TRANSCRIPT
Over the last few months, several people have asked me about the subject of analyzing our dreams. How do we analyze our dreams? How do we figure out what they mean?
Now, one thing that I would say is it’s very difficult. It’s not easy. Meaning, when I have a dream and I start analyzing it, every dream is a new experience in humility for me. Meaning, I come into every dream that I analyze saying, “Well, I’m not really sure what it means. I don’t know.” I think I’ve gotten a lot, lot better at it, and I see this for other people. It’s like a muscle that you can get stronger, and it grows and grows. You can get better at analyzing your dreams.
But a lot about dream analysis is based on knowing ourselves and knowing what we’re going through in our lives and using our intuition, our feelings, to try to make sense of what it is.
Now, my process for analyzing my dreams—and it’s changed over the years—sometimes I do it more quickly, sometimes I do a more thorough job, and sometimes I’ll have a dream that just, in some intuitive way, feels so intense that I can put a lot of energy into it. Maybe write many pages about one dream alone, or maybe write half a page about just one line in a dream that might have 30 lines. I might have a whole page long dream, and just one little part just jumps out at me.
Now, what I do when I analyze my dreams is I usually go line by line, or idea by idea, or image by image. I try to figure out, “Well, where did this dream happen?” I’ve noticed over time that many of the dreams I have take place in different locations from my childhood, in different childhood homes in which I lived, in different friends’ homes, in different geographical locations that I can identify. So often, I try to identify, “Well, where did this dream happen?” Because often that gives a clue about something about its meaning. Maybe it’s connected to something that happened in that place, in that home, or in that time of my life.
I don’t feel like it was my advantage at all in very many ways that we moved several times when I was a kid. I think it was traumatizing. I was uprooted. I had to make new friends. It was stressful. It was alienating. I had to start over again. It brought up a lot of insecurities.
But one thing that for me I find that can be very useful is that if I dream about certain locations in my life, if I can identify, “Oh, this happened in this place, in this time in my life,” I can narrow down the age, the emotional age that this dream corresponds to. So I find it helpful. So in that way, something that wasn’t so good can actually later in my life be kind of useful at helping me make sense of what’s going on in my unconscious. Because again, dreams are the direct product of our unconscious, and it was Freud who actually said that in such a beautiful way. He said, “Dreams are the Royal Road to the unconscious.” Some meaning, if we want to understand what’s going on in our minds, looking at our dreams and analyzing our dreams can really be a very, very helpful tool.
Now, I remember I was probably 15, 20 years ago, something like that, when I was really engaged and beginning to really work very hard at making sense of my dreams. I went and got out of the library Freud’s book on interpretation of dreams, and I started reading it. And oh my god, I thought a guy who wrote “Dreams of the Royal Road to the unconscious” must be really good at dream analysis and must really be very useful at helping me make sense of what my dreams are. Well, that was not what I experienced at all. I found his book very boring. I found it kind of dissociated. I found it kind of strange at points. I did not personally find it helpful.
I remember getting a lot of books out of the library and even buying some that were about dream analysis, and some of them were even worse. I remember reading some of the New Age books on dream analysis, and they did a very simplistic thing that I find a really bad idea. Oh, if you dream about horses, then it means this, and it corresponds to this. If you dream about frogs, it corresponds to this exact idea. If you dream about a pool of water, then it means this. And the idea behind it was that every idea in a dream corresponds very concretely to something else. And what I found by reading that was that it was not true for me. It just was wrong.
I think dreams are very individualized things. Meaning, I could be dreaming about a frog, and it can mean something totally different than if somebody else dreams about a frog. And the reason is because each of us have our own context for what frogs mean. I actually used to catch frogs with a net when I was a kid. I used to have frogs as pets. Sometimes I’d catch tadpoles, and I’ve raised them up until they became frogs, and then I’d let them go free. I remember watching frogs when I was a little kid in the ponds and streams around our house.
I remember one time I had a baby duck, and I’d raised this baby duck from an egg in an incubator, and it thought I was its mother. I would quack to it when it was inside of its egg, and it would go “baby” back at me. So by the time it hatched, it knew the sound of mine, ran track, and it followed me everywhere. But I remember one time I was wandering through a marsh near where I lived, and my little baby duck was following behind me. I was walking, the water was probably up to my knees, and the little front of the little baby duck was swimming behind me. And suddenly I looked back, and it was under the water, half, and it was twitching like this. And I was like, “What’s going on?” I went back, and I pulled it up. It had been captured by a huge American bullfrog, and the bullfrog had grabbed the baby duck by the neck and was dragging it under and had basically drowned it. I managed to get the baby duck out of the frog’s mouth, but it was dying, and then it died.
Well, the reason I share this story is if I dream about certain types of frogs, it could go back to that memory, which was basically a traumatic experience for me. Someone else might dream about frogs, and they can mean something completely different. Maybe they ate frogs when they were a kid. Maybe frogs are a good thing to eat, and they associate that with a yummy food. Or maybe they, I don’t know, maybe they drew pictures of frogs, or maybe they liked Kermit the Frog. Point being, you can’t just look in a book and say this thing means this thing. Frogs mean this because anything in a dream can symbolize something completely different to a different person. Also, one thing can symbolize many things to a different person, and I think that’s true of dreams in general for myself, that there can be multiple interpretations that are all equally correct for any single dream that a person has.
Point being, that’s why if I’m going into dream analysis with myself, I’m trying to figure out what some dream means, I need to be open-minded. And I do something that actually Freud said, which is free association. What do I mean by free association? Meaning, when I look at a line of my dream or an image of my dream, I just let my mind wander. I let my mind open up and freely just associate whatever comes to my mind and say, “Hmm, I keep that as an open hypothesis. Maybe that’s what my dream means.” And I think that is the number one rule for dream analysis: let yourself freely associate to whatever comes to your mind.
I remember sometimes clients would come to me, and they’d say, “I have a dream. I don’t know what it means. Can you tell me what my dream means?” as if I, some mental health professional, who’s some sort of expert, is supposed to be able to instantly decode their dreams. My first question would always be to them, “Well, what do you think?”
It means, and they’d say, “I have no idea.” And I’d say, sometimes in therapy, I’d say, “Well, you want to just try, sit back, close your eyes, tell me the dream, and tell me whatever comes to your mind.” Now, does that mean that whatever comes to their mind is actually correct? No, not necessarily. But it’s certainly going to be a lot more correct than anything most people are going to come up with.
And that’s another thing. Who is the best person to analyze our dreams? Is it some external professional? I think this is my experience: ultimately, the person to analyze our dreams is the person who knows us, knows our history, knows our emotions, knows what we’re feeling the best. And usually, that’s us ourselves, especially if we’re very actively engaged in a broader self-therapeutic process.
Now, what I found sometimes as a therapist is I had clients who came to me. They told me a lot about themselves. They told me about their history. They told me about their traumas. And I started to build a picture of who they were, of what their history was, of what they had gone through in their lives, of what their behavior represented in the light of their traumas, in the light of their positive things in their history. And I got to know their character. I got to know the people in their lives. I got to hear all about the members of their family, their friends, their past boyfriends, girlfriends, anything about their life. So I would get to know people pretty well.
Now, I found when they would share a dream with me, I would start to associate. And what would I associate? I would associate to whatever I knew about their life, and that would be the context into which I would begin to analyze their dreams.
Now, if someone was in a first psychotherapy session with me and I didn’t know anything about them at all, and they told me a dream they were having, often it was very, very difficult for me to do much free associating because I didn’t know them. Now, instantly, what I would do when I would meet someone new in therapy was start to collect a lot of data about them. My job as a therapist was to try to deeply get to know this person, their character, their history, their emotions, all sorts of things about what they went through in their childhood, the different people in their lives. This would help me begin to gain a context about who they were. But until I had that context, I don’t feel I was in any position to be analyzing anything about them.
But ultimately, what I found still is that when people were engaged in a self-therapeutic process, they knew themselves better than I did, especially if they were working really hard to make sense of themselves. So often, I would put it back on them, and I would say, “No, no, you try to figure what your dream means.” Now, sometimes what we could do is they could share their dream, and we could both simultaneously be analyzing, and then we could compare notes. Sometimes, actually, if I knew the person really well and they were really beginning to know themselves really well, we could come up with some very similar ideas on what this dream might mean. But sometimes our ideas were very different.
Now, did that mean they were right and I was wrong, or I was right and they were wrong? Sometimes, actually, we could both be right, or we could both have different insights about what this dream might mean. Because another thing that I found is even with the dreams where I really felt very confidently that I was starting to decode what this dream might mean—some hope of mine, some desire of mine, some fear of mine, some unallowed thing that I was expressing through my dream that I couldn’t consciously think about, some trauma that I’d went through that I’d never made sense of—whatever it was, I could be very confident about what it might mean, but I could never be a hundred percent sure. And that’s something that’s really important to me: that dream analysis is not an exact science. But what it does is it can point in a direction, and that’s where it can be very, very helpful.
What I found by doing a lot of analysis of my dreams and also comparing different dreams that I had and noticing recurring dream patterns that I had—because that was something that was very useful for me to notice patterns in my dreams. Oh, I have this kind of dream over and over and over again. If I could keep reanalyzing dreams that were kind of similar, often I could come up with patterns that would help me know myself better and better and better.
Now, another thing that I’ve seen for myself, and I’ve seen it with other people too, is if some people don’t remember very many dreams, but when they do remember one dream, let’s say out of a month—maybe because there’s some people in a whole month they’ll only remember one dream—has a general rule, I think that if someone rarely remembers a dream and then suddenly does remember one dream, that dream is pretty darn important. And usually, I think the reason that people can remember, if they don’t remember many dreams but they just remember one arbitrarily, it usually means that dream is able to push through their unconscious entirely and stay in their conscious mind. It is sending them some sort of deep emotional message, and their job is to try to make sense of it.
Now, again, what about if people try to reflect on a dream and they can’t make sense of it? They can’t really free-associate too much? Well, I would say keep trying, keep meditating, keep thinking about it, keep trying to analyze it, and notice whatever comes up. Whatever comes up in your mind, to be totally non-judgmental with yourself, profoundly accepting of whatever comes into your mind, and just think about it. Or if even especially write it down and look at it. My idea is that even if we have no clue what we are associating, we have no clue what comes to our mind when we’re thinking about what this dream might mean, just the fact that something comes to our mind is significant, and we can learn from that.
It’s not about it being right or wrong; it’s about it being useful. And I think it’s about learning to trust ourselves. And I think many, many people, because of the history of their childhoods, because of what they went through, they were not listened to, they were not respected, they were not acknowledged and cared about as an autonomous, valued person. So what they learned to do is what the things that came to their mind, they learned to push them away and say, “Oh, that’s not important,” to be very judgmental with themselves. Many people have internalized a lot of critical judgments of themselves. They’ve learned to invalidate themselves.
Well, to me, the process of doing dream analysis is the process of doing the opposite of being judgmental with ourselves. It’s about learning to be open with ourselves, to be accepting of our creative mind. Because the part of us that does create our dreams is a genius. It’s a dream genius. It’s extraordinarily creative. I’ve tried several times in my life to write fiction. I don’t think I’m very good at it for whatever reason; it’s not my talent. Yet my ability to create fiction in my unconscious when I’m sleeping—oh, it’s absolutely brilliant. And I think everybody has that.
Now, this is another thing: are there people who actually don’t dream? I’ve heard many people say, “No, I don’t dream. I never dream at all.” Well, I don’t believe that at all. I think everybody dreams. Everybody dreams a lot. Everybody’s got an incredibly creative part of their mind that actually is creating dreams, and these dreams are sending us messages. We have all sorts of feelings associated with our dreams. We’re trying to work out conflicts. We’re trying to work out problems. We can be working out our day-to-day problems in our dreams. We can be working out our modern relational problems, and we can be working out historical problems in our dreams. And we can be doing all these things at once potentially in every single dream we are having. But everybody’s doing it. The problem is many, many people are very disconnected with their internal deep creative process. And that’s why, to me, the process of doing self-therapy is an inherently creative process, and it gets us closer and closer.
In touch with the deep creative part of ourselves that’s trying to heal, that’s sending us healing messages through our dreams. Because that’s what I believe. So many of our dreams carry healing messages, and we can figure out, we can work and try to make sense of what these healing messages are so that we can grow.