopped! After years of this weekly occurring dream, it simply stopped. Why?
Our brains hold more that we can possibly conceive of and not only do our brains hold many types of memory without our awareness, we also hold onto the way in which we've processed or made sense of these experiences. Often these are experiences we might not even have conscious awareness of but they have been occurring under the surface, so to speak. Dreams are one way that our minds, our psyches, express what is occurring unconsciously. As you can imagine, a repetitive dream, or theme in our dreams, would indicate presence of a process or issue that some energy is circling around and a part of us is stuck there in our development or growth.
When Tara finally took action to understand what this dream meant, and when she became attuned to the relevant aspects of the dream, she answered the call. Her psyche had been sending out this call for years, and now was the time for her to answer it. Possibly the most fascinating part is that all her unconscious mind needed was for it to be made conscious. In this instance, Tara didn't even need to understand what the dream images meant for them to stop. She simply needed to acknowledge their relevance and their presence in her psyche. She did, however, learn what her dream was telling her, has been integrating this, and is still creating that story today.
Comments