Do you have intense dreams? Do you wonder if your dreams mean anything? Do you feel conflicting feelings about paying attention to your dreams?
On the one hand, your brain brings up those voices that say “Paying attention to dreams is just superstitious nonsense.”
On the other hand, you can almost sense that there is a deeper meaning hidden inside them.
Like you, I have always been interested in my dreams. Even when there is nothing big or exciting happening in my outer life, it always feels like my inner life is alight with images.
And so it was that a decade back, after I had just relocated from India to the United States, that I started learning about dreamwork. This was a transitional time in my life. I was newly married and in a new country. Through all the big changes, it seemed as if my dreams were again vividly colored, almost poetic.
These explorations into my dreams became one of the greatest adventures I have ever gone on. Dreamwork is also a huge thread in my book The Empath’s Journey, a book about my experiments with living life as a sensitive person
.My research had showed me that instead of being “nonsense,” dreams were, in fact, very important. The study of dreams is part of many psychological theories. Great psychologists like Carl Jung & Erich Fromm had not only been fascinated by dreams, but had explored them deeply. Working with dream symbols is, in fact, a huge part of Jungian depth psychology.
So, what did I learn? And how can your dreams help you?
- Dream characters, places and symbols often stand in for parts of our own self. While this is by no means a formula, the assumption in Jungian dreamwork is that the characters as well as the places and animals that appear in our dreams are representations of parts of ourselves. So, when we are walking through strange alleyways or undiscovered parts of a house in our dreams, what we’re really walking through are undiscovered parts of our own psyche. When strange animals show up in our dreams, they are parts of ourselves — our own instincts or our shadow self. We might have angry and biting dogs or a malnourished cat show up in our dreams. These are all parts of our own self, and their condition shows us in clear pictures the condition of the unkempt & ignored parts of our psyche.
- Dream symbols can’t be interpreted in just one way: Paris in one person’s dream is NOT the same thing as Paris in another person’s dream. If you’ve always dreamed of going to Paris, Paris is likely a positive symbol in your dream. But if you got your suitcase stolen while on a vacation in Paris, the meaning of Paris in your dream will be completely different. This is where simplistic dream dictionaries fail and dream analysis starts to go south. We all have many symbols show up in our dreams that are unique & personal to us & our experiences.
- Dreams speak the language of symbols and metaphors: They are poetry, not prose. For example, death in dreams is often about the death of a part of us. There are many times in our life when an old part of us needs to die for our new self to be reborn. So, to really explore whether death in our dream has a positive or a negative value, we have to ask questions. Is our dream telling us about a needed death of a part of us that will help us move forward? Or is our dream saying that we’re engaging in dangerous physical activities in our waking life and is, in fact, a warning to be careful? Remember: Context matters.
- Disturbing dreams are sometimes disturbing because we’re taking them literally: When your dreams show you having an affair with a person other than your partner, it might feel highly disturbing. But most often, the male figures showing up in women’s dreams (called the animus in Jungian psychology)) & the female figures showing up in men’s dreams (the anima) are contrasexual elements in our own psyche. These images hold a quality that feels opposite to who we are normally. So, for a very “thinking type of man,” their emotional, unintegrated side might be imaged as a woman. Our psyches grow towards wholeness, and for that, we need to marry the different qualities inside us.
- The greater Self shows up in our dreams: One of the most magical things about dreams is that the greater Self often shows up in our dreams. It can show up as a dream animal and come with a feeling of grace, or it can show up as a symbol that has great meaning for us, like my dreams with amethysts in them that I talk about in The Empath’s Journey. Dreams also give us suggestions about what this greater self needs & wants from us.
Dreamwork helps us find diamonds and rubies hidden in our psyche. It helps us explore the undiscovered parts of our own soul, and working with dreams may be one of the greatest adventures you ever embark on! I hope you answer the call.
With love,
Ritu
Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey, which TEDx speaker Andy Mort calls “a fascinating insight into the life of a highly sensitive person & emotional empath.” Ritu is a Silver Medal awardee at the Rex awards, co-presented by the United Nations in India.
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Hello, my name is Cristina. I have often wondered about the meanings behind vivid dreams. Some are so jumbled, make no sense and goes from here to there with no rhyme or reason. Most dreams I can’t remember in my waking form. As soon as I wake, I pretty much have forgotten or only remember tiny fragments.
There is one dream though that still haunts me to this day and was so realistic and vivid that my sleeping physical self felt it as much as my dreaming self, if that makes any sense? My mother died of covid in 2021 and I spent the day with her in the hospital as the family had come together to make the tough decision to give my mom as peaceful death as possible since she was on 100% oxygen and intubating her at the age of 85 is something her doctors told us, she would not come out of it unscathed or would be a vegetable. So, as only one person was allowed in the room because of protocols, I elected to be the one as my mom and I were like best friends and I didn’t want her to die alone. I played her favourite Italian music, I sang and talked to her while she lay heavily sedated. I made sure the family had a chance to say their goodbyes via Skype on an ipad and there were moments where my mother tried to take off her oxygen mask. I think it was to say something, or scratch her nose but we just kept on saying it’s ok it’s ok and putting the mask back on. So the rest of the day was me and her. I held her and kissed her and agonized about her wondering if she were afraid. She died in mid evening and I stayed with her for a while, then I brought all her stuff home and sat in a dark room and realized that maybe I should have fought for my mother with the hospital and my family.
Anyway, one year later I had this dream that I became Ill with something which affected my breathing and I had to be hospitalized and my kids were there as I had to make the same decision to be intubated or die. My kids made the decision for me for some reason and I was powerless and as I started to die, I screamed out to the kids over and over to help me, that I was scared and couldn’t breathe and as I lay there I looked up at my kids and I felt like I was sinking into a dark well and couldn’t catch my breath and I lost consciousness or died in my dream.
It was so vivid, I woke up and I cried all day and was an emotional wreck. Yes I have felt guilty for me mom’s death. When I brought her to the hospital and they let me stay with her that first night, the doctors came and asked her if that time came if she wanted to be intubated and do everything we could to save her and she said yes to it all and then she looked at me and said ‘ I want to come home, I won’t die in here will I?’. I promised her she would be fine and will come home as soon as they could get her feeling better. 1 week and a half she was gone.
I know you will tell me it’s my guilt and yes I acknowledge that. I still feel it in my heart and soul how I should have fought harder for her. It kills me inside every day. She had such a fear of dying and anxiety that she gave up out of fear. She couldn’t understand why no one could visit and she thought no one cared. It hurts to think she died feeling that way.
All this to say, this dream shook me to the core. What could something like that, so vivid as my death in the dream that I felt it physically? That has me wondering if it’s a portend of things to come.
Funny thing is, as I write this novella, lol I am just getting over 2 weeks of COVID illness. There was one week where I didn’t think I was going to make it and would have to call hospital. I went back to thinking I was going to die like my mother but Paxlovid got me out of it after 5 days. I’m still weak, tired and trying to get back on my feet.
I’m sorry to have made this so long but had no other way to describe the experience without giving you the background. Thank you for reading and perhaps giving me your insight.
Hi Cristina. Thank you so much for sharing. Your deep love for your mom is apparent. I can only imagine the grief you must be feeling. And the circumstances around her passing have just added to it. I am so sorry to hear that your mother had to feel that no one cared because of the Covid protocols & the circumstances. I know that as adults, we know all the logical reasons behind this. And as you said, you understand that you feel guilty and that feeling is partly what is pictured in the dream. But I know our emotional realities are not so simple. I do want to start by saying that you and your family made a very tough decision, but a decision that was for the dignity of your mom. I don’t think anyone in the world could make such a decision without some ambivalence afterwards. But you chose to let her go out of love, instead of prolonging her pain. I’m guessing you already know all this rationally. Going to your emotional self, which can’t help but feel deep emotional pain, I would say that first of all, the dream, even though it’s a terrible nightmare, is a testament to your deep feelings and the deep responsibility you felt and still feel towards your mom. And it speaks to the depth of your own grief and your sadness at the way things unfolded. You did a very hard thing as well. You were there for your mother. In truth, she wasn’t alone when she passed like so many other people. She had someone who deeply loved her with her, even though she missed other loved ones…….Our modern worlds don’t give us a place or space for deep grief. If you haven’t as yet, I would say, this might be the right time to find support – a community, a group, or some other container – where you are around people where you can speak your grief. On a more personal level, I think creating a ritual where you connect with your mother’s memories regularly in some way would really help. (Even if you don’t believe in God, a ritual will foster a connection to your own feelings and honor your mom’s memories). You might want to light a candle in her memory every week or as often as you want, or keep her photograph out and lay out flowers. I know rituals sometimes feel “useless” because we’re often not used to doing them. But I think doing something that is a PHYSICAL gesture will help provide a container to hold & transform your grief. And those were just examples – if there is something else that feels more meaningful as a ritual, please go with that. And last, at some point in the future, when you feel up for it, discussing with your children what you would want in a similar situation IF it ever comes up is an act of love both for them and yourself. Most of us don’t have these conversations until the end. My sense of it is that the dream is NOT a portend of terrible things to come. I think it is a mirror of both your grief as well as your heightened awareness of how fragile life is as a result of your mom’s passing. In the end, I want to say that although I am hardly an expert, my guess is grief will come and go in waves. You’re not an emotional wreck for feeling as you did. You are someone who is touching all the raw pain of letting your mother go. I hope you support yourself as you feel all these very painful feelings. I am sending you love and prayers💜