Dreams Cloud Educational Series by Dr. Robert Van de Castle - Session 8 Outdoor

What we’re going to do in our session today is try and get you started learning about the particular kind of material that appears in your own dreams. We’ve been going through the content analysis, showing you different categories to consider, in terms of, settings, characters, objects and social interactions. Now what I’d like to do is try and give you some suggestions. We made it clear back in the nine “textual” blogs, that no one can really interpret your dream. If someone offers you an interpretation, it says more about the person offering it than it does the dreamer. So with the painting here, if the title were given as “A Drunken Woman Who Isn’t Preparing Supper for Her Husband”. That’s clearly saying something about the person offering that interpretation and not necessarily the dreamer.

I would encourage you now to try and keep track of your dreams on dreamscloud, so you can always go back and refer to that; and try and develop your own unique symbol dictionary because we have tried to discourage you from relying on a dictionary that says, “to dream about ‘x’ means ‘y’.” It may not. You’re a unique individual. Just as you have your own thumbprint and that’s unique to you, so it could be used by the police or the government to try and determine who you are uniquely, you are your own person with your own ‘dreamprint’. So you have to figure out what your own kind of unique imagery would be.

Let’s take a look at settings, because by now you are quite familiar with that concept. What are the kinds of things that you could dream about that could give you some clues as to what would be going on in your life? If we were to dream about floods, that might suggest that maybe we are feeling emotionally flooded; that there are just too much emotions going on. That we are just drowning in our feelings and we aren’t able to find any dry land. In that case, I would encourage you to look at your life and find out where are you feeling flooded, overwhelmed, swept away? Strong kinds of passions or strong kind of resentments that are going on.
Another kind of setting that you might encounter would be an earthquake. An earthquake is similar in a way to floods, except an earthquake suggests that it is something down much deeper and is more invisible. You don’t know it’s there. With a flood, you clearly know it’s there, you see the flood, it’s raging along and coming towards you. An earthquake, all of a sudden it happens. This suggests that there may be something deep down where you feel you are losing control. You’re maybe fragmenting. You’re maybe splitting apart. So what may be going on in your life that you’re not feeling very integrated? You’re not feeling very cohesive or very solid. You feel like you may break into pieces. You’re going to be shattered.
If it were a volcano, that would be an outdoor setting and volcanos again, usually come very suddenly and when they come, they come with a great deal of heat. They blow up into the sky and come tumbling down and you usually don’t have much warning. So if you were to be dreaming about volcanos, is there something in the way of perhaps, hot aggression. You’re going to blow your top, literally. We have that in our language, “Wow! He really blew his top on that!” So the symbol of a volcano would work quite well for that.
Tidal waves, again, all of a sudden they come in and you get swept away. This could be, as I suggested before, that your emotions are just too much and you need to retreat. You need to get away from them. You need to find a higher land where you could be.

If you’re out in a desert, there’s not much nourishment, there’s not much water, there’s not much vegetation. So a desert setting when your outside suggests that you’re really feeling isolated, you’re feeling stressed and maybe there’s not enough supplies to be able to continue on.

We’ll continue on in our next visit and cover some more topics.