Feeling comfortable sharing now some of my old dreams during a moment I was very active analyzing the contents of my unconscious mind. Something to be said about dream analysis, especially when one is doing one’s own analysis is that there’s a risk that much in it will remain unconscious. The reason one has dreams is, after all, to conceal unconscious aspects of one’s personality. My initial analysis will always be suspect and only after an exhaustive analysis of my waking life and the contents of other following dreams or visions would I be able to clarify or cement the meaning of any particular dreams. Now, more than 3 years later, I also have another perspective, aka., the contents of my consciousness and my unconscious may very well be different, so this change of focus can help with refining analysis. That being said, having a third party, a dream interpreter is important for this reason: to remove personal bias.

Let us see the dreams now.

Dream 1:

I don’t remember many of the details, but I’m hanging out with some people on the street. We are waiting for something. It is dark, and the street lights are on. The place reminds me of “Teatro de la Luna” (Theater of the Moon), and Ms. M, and company are outside with me also waiting. I think we had just finished work, and we had clocked out. Just after the main entrance/exit door there was a locker room for the employees/theater practitioners. I remember coming back inside (of the locker room) one more time, to encounter the main door open, but the inside doors that led to the factory (?) were locked. It reminded me also of the bakery store in which I once worked in real life. Then, I go out again, and Ms. M. was wondering who went inside, thinking it was an intruder, until she realized it was me. I had some of my stuff (a backpack, or a bag) outside, just hanging on the building wall, or pasted there on the wall. I tried to carry them with me, but everybody said not to worry, to leave them there, that all should be ok, and I left my things in there.

Dream 2:

I travel to Texas to hike a big mountain. I’m on the hike already with two other people: A. (my girlfriends sister whom I haven’t met yet, and lives in Texas), and M. (a friend I met during my retreat in California). The hike is strenuous, vertiginous, and extremely dangerous: there are difficult curves, the trail barely perceptible, and the slopes very pronounced. The landscape is very dry, desertic, though there are some threes. I see the panorama, but it is difficult to take photos without losing my footing, and falling, so I don’t take photos. M. is guiding the expedition, and I lost him in one curve when he turns left. At the curve there is a wooden rail structure to protect people from falling at the edge of a cliff, so I turn right, and take some photos there, I think. Then I see what’s left, and I encounter a difficult terrain, and a precipitous slope. I realized that if I slip, and fall, I might die. I see A. pass me, and she fell into some threes. I thought she was dead. I asked M. if she was ok, and he said she was. She must have hurt herself badly, I thought, given that she must have crashed with the threes that may have saved her. We kept hiking to a place with “ridge” on its name. I can’t take photos, or I fall. I get closer to M. and tell him about my concerns in waking life, like what am I going to do now with my career or whether I should study, and things of the sort.

Interpretation dream 1:

Alright, these two dreams are very different, but occurred during the same night. My hypothesis is that they should have more in commmon than what meets the eye. Let us go one by one.

In the first dream, the setting is that of the factory/theater. The small factory was a bakery place I used to work at many years ago. The theater place was the place I went for theater practice a few months ago. Why are these two associated together? What happens inside the building? Well, for the bakery, my association is that of an exploitative environment: too much work! The theater is, well, theater, a place for acting, for playing a character. As such, this place had a locker room, and so did the bakery. The locker room is the liminal space between real life outside and fake life, an act, inside. At the bakery, we used the lockers to change into our uniform clothes, for example. So, I believe this dream is telling me that the “playing of characters” is over, that now I return to real life, therefore I need to clock out. That is also why the door leading to the inside room is locked. My unconscious, my experience of the other day doing shadow work is over (you can read about it here). At the time of this dreams, I felt exhausted, and a little overwhelmed: it definetely felt like “too much work”, and very stressful. The theater-work, literally, my shadow work shift is over, I’m tired. It’s time to go.

Afterwards, Ms. M. is concerned about me intruding in the building after practice hours. She’s the one in charge after all. Some of my associations of her in real life are those of a good acting teacher, and very caring. It always seemed to me that she was always “in character,” even after theater was over; and everytime I remember my experiences at the theater, I remember her face because her facial expressions would be so particularly “theatrical.” Because she’s “the face” of the theater, it would make sense that, in the dream, she’s also the building, the theater, the guardian of the thershold and my Anima, my other side. She’s my unconscious. She’s not alone, she’s with company, a group. My unconscious is also a multiplicity, a collective, therefore, it lacks individuality in real life. It is split off into multiple pieces. These people may represent, then, different unconscious complexes but they all sum up and condense in Ms. M, it seems to me. Because they must have been with me inside the building either as co-workers or theater students under Ms M., it is assumed that, for a moment, all the parts of myself where united, participating in the work, but they all must split off now, for theater is over. Real life commences.

Outside is real life, and this is how my unconscious sees it: as a dark street illuminated by artificial light. My waking life is a shadowy illusion. It seems they were all just waiting for me to decide to leave the building and my backpack behind. In the end, the backpack is tied to the building, but what is in the backpack, and why is it pasted on the wall? Why didn’t I use the lockers behind?

I do not have an aswer to this questions, but I can make a few assumptions. Perhaps the contents of my backpack are not what’s relevant, but that it is a backpack, the thing I’m carrying with me all the time, an extention of myself, the unconscious. Perhaps what the backpack is actually carrying is the whole building, that’s why they are tied together. But because my shift is over, I must leave the whole thing behind. I must come back to my previous split off state where everybody goes home, meaning everyone splits off into repression, and I continue living my shadowy life. I cannot bring my theater experience with me to the real life. I have not integrated the experience.

Interpretation dream 2:

The second dream gives me more clues: I’m hiking a mountain, and going to the “ridge”, the “edge”. It is a dangerous path, which probably represent the challenges I’m facing now, specially psychologically. I’m “walking on a thin line”. I’m also in Texas that not only is the sourthermost state in the US (it is “bellow”), but in previous dreams has also represented a pshycological place I would denominate as the “inmidiate unconscious”, or the uppermost layer of my unconscious. I’m also in a the desertic, rocky terrain, very dry, and reminds me of the Big Bend area. So, yes, it is a dangerous journey. Very zig-zaggy.

My companions are M, and A, possible representations of my Shadow, and Anima, respectively. My associations to M. are that of the wild, rough man, the man of nature. He definetly does not belong to modern times for he, also, literally lives in a cabin in the forest in real life. About A., I have no associations since I had not met her yet at the time. She’s therefore the unknown woman within, my Anima. The dream starts by telling me I’m going through dangerous paths, following the wild while at the same time I do not know myself for I don’t know my Anima. She’s unkown to me, though I have an idea she exists.

So, I’m in this journey, trying to take photos, trying to use modern technology, quite unfit for the adventure we are in. I don’t know for sure but the camera may represent my intellect. Is this an analogy of me writing down my dreams and trying to pin things down into static interpretations? I’m not sure. I have many dreams where I’m taking photos and I can’t for one or other reasons. At any rate, these things are beyond the grasp of the intellect and using it may actually hinder my path, it will make me fall.

In the dream, we keep going because I expect to take photos when we reach the “ridge” point where the trail takes us. As it can be seen, I’m trying to reach the goal of Individuation, simply to gratify my intellectual curiosity. But this is the wrong approach. M., turns left, the unconscious side, while I turn right, the conscious side of the intellect where I’m actually able to take a few photos. This place is also guarded by a wooden rail that is human made, that is a comfort of society, where I’m quite safe. This section in the dream represents the current split in my psyche.

After that, A. passes me, for she’s also the unconscious. She went where my Shadow went, and another split happens: she falls off the cliff. As I hike up, she falls down, into the trees, into nature, and into repression, while my intellectual, desertic, dry journey above is a dangerous hike. I keep hiking with M., and telling him some of my concerns, but he is so simple-minded, and has no answers for me. He is leading us to the goal.

To end, I do not remember if we made it to the end of the hike. Probably not, since that would mean Individuation. M’s only concern is in getting to the destination. My concerns of waking life are not important to him. He’s single-minded and quite rough over the edges perhaps because I lost my Anima on the way. She is my emotional, sensitive side. If she’s lost in the woods of my unconscious underneath, my Shadow side remains quite primitive, uncivilized. No matter how he is, he’s also me. He is my wild, uncivilized part that survives my exacerbated intellectuality. This shadow part of me will remain so, and the path dangerous and dry, until I’m able to integrate my Anima side. My other concerns in life are irrelevant compared to this goal.

Conclusion:

What do these two dreams have in common? The common theme is that of splitting several parts off. After my shadow work experiment, I remained unintegrated, and, although I say to myself I’m on a path to Individuation, in reality, my everyday life has not changed at all. The culprit lays in my exacerbated intellect who wants to grasp all this experience in a way that can be explained.

The road is curved, serpentine, and it cannot be expected otherwise. Parts of me will split off at times, while at other times they will find union, integration. My attitude today is so different than what it was yesterady, after my experiment. I’m just pointing out the differences. There’s no right or wrong answer. My goal is, basically, to prove that dreams have a meaning, and they are a counterpart of our conscious, waking-life attitude. If that is so, they can be used to assess the current state of the psyche, in the same way an X-ray would the current state of any particular hard-tissue in the body.

If you’d like to have your dreams interpreted by me, contact me via Instagram or email me at dreamanalytics@hotmail.com