part0014

The interpretation of your dream is the end result of all the work you have put into the earlier steps of dream work. The interpretation ties together all the meanings you have drawn from the dream into one, unified picture. It is a coherent statement of what the dream means to you as a whole.

At this stage you ask questions like: “What is the central, most important message that this dream is trying to communicate to me? What is it advising me to do? What is the overall meaning of the dream for my life?”

We don’t have the right to make an interpretation of a dream until we have gone through the two earlier steps. Trying to make an interpretation without first making your individual associations is really just guesswork. If you take a ready-made interpretation out of a dream book, it is like wearing someone else’s clothing that doesn’t fit you. The interpretation should flow naturally out of the first two steps. The associations begin to tie together in your mind; the connections to your inner life become clear; and out of this is born a sense of the dream’s overall meaning.

As part of your interpretation, you should try to make a simple statement of the one, main idea that the dream communicates. Ask yourself: “What is the single most important insight that the dream is trying to get across to me?”

Using the dream of the Girl with the Sparkling Eyes, I have prepared a sample interpretation to illustrate the kinds of ideas that might come out when you start to tie your dream together into an overall message.

As you read this example, remember that I had the advantage of working with the dream, years ago, and seeing what became of the dreamer in the aftermath of the dream, so the interpretation comes out of me a little more smoothly and coherently than it would if it were my own dream and I were trying to interpret it for the first time.

When you begin to interpret your dream, don’t expect your interpretation to come out in coherent form on the first try. Just write down your ideas about how you think the entire dream fits together and the meaning that it has for your life. Keep working at it until it makes sense and fits with the overall pattern of events in the dream.

I have put this example into the first person, as though the dreamer were talking, for purposes of illustration.

What is the overall picture of my life that this dream brings to me? The dream gives me a way to understand my emotional reactions, my depression and paralysis, and my inability to function at school in the last several months.

I have been stuck in a severe neurosis. Since a neurosis is actually an unworkable gap between my conscious attitude and the needs of my unconscious, I can see something of what has been going on. My conscious attitude has been one of plowing ahead, trying to succeed in college, and taking up the career that I now feel was dictated to me by the world around me. But my inner being is demanding something quite opposite, which comes under the heading of an inner life . That means meditation, working with my dreams, finding out who I am, realizing that I have a soul—just as humans used to believe, in the old religious sense, that they had a part of themselves that connected them to God, and called it the soul.

In the dream, the results of my trying to succeed in the collective world and stay in my dependent, mother complex is shown by the image of my lying in the gutter, absolutely helpless, passive, and dependent.

The dream shows me the three kinds of feminime energy inside me that are active in my life right now. First, with the Great Mother, I have been caught in the negative side. I’ve gone completely passive and dependent, and that has resulted in the terrible paralysis I’ve been in, my inability to function at school. But the other, even deeper, reason underlying all this is that I haven’t been living the life or pursuing the qualities that my deeper, inner self is concerned with. I’ve been pursuing what I thought other people expected of me but not what my deepest instincts would lead me to. So lying in the street in front of my maternal grandmother’s house tells me that I’m caught in the mother complex in this regressive, childish sense, depending on others to tell me what to do and what to think.

Another side of the feminine at work in me is represented by my sister. This “earth feminine” wants to lead me back into relatedness to women and to the world at large. That is good, but I can’t do it while I’m lying helpless in the mother complex and a collectively derived way of life. I have to learn how to relate to my inner self before I feel I can relate correctly to the people outside myself. Otherwise they seem to pull me into a collectivity that harms me rather than helps me.

The other feminine presence in me is the Girl with the Sparkling Eyes . I identify her as the image of my soul, my inner psyche, my anima. She is the force in me that pulls me toward the inner world, religious meaning, and the discovery of my own unconscious. She is like a goddess with sparkling eyes who could take me on the journey through the hidden world of my inner self, my soul, and show me how to live with who I am instead of what I think I ought to be.

How can I apply this information? First, I think that I have to give up, for a while, trying to be “somebody,” trying to succeed in the academic world or the competitive world of success and power and social approval. Instead I need to do in my daily life what I do in the dream: Go off with my own soul for a while, and make it a journey of discovery into my own self.

I should take the time to dream, remember my dreams, work on my dreams, do inner work, try to find out what my deepest unconscious self wants of me, how it says I am to live. Then I think I can live without being in such terrible inner conflict and without winding up in the gutter again. According to this dream, to meet with my soul and explore my inner self is the only path open to me: That is the only thing that pulls me out of the gutter, puts strength into my legs, and enables me to stand up again like a man.

As you read over this interpretation you can see how it naturally grows out of the first and second steps of dream work that we have already gone through. By identifying which parts of his self are symbolized by the feminine figures in the dream and seeing where they have been affecting his life, he is ready to make an assessment of the dream’s central message. It even leads to decisions about how to live his life in the future.

An adequate dream interpretation should sum up the meaning of your dream in a nutshell. It should also provide a specific application of the dream’s message to your personal life, to what you are doing, to how you are going to live.

Sometimes you find that you can create several interpretations from your associations with the dream, and they all make sense. How do you decide among these possible interpretations? Sometimes you have one association with the symbol that is positive and encouraging, but another association that is negative, warning you that something isn’t right. How do you decide which association is the right one?

Several approaches can help you to decide on the more likely interpretation. The most important technique is one that we have already learned: Write out your interpretations. When you write your interpretation on paper, it has a remarkable effect. It brings it off the level of fantasy and abstraction and gets it into a form that you can see clearly. With the act of writing, you begin to get a better feeling about whether it really makes sense to you or not. When it was spinning around in your head, it may have sounded fine to you. But when you write it down, you start seeing the holes in it; you see that it doesn’t really correlate with the dream; it doesn’t match what has been going on in your life. By writing it down, you see if it really hangs together, if it really “clicks.”

Because your dream is composed of energy systems, a good test for an interpretation is whether it has energy behind it. If the interpretation arouses energy and strong feelings in you, if it suddenly gives you insights into your life, if you suddenly think of other areas of life where this interpretation makes sense, if it offers insights and liberates you from patterns you’ve been stuck in, all of these are signs that there is a tremendous energy behind this interpretation .

When you write out another interpretation, you are likely to find that it simply has no energy in it. It withers, it dies, you can’t connect it to anything that has life or power for you. This is a good sign that the interpretation is not good for this dream.

In every mystery there is always a tiny clue, noticed only by the most observant, that leads to the solution. This literary ploy actually reflects an archetypal pattern in life and in dreams: Every dream provides us with some small detail, some small clue, that tells us which interpretation to follow, or how to take the dream.

Ten years ago a friend of mine was offered a job that sounded wonderful. He would start out as a full partner in the firm, would have challenging work, boundless opportunities. He was excited, but something told him to wait a couple of days before he made a decision. That same night he dreamed that a beautiful and voluptuous woman in a seductive evening gown walked toward him and let him know that she was his for the asking. He decided to go with her; but then she drew close, and he looked into her eyes. Her eyes were a strange, otherworldly shade of green that made him queasy and frightened him. He backed off.

The next day, the correlation between the seductive siren and the seductive employment offer was all too clear to him. He felt that he had projected his anima onto the new job possibility, but the dream was warning him that this was the witch aspect of anima. There was something inwardly wrong about the job offer, some hidden barb—so he refused it. He later found out, through other sources, that the firm was dishonest, and he realized that he could not have survived there.

He also found out about the archetypal meanings of the color green. Like every other color, green has both a positive and a negative connotation. When the color appears in nature—in trees and meadows—it is the symbol of the life force, the energy in nature that bursts forth in springtime. On the positive side, it symbolizes the renewal of life, but on the negative side, it represents poison —the venom in the snake, the pus in the wound, the secret venomous quality in the human race. One is said to be “green” with envy, for example .

The sickly, unfriendly shade of green in the eyes of the seductress was the clue, the special detail that told us how to interpret an ambiguous dream. A good job, a business opportunity—nothing wrong with that, on the surface. And a beautiful feminine figure approaching in your dream can be something excellent: the positive side of a woman’s shadow, the appearance of a man’s anima, a consciousness of the sensual and erotic, the opening up of one’s feeling function. But if the shade of green in her eyes causes your hackles to rise, you have your clue.

Harold Goddard, the great Shakespearean scholar, has shown us that the principle is true in the plays of Shakespeare and perhaps in other great literature. The example that he gave, as I recall it, was the scene in Romeo and Juliet in which Juliet’s father is discoursing on what kind of son-in-law he wants. He wants Juliet to marry someone who is rich and from another strong, wealthy family that would form an alliance with his own. All this sounds fairly normal and neutral for fifteenth-century Italy. It doesn’t give us any terrible feeling about where the play is headed.

But then there is one detail, seemingly insignificant: the complaint of the maidservant. She says that the father’s attitude is the same as selling Juliet into prostitution: He will sell her to the highest bidder, to the one who will bring in the most cash. The maid’s statement gives us the small clue we need that things are not going well at a deep level in the destiny of this family. There is a deep split in its sense of values. Things are going badly, and the seeds of the tragedy ahead have already been planted.

In your own dreams, learn to watch for these small details and read what they are saying. They will make the difference in understanding a situation that would otherwise seem ambiguous.

If you find that the interpretation is still not coming clear, or you can’t decide between the opposing interpretations, play devil’s advocate with each explanation of the dream: Take sides, like an attorney, and argue strongly for each point of view, one at a time.

First, argue it affirmatively: Argue that it would be absolutely correct from an inner standpoint for you to take the job. Argue that it allows you to have the life-style that your dream prescribes for you. Argue that it would leave you plenty of time for your family, your inner work, and recreation. Gather all the evidence you can from your dream and list it.

The, argue the opposite position: Be the devil’s advocate. Argue that the dream says you should stay where you are and maintain the status quo. Argue that you should put your energy into straightening out your inner life and healing your neurotic splits, rather than wasting your time getting into new jobs and new power plays. Argue the dream as a warning to not take the path or the direction that the dream seems to refer to. Argue first the yin , then the yang . Argue from the feminine instinct in you, then from your masculine side. Argue that you should leave it to fate and wait; then argue that you should take decisive action. By playing devil’s advocate we force ourselves to align with each point of view within us, in its turn, until we see which one really reflects the lesson of this dream. You will usually find that there is some truth in both interpretations, and your final understanding will be a synthesis of different viewpoints.

Sometimes a dream says that there is no one “right” choice. You may take either path, and the dream tells you what the consequences will be for the one you choose. The dream tells you what price you will pay. The dream may be saying: “Look, here is the attitude you should take, but if you persist in the other attitude, here are the consequences that will follow.”

The unconscious is fair with us. It allows our egos to do exactly what they insist on doing, so long as we take responsibility for our choices and accept the consequences. Even when we take the wrong turn, as we frequently do, we gain consciousness and learn from the experience—again, provided we accept responsibility for it and face the results honestly. Even something that seems “wrong” turns out to be of benefit if we are able to learn from it.

But the one thing that our unconscious will not tolerate is evasion of responsibility. The unconscious pushes us into one suffering after another, one impossible mess after another, until we are finally willing to wake up, see that it is we who are choosing these impossible paths, and take responsibility for our own decisions .

Opt for the interpretation that teaches you something new, rather than one that seems to confirm your ingrained opinions and prejudices. Remember, the main function of a dream is to communicate something to you that you don’t know, that you are unaware of, that lives in the unconscious. Your dream will not waste your time by telling you what you already know and understand; therefore, you should choose the interpretation that challenges your existing ideas rather than one that merely repeats what you already think you know.

There is one exception to this rule: Sometimes your dreams will send you the same basic message over and over again, but you either won’t understand or won’t put it into practice. In that case, the dream may seem to repeat something you already know. But if so, you had better begin to question why the dream has to keep repeating the message.

If dreams only served to affirm our pre-existing opinions and assumptions, they would not contribute to our psychological growth at all. Assume that your dream has come to challenge you, help you grow, wake you up to what you need to learn and where you need to change. And adjust your interpretation accordingly.

Dreams often function as reporters. When you have made inner changes, straightened out your inner values, or made some advance on the path to maturity or individual development, they report back to you. You have a right to feel pleased when good things like these are reported to you.

However, dreams never report these things in a way that invites egotistical satisfaction. If you find yourself writing an interpretation of your dream that has you preening your feathers and congratulating yourself on how wonderful you are, how high above other mortals, then your interpretation is not accurate. Dreams don’t give us those kinds of signals, and they don’t invite us into ego inflations.

Dreams are aimed at the unfinished business of your life, showing what you need to face next, what you need to learn next. In the inner life, we never reach the point at which we can stop learning and start resting on our laurels. So if you find yourself writing a self-congratulatory interpretation of a particular dream, try to see it for what it is, understand that it can’t be a very accurate reflection of your dream, and search further.

There is a strong temptation to use dreams to blame other people for the things that are going on in our lives. For example, if you have been feuding with someone at your job, and that person appears in your dream, it is all too convenient to say: “Good! My dream proves that I’ve been right all along. The other person is wrong, and the whole conflict is his fault, not mine.”

This kind of interpretation is not only self-serving, it is usually completely inaccurate. Your dreams are not concerned with pointing out the faults of other people, or where other people need to change. You can leave that to the other person’s dreams and the other person’s own unconscious. You can leave that to God. Your dreams are concerned with you : what is going on inside you, the invisible energies that are shaping your inner path, the areas of your life where you need to become conscious or make changes.

If your dream comments on an external situation, it will focus on the contributions of your attitudes and unconscious behavior patterns.

Usually a dream can be understood in terms of specific events in your inner life in the last few days. Sometimes, however, you have a “big dream” that is showing you a panoramic view of your inner development over a long period of time. It may interpret for you what has happened in the past, show you what will take place in the future, and give you an idea of how your present experiences fit into that long-range flow. Sometimes it is hard to make a cut-and-dried interpretation of these dreams, because their full meaning only becomes clear with the passage of time.

We have to learn to live with dreams like these, and return to them regularly. As time goes by, our understanding increases. We see events in our lives, and suddenly realize that they fit exactly into the long-range developments that the dream spoke of. Such dreams are revealed as blueprints for our inner growth, and we learn, with time, to see how our lives match the blueprint.

If, after all your work, you can’t honestly choose one definitive interpretation of your dream, then consent to live with it for a while. Be willing to live with the ambiguity of your dream just as we sometimes have to live with the ambiguity of life. You can legitimately say: “It may mean this, or it may mean that. It may go this way, or it might go another way. Only time will tell.”

Such dreams come from the frontiers of your consciousness. They are joined in some way to the future, the seeds of which are contained already in you now. Give yourself time and experience, keep interacting with the symbols, return to the dream from time to time, and all will come clear.