Dreams speak the language of symbol, and so can you

Remember when you were a baby, before you could talk, before you could make meaning of the strange jumbled mumble of sounds coming from the adults’ mouths? No? Me neither. And part of the reason we don’t remember that time is because we didn’t yet have symbolic awareness to which we could attach meaning. We need stories about things to make them make sense.

In waking life, as adults, we have a vast internal library of symbolic meaning about the world around us. This helps us sort out useful information from background “noise” so we can recognize our loved ones, our coffee cup, our comfy pillow. Sometimes we lose this ability through illness, inebriation, fatigue, or circumstance and a familiar object appears bizarre. We suddenly think a shadow is a spider or a monster or an intruder. Our minds play tricks on us.

Another way to look at these “tricks” is that our minds have a momentary dream about something in physical reality. If we look at these odd moments as dreams rather than mistakes, life becomes much more fun. We get to play in the realm of the symbolic. “Oh, I just had a short dream that that table had feet and walked away! I wonder if I, too, want to play more, to be less fixed in one place…” This is an invitation into Dreamland. I am not taking my momentary “dream” literally; rather, I’m embracing the arrow of the abstract that points to something in concrete awareness.

Now consider this in the context of your nighttime dreams. Every nighttime dream is chock full of symbols, from the characters to the landscapes to the quality of light. Each symbol invites exploration, invites you to find layers of meaning, invites you to dig deep.

This might, at first, sound like you can make any meaning you want from any dream you want, but this is not so. The Dreaming is speaking a language, the language of the symbol and, just like with any language, you are invited to de-code it. There may be multiple possible meanings to a dream symbol the same way the word “bark” might mean the call of a dog or the protective outer layer of a tree, but it definitely doesn’t refer to the vast depths of the ocean. 

Your dream symbols work a similar way; a dream about a friend might refer to an experience you had with them, to something about their identity (gender, race, profession, etc.), to a part of you they represent, to the time in your life when you met them, or many other things, but the symbolic meaning of that friend in your dream will always tie back to them in some way. It’s not an obscure reference; the Dreaming is very precise, often comically so.

One way to learn the language of symbolism is to study fairy tales and ancient mythology. The stories we have been telling ourselves since time immemorial are overflowing with symbols which are embedded in our human consciousness in a universal way. Every culture throughout history has spoken the language of The Dreaming and so, too, can you when you make a study of symbolic meaning. So the next time you feel perplexed by the strange images which appear in your dreams, imagine your dream was a fairy tale constructed just for you and see what mythical insights it has to offer!

If you'd like to learn more about working with the symbolic language of your dreams, check out this introductory workshop.