Dreams & the Subconscious

Lesson 4: Common Dream Scenarios

Common Dream Situations IV

Flying Dreams: Flying dreams can be positive or negative. If you watch birds fly, you see that they immensely enjoy the act of flying. It is the ultimate freedom. If you are flying in a dream, you rise above the earth’s surface. To soar into the air often indicates uniting with spirit, which is the part of us that enables us to rise above life’s challenges to get a broader perspective. Flying helps you to get a better picture of your life and your place in it. But we can too often want to remain above the earth life with its duties and cares. Jungians tell us that flying in a dream can mean ego inflation – "better than thou" attitudes. While it is healthy to get above it all sometime to experience spirit healing, it can be too tempting to feel we are above or better than the mundane world and of the people who scrabble and squabble and are often petty and mean and therefore we to want to stay always above it all.

The mythic character Icarus stole his father’s wings in order to fly to the sun. But the wings melted and he crashed to earth. His father’s wings are too advanced for him and he cannot maintain the flight. And the sun often represents the light of consciousness which cannot be taken in one great burst without blinding and searing us. In order to fly safely, we must have an honest knowledge of our place on this earth, our limits and our talents, our weaknesses and our strengths. Folk tales often tell of the hero who tried to fly before he was ready, and sometimes like the hero we want to fly in the world of the spiritual without having lain strong foundations for the journey first. So if we try to fly before we are ready, we crash to the ground, and that plummet to earth reminds us of the need of being firmly grounded before we try to rise.

Making Love Dreams: Some people think that if a woman dreams of making love to her boss or a man dreams of making love to his wife’s best friend, it means that the dreamer wants a sexual relationship with that person in mundane life. It is true that the dreamer may in physical life feel a strong attraction to that person after having the dream. However, lovemaking in dreams often has more to do with Sacred Sex, soul bonding and soul unity on a deeply spiritual level.

In sex in dreams, you are uniting with some facet of yourself represented by the person who appears in the dream as your lover. I’m not saying it has nothing to do with the outer world, but rather that interpreting the dream in terms of the outer world, most of the time is to miss the mark. Within the man is his divine Beloved, his anima, and within the woman is her divine Beloved, the animus. When making love in a dream, you are experiencing unity with your divine Beloved and the characteristics you are integrating into yourself are like those in the outer person whose face the Beloved wears in the dream. So in working with the dream, ask yourself what that person is like and look for those characteristics in your own anima or animus. Some of the greatest damage we humans do lies in projecting our inner Beloved onto outer people. So before you try to seduce the mailperson after a steamy dream about him or her, look first inside to the inner drama that is taking place in your psyche.

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