Dreams have been an important part of the human race since the beginning of civilization. When our predecessors sat around the fire and talked about the dream world, there emerged another dimension of reality, one that was peopled with animals and ancestors, evidence of what was later to be understood as the collective unconscious through which all humankind is connected. Even as science reveals more of the technical aspects of what happens in the brain during REM sleep, the sensation of the power of dreams to reveal more of the soul to the dreamer is unmistakable.
Though we are more disconnected from this soulful realm than ever before, through the dream world we find a profound connection to the self and therefore to all of humanity. On a personal level, anyone who has gazed into the mystery of a dream with a bit of reverence knows the value of such exploration. By understanding your dreams better, you gain a deeper understanding of yourself and the world around you.
Dreams are stories told in a language of symbols. To understand that language, you must go to the heart of the image itself. The universal meaning of any symbol is held within its use, its essence, its purpose, or its inherent qualities. Once you understand this relatively simple concept, every dream interpretation is simply a story about the story that the dream is telling. This dream dictionary is a comprehensive tool to assist you in this process. It can deepen your experience of knowledge and self-awareness by helping you understand what your dreams are trying to tell you.
I was first drawn to dreams as a very young boy. In fact, I can still remember a dream I had when I was just three years old. In a strange and empty landscape, I was aware that above me there was a realm that seemed impossibly large while I was simultaneously able to perceive a place that was infinitesimally smaller than the middle ground I inhabited. The greater part was the size of the universe itself and the smaller part was at the molecular level, though my very young mind could not really conceive of such constructs. As an adult, I now recognize this as a dream of infinity and have actually heard this exact same dream described by others. At the time, however, it was simply a captivating image that both exhilarated and terrified me. But more than that, I was acutely aware that this fantastically terrible place existed inside me, within the bounds of my own imagination.
As a teenager and by complete happenstance, I came upon a copy of Freud’s seminal work The Interpretation of Dreams. Though it was a bit beyond my fifteen-year-old sensibilities, I was able to glean from his writing that dreams could indeed offer insights and hidden perspectives if they were explored. Social gatherings as a teenager gave me my first opportunities to give this notion a try. When friends would gleefully exclaim that they’d had a crazy dream, I would simply ask to hear the dream and then offer my intuitive response. Wide eyes and exclamations of fascination would follow. I kept doing this—thousands of times, in fact—over many years and developed what was ultimately an innate gift, which eventually led me to formal study and a doctorate in psychology.
The gift, however, is not what it seems, even if you ever have the chance to witness me interpreting a dream and you declare it to be something of note. Anyone can do what I do, and this book can assist you greatly in realizing your own abilities. My gift is not that I know such things, for we all have access to this knowledge through our humanity and the connection to the collective unconscious. My gift is that I can do this very, very fast.
My first book, Dream Sight: A Dictionary and Guide for Interpreting Any Dream, outlines this process in great detail and is more of a teaching tool designed to familiarize you with how to connect to the hidden knowledge of universal meaning. You may be interested in referencing this book for a more comprehensive dream interpretation experience, but all of the detailed terms from that book can be found in a simpler format within these pages as well, in addition to many more! Llewellyn’s Complete Dictionary of Dreams contains more than 1,000 interpretations for various symbols that you are likely to encounter in your dreams. It is your go-to reference guide to help you decipher any dream by virtue of working with the symbols that it contains.
There are a few tenets of dream interpretation that you will need to know in order to use this dictionary effectively. The primary one is that there is no wrong way to interpret a dream. The meaning of a dream is deeply personal, and much depends on the dreamer and the sensation of the dream. Over time, the insight that a dream has to offer can even change and evolve. Most important to remember is that the dream itself has a consciousness of its own. Like an excited child discovering a new activity, it just wants to be seen and acknowledged. Simply thinking about a dream is enough to stimulate the unconscious mind to offer you more information to help you understand yourself better. The true value behind interpreting a dream for yourself is not in the final meaning you give to it but in the process of investigating it.
The second principle to be considered is embodied in how to approach the landscape of the dream world itself. Although dreams can mirror many aspects of your waking life, the most powerful way of working with them is to consider every element of the dream as a reflection of your own consciousness. In this way, every setting and activity that appears in a dream is a part of you, the dreamer. You can consider that your own consciousness is made up of many facets, and a dream is a symbolic glimpse into your inner world.
This approach comes right out of the work done in the late nineteenth century by noted psychologist Carl Jung, who is considered the father of modern dream work. It was Jung, a contemporary of Freud, who postulated the existence of the collective unconscious, a realm that connects all human beings to the same archetypal information no matter what culture or geography might separate them. In his travels, Jung discovered that his upper-class patients in Switzerland were having the same exact dreams as the natives in Africa he visited. Of course, the Swiss businessmen were more likely to be chased by bankers than tigers, but the themes were the same.
According to Jungian philosophy, the people in your dreams represent various aspects of yourself. I refer to these as “character aspects,” where the waking-life qualities exhibited by the people represent those qualities as they live in you, the dreamer. This is reflected in many of the terms that you will find within these pages when the object of the term in question relates to a person or individual. This is referred to in different ways in various disciplines of dream work, but here you will find the term “character aspect.” Every person who shows up in the dream world represents an aspect of your character and should be interpreted as such. As complex human beings, we often understand ourselves in this fractured way, as evidenced by the common phrase “part of me feels this way or that way.” It is much like this in dreams, where distilled elements of your essential nature are best represented on a symbolic level by a particular person who may be known or unknown to you in your waking life.
You can practice this technique immediately by simply considering people you know and assigning them three adjectives that describe their personality. Perhaps your best friend is “warm,” “gregarious,” and “funny,” or your boss is “controlling,” “demanding,” and “rigid.” This is best done in a spontaneous manner, without thinking too much. The same approach would be applied to a dream. If your dream includes someone you know, use this three-adjective technique to describe the person and you will immediately have a sense of what this individual is representing as part of your dream landscape.
Here is an example of how this might work from an actual dream. A woman had a dream that her high school English teacher was floating above her in some strange setting; it was a disturbing experience and so the dream demanded her attention. When asked for three adjectives to describe the English teacher, the dreamer said “negative,” “harsh,” and “demanding.” When asked about current stresses in her life, this dreamer told of an upcoming presentation she was required to do as part of her work, and given that she is uncomfortable with public speaking, she was quite worried about the upcoming task. It was easy for her to understand and even express to me how nervous she was, but it was by examining her teacher as a character aspect of herself that she was able to relieve some of her anxiety by understanding that she is her own worst critic.
The better you know someone from your life, the harder it may be to envision the person as operating as a part of your own personality. In these cases, it’s best to attempt to stay very detached in your thinking. You might consider how someone else might describe such a person in order to reach a more objective sense of the individual as a character aspect of yourself.
Of course, the dream world is populated with many people you have never met before. When this is the case, use whatever information you have from the dream and any details you can remember about the person in it. The less stuff offered by the dream, the more work you will have to do to discover what character aspect might be represented by a stranger. Often, a stranger in a dream represents parts of your own psyche that you have yet to understand.
Sometimes this is not at all easy to do, especially if a character aspect represents elements of your personality that you don’t readily relate to. I ran into this with a client who so resisted this idea that it took every ounce of my patience to guide her through the process. She was a woman in her late twenties who had a dream about an older female boss she had worked for many years prior to when she had the dream. When picking the three adjectives to describe this boss, she came up with “aggressive,” “powerful,” and “unethical.” It was clear to me that the merciless boss-lady from the dream was a character aspect of the part of the dreamer that was also capable of being ruthless and unconcerned with the moral constructs of right and wrong.
In her waking life, this young woman certainly does her best to do the right thing in every situation and would hardly be considered ruthless. Ironically, while railing against the idea I was asking her to consider, she became quite ruthless in her defensiveness. She finally relented and understood what I was trying to convey when I explained to her that all things live inside of us, the good as well as the seemingly bad.
This does not mean that dreams do not also reflect the relationships you are engaged in with your family, friends, and acquaintances; they do. However, I work from the perspective that the best value to be gained from doing dream work is an investigation of the self. In this regard, working with every aspect of the dreaming landscape as a reflection of your own consciousness will reveal more of you to you. This does not negate the influence of your outer relationships impacting your dreaming life, but this dream dictionary is predicated upon working only from the perspective of what I call the “inner circle of interpretation,” where everyone you find in your dream is a reflection of you.
The third element of dream work you need to be familiar with is what is known as the “shadow.” The shadow is a term also coined by Jung, who recognized that there were many aspects of consciousness that people readily resisted. He described the shadow as a section of the unconscious mind. And as its name implies, it is home to all the elements of your personal humanity that are dark and frightening. It is where we hide the parts of ourselves that are distasteful, hated, rejected, disowned, and unacceptable. By burying these ideas deep within the hidden recesses of our minds, we are able to remain blind to them in our conscious awareness.
The basic idea behind this is that contained within everybody are all the potential expressions of the human condition. For example, murderous rage lives in us all. For the most part, not too many of us are actually going to ever act on those impulses. But by virtue of being human, every quality that can be expressed lives inside our psyches. And those qualities that are dangerous, shameful, and otherwise objectionable are housed in an area of the mind that keeps them safely out of view. That area is aptly named the shadow.
For the average person, an endless variety of dark, socially unacceptable emotions remain safely tucked away and never see the light of day outside of our dreams. By allowing them to reside in the shadow, we can be fully human but still function properly within society. However, in order to grow and expand in wisdom and consciousness, we must continually explore these dark, hidden realms in order to discover more of who we are. Dreams are perhaps the most important way in which this is done throughout life.
Nightmares and disturbing dreams are most likely emanating from the shadow. Those that take place at night or in dark landscapes are also likely to be shadow dreams. Anything in a dream that runs contrary to your nature or being, such as skin and hair color as well as gender, is also an indication that the shadow is being expressed. If a section of a dream features a dangerous, frightening, or mysterious occurrence, this too is likely to be a moment of the shadow calling to you.
Things that are within your conscious awareness have no difficulty being integrated into your sense of who you are. You discover something new and take it in, and your identity is expanded. When something is coming from the shadow, however, the process is confounded by fear and resistance. The material itself is made up of elements of your personality that you disown, and they are, therefore, more difficult to reconcile. Dreams are the best way to help release the grip of fear that can often hold you back in life. This happens by virtue of illuminating the places in your consciousness where that fear lives. The process is irrational and mysterious, but spending some quality time with your dreams can actually relieve some of the bondage that fear and inhibition can cause.
All dreams are valuable, but those that are dark and scary offer a particular opportunity. It is even possible that nightmares are scary so that they will be remembered more easily. The shadow in dreams points to the very place in the recesses of the unconscious that needs to be released in order for expansion and growth to occur. Once the fearful place has been identified, it is no longer in the shadow, and light fills the space that was once dark. This is how wisdom grows throughout life.
There are a few terms that are used throughout these pages that will be helpful for you to understand in order to put this dictionary to its best use. An “archetype” is a pattern of energy that comes together to form a single idea that is then represented by similar images. Consider the warrior as an archetype of power and aggression. The various forms the warrior archetype might take in our modern world include athletes and certain male movie stars. The same can be said of the archetype of love or compassion, mostly typified by female characters we find expressed over and over again in various media. These are just two simplistic examples of what an archetype is, and many of the terms in this book will refer to this concept. When an archetypal image is present in a dream, that dream is reflecting some of the foundational principles of consciousness that make up the human experience.
The two previous examples also illuminate another concept you will find repeated in the following pages. The idea of the “feminine principle” and “masculine principle” refers to the notion that almost all aspects of behavior and experience fall into one of two categories. This is not to be confused with male and female; this is not about gender or sexuality. The masculine principle refers to the concept of doing, taking action, and being decisive, while the feminine principle embodies the idea of being, creativity, nurturance, and receptivity. When the two are combined and in balance, we experience a sense of integration and wholeness. It is simplistic but not inaccurate to say that the entire point of doing dream work is to pursue this sense of integration and wholeness in our sense of self. Dreams, in fact, often emerge within our psyches to help us find and evolve toward this state. It is helpful then to understand that many images relate more definitively to one or the other of these two fundamental constructs, and you will find these terms throughout these pages.
Welcome to a new commitment to working with your dreams in a deeper and more meaningful way. While there truly is no one correct approach to interpreting your dreams, life has a way of pulling in the right and perfect guidance just when you need it. If you have been drawn to this particular dream dictionary, then it is the right one for you. If a dream is a story, then an interpretation is a story about the story. Use the terms within these pages to guide you and let your dreams speak powerfully as you tell yourself the story of you.