Dreams & the Subconscious

Lesson 4: Common Dream Scenarios

A Sample Dream Analysis

The following is a sample dream.

A woman dreamed: I am at work, walking up a dim stairway. In the next scene, I am in my boss’s office, massaging her neck. She suffers from headaches. The scene changes. The dreamer is now at home. She was supposed to collect her daughter from school but is late. She calls the school and is told that a man picked up her daughter an hour ago. The dreamer screams and is inconsolable. She is hysterical, terrified for her daughter.

Where does the dream begin? It starts at work. In waking life, this woman was working very late hours, seven days a week to do her job. In the dream, she is walking up a dark stairway. So she is climbing, working her way to the top. The stairway is dark indicating that we are seeing something that exists deep in the unconscious and that her path is not clear to her, not clearly illuminated. She is not aware in physical life of any ambition that drives her. She knows only that she enjoys the work itself and must work to feed her family.

In the next scene, she is rubbing her boss’s neck, trying to relieve her headache. The boss is a part of herself, the one who sets her work values. The woman suffers from headaches. This is saying that she is intellectually overtaxed. It suggests that the part of the dreamer that sets the standards for herself in the world of work is coming straight from her head, ignoring the price she is paying on the physical and emotional levels.

In the next scene, she arrives late at her house to take care of her daughter. In waking life, the dreamer adored her daughter and was very aware of how much she missed being with her. Her daughter is very young, and the dreamer is missing out on her child's formative years. The daughter also represents a part of herself. The dreamer is working so hard, working so many hours, that she is denying herself any experience of those things that are fun and enjoyable to her and give quality to her life. So in the dream, the daughter is stolen by the dark man. The dark man is the one who denies the basic talents of the dreamer. He drives her without mercy and ridicules her desires for enjoyment in life. He denigrates her talents, driving her into the pattern of perfectionism.

This dark man is the one who steals the youthful creative energies of the psyche. In waking life, the woman was sad about missing valuable time with her daughter. But what picture does the psyche present of her on the emotional level? She is wailing with unconsolable grief. Unfortunately, the woman continued to work the long, hard hours because she felt she had to in order to survive and to build a life for herself and her daughter. Within a year of the dream, she developed a severe, life threatening illness. You might say that, since she did not consciously change the destructive environment revealed in the dream, her body forced her to change. The illness brought her a new level of awareness and she did find a way, once she recovered, to support her daughter without destroying herself.

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