Dreams Cloud Educational Series by Dr. Robert Van de Castle - Session 3 Typical Dreams Part 2


Another frequent dream would be bathroom dreams. Here you ‘re trying to run and find a bathroom, you can’t locate it, you go and the door is locked, or you get in and there’s 20 people waiting ahead of you. So there’s somehow some urgency with that. These dreams are concerned with, if we were to speak in terms of colloquial language, they are sort of are dealing with the “shit” in our perceptions. The “shitty” kinds of things we have to encounter in life and how we are handling it. So they’re dealing with those parts of ourselves that we find kind of objectionable, that if people know about them, they would “smell bad” and that we would be unaccepted. I find that when I have that kind of dream, sometimes I’m sitting in a very public place with everyone around me and there all sitting and I don’t know what to do, I don’t know whether to continue to wait there, or to get up or how I’m going to deal with that particular situation. It’s a fairly common one, so ask yourself what kind of shitty situation am I encountering in life – that’s probably something that led up to having that particular dream.

Another typical dream would be that you’re unable to control your car. That your car is speeding down the highway and you can’t hit the brakes, you can’t slow it down. Ordinarily, you would have the ability to go left and right and be in control with it, but in these cases, it seems like your accelerating too fast, or like a variation on falling you’re going down the hill too rapidly, there’s too many curves and you can’t negotiate the curves rapidly enough. In this case the car may well represent our impulses, our instincts and we don’t feel we have the ability to control our instincts very well.
Another one would be of being late. So that we’re trying to get there and we’re running late. We can’t get there on time. We go and the bus pulls away just as we get to the bus stop. The train pulls away just as we come up to the train. Or whatever it is, we just seem to not be able to get to our designated spot.

Now all of these that I’ve been going through are certainly very undesirable ones, very unpleasant ones. The only one of the typical dreams that has a positive affect to it are flying dreams. All of the rest of them are not very pleasant and are usually suggesting something about ourselves that is unacceptable to ourselves.
In flying dreams, we can have all kinds of postures, we can be Superman [holding arms out in front of him]. We can be flapping our wings [arms] like a bird. We can have all sorts of unusual postures. But with a flying dream, the beauty of it is that we can be under our own control; so you don’t get on an airplane, then the pilot’s in charge of the airplane. You’re in charge of what’s happening. You’re flying under your own power. You can determine how high you go, how fast you go. Once in a while, they’ll be a lit bit of anxiety with dreams of this kind, you may be concerned about a power line, and you may bump into the power line. But usually these are dreams of empowerment, because you are able to control the speed, you can show off and do all kinds of tricky maneuvers. People in life who are usually fairly successful would report having flying dreams. Flying is not something we do in waking life, so sometimes when we have a flying dream it may actually be something that leads up to what we call a lucid dream, where we have awareness within the dream that we are dreaming. So if you are questioning for a second, wow I’m up here flying could I really do that? The answer would be no. So if not, you recognize this is an unusual situation and that can trigger off the idea of lucidity.

Another frequent theme would be losing your purse or your wallet. So there could be two things that could be associated with that. One is potentially losing all of your money and valuables and the other is that this is where we usually have various means of identifying ourselves, our checking card, our driver’s license, or some other way like that. So when we lose our purse or wallet, it may mean that we feel that we’ve lost something very precious, something important like the money, but it may be even more important is feeling the loss of personal identity. I don’t feel that I am really in touch with who I am. I can’t really find a linkage to what my true identity would be. My true identity has been taken from me.
Another possible one that comes up fairly frequently and it’s a tougher one to come up with, at least for me, a satisfactory answer for, is losing teeth. It seems to be somewhat more frequent with women than with men. It may relate somewhat to our personal appearance, so that if we had grungy teeth, all moss covered, certainly not very attractive given that we have all those TV ads with bright sparkly teeth. It could be related to where do we lose our teeth. We lose our teeth as we get older, so losing teeth may be showing a concern about the aging process. Freud had, as he frequently did when interpreting dreams, sexual connotations for it. The idea that someone is pulling your teeth out, he made a focus on someone pulling on the tooth, which he related to masturbation anxiety. You could also possibly tie it in with pregnancy because you have a small object coming out of an orifice, the opening of your mouth, and it’s associated with a lot of pain and bleeding and having a child is a small object coming out of an opening in your body and it’s associated with a lot of pain and bleeding. In some cultures it’s thought to relate to deaths in the family – the teeth in the front would be your parents and those further out would be your grandparents, then cousins and so forth. That’s one that seems to be of universal reflection.
So those are some of the more common dreams. Even if you’ve had them only once, then you would qualify as saying Yes, I have had that dream. What we’re going to talk about in our next get together is other classes of dreams. So these that I’ve given you are some of the frequent interpretations, but it would be up to you to try and think, using the leads I’ve given you here, how might that reflect with my having had that dream the preceding day, which of these conditions seem to apply.
I look forward to having our next get together where we’ll be taking up the topic of traumatic dreams.