Dreams Cloud Educational Series by Dr. Robert Van de Castle - Session 2 Typical Dreams Part 1


Hi, this is Bob Van de Castle and welcome to our second video visit. What we’re going to do tonight is to try and go through, as it says here, typical dreams. Now a typical dream is one that most people have. So they would typically dream about these various topics. They don’t have to dream about it frequently to qualify as typical. It’s just that they have had it. So if we were to survey a large number of people and ask, “Have you ever dreamed about X, Y or Z?” they would say, “Yes, I’ve dreamed of that.” So what would be the types of things that most people dream about at some time or another. So I’m going to go through with you briefly, ten different typical dreams.
Generally the most frequent one that you would find in a survey like that is that it would be a dream of being chased. It may be a single person chasing you, it may be a group, you may be running, but the main motif is that somehow people are after you and you’re trying to run away, or hide, or get away from them. These dreams usually reflect when we are feeling overwhelmed with situations in life. As you remember back when reading through the blogs, 2/3 of all dreams are unpleasant and it’s certainly a very unpleasant situation to have people running after you, trying to run you down and so forth. So these can’t be realistically reflecting our concerns about the outside world unless there are real people out there that are really after us and have evil intent towards us. Sometimes though it can be a part of ourselves – there may be an internal part of our self that is somewhat of a stranger or someone that’s beating us up a lot, is being very critical of us. So it may be that it’s an internal part who’s after us.
The second most frequent one would usually be falling. So in these you may be falling from a mountain, from a bridge, a tall building or some other dangerous situation. These dreams seem to be reflective of the idea that somehow we’re not on very firm ground, or we seem to feel that we’re off balance, a little bit out of kilter, and unless we’re a little bit more careful, stabilize ourself more, take more care about where we are and how we got our self in this location, we may wind up just falling. So, in general, the direction going up, like we go up to heaven, we climb up the social scale, we move up to upper class living. So up is generally a good direction. Going down, like we go down to hell, we fall into disgrace, we fall into bad situations. So these seem to be reflective of our concerns as to how we are taking our stance in life. Is it a precarious one or not? There’s sort of a belief that if we dream and fall and hit the bottom, we’re going to die. That’s not an accurate perception because I know that I’ve had dreams myself where I‘ve hit bottom and I’m still here sharing this conversation with you tonight.
The third one would be what’s called an examination dream. Now sometimes that’s literally an exam where you have an exam that’s given to you and you have to go and fill out the answers and then it may be that your pen runs out of ink, your pencil breaks, you may not be able to get to the exam room, you’re late, you get there and the doors are locked, the person who is supposed to administer it isn’t there, you just get started and then whoops – time is up. So that it’s usually some difficulty in completing the task. So examination dreams could be reflective of how in life we are frequently being evaluated by others. It seems like it’s some sort of an authority figure, it could be in the larger sense, it doesn’t have to be a person, but like a larger organization that would be concerned with checking up on us, not only the government with your taxes and so forth. But in these cases then, we are not really sure of how we’re doing in this. Now it can go in a different form from an examination where you’re trying to fill out the answers, in terms of being work related. So that like a baseball player might be concerned about striking out, an actress might be worried about forgetting her lines when she’s on stage. So it’s somehow, how we are going to be evaluated by others, do we have the skills to present ourselves well and successfully or do we feel pretty uncomfortable with it.
Another typical dream would be dreams of nudity. Now seldom are we totally naked. A more accurate description would be inappropriately dressed. So we aren’t completely nude, we may be partially nude or inappropriately dressed. Now these, people are usually concerned that everyone is going to be laughing at them, saying look at them, look at the way they’re just sitting there and so forth. It doesn’t really seem to have, in my experience, much to do with that. So people are pointing at you and pointing at your sexual areas and so forth. It seems to be one where we are more concerned with how would you view me if you saw me as I really was? If I didn’t have this particular uniform on, because we use uniforms to indicate who the doctor is, who is the nurse, who is the policeman, who is the soldier, who is the firemen and so forth, and so if we don’t have on our usual clothing on than we can’t differentiate. In the shower room, a general looks the same as a private. So clothing is kind of a way to make a statement as to who we are. Do we have fashion labels in the back, are these expensive clothes, is it dirty clothing, and so on. The nudity is more that you’re concerned that if you were to really see me as I was, would you be able to accept me? The surprising thing is that most of the time, people do in the dream. It isn’t that anybody laughs at you, or points at you or tries to embarrass you, they accept you as you are.