Welcome back!
I hope you are discovering some new insights, or an awakened curiosity about your dreaming mind…
In today’s blog, we are going to venture into the realm of archetypes. Carl Jung discovered in his study of dreams that the tendency to create representations of certain human characteristics—the Caregiver, the Trickster, the Hero—is universal and crosses culture, age, and history.
When you encounter an Other in your dream— a stranger or unfamiliar personage — this is your dreaming mind participating in this creation, the representation of universal human patterns through icons. It’s a sort of shorthand, a way to portray possibility or danger in a manner that is easily interacted with and recognized. Your particular archetypal images may vary from those of another person, but the instinct to create these images is a collective one.
Dream Skill # 4: Decoding Others
When an unfamiliar person or stranger turns up in your dream, notice how they act and how your dream-self reacts to them. Is the Other threatening? Nurturing? Repulsive? Troublesome?
After you have written out your dream, take each Other one by one and describe their character in a few words. Notice also your dream-self’s emotional response to their way of being.
Then, plug these associations back into your dream narrative any time the character shows up in the dream. This can decode the shorthand and help you understand what your dreaming brain is telling you through these unfamiliar personages.
If you’d like to take this work a step further, you can interview the Other who showed up in your dream. Robert Hoss’s work with dreams has elucidated a few key questions you can ask the Other that will help to clarify their archetypal meaning for you. These questions include:
“Who are you?”
“What is your purpose?”
“What do you like most about being yourself?”
“What do you dislike most about being yourself?”
“What do you fear the most?”
“What do you desire the most?”
I have found that this process works best if conducted much as one would conduct a real interview, speaking the questions out loud and answering them as the Other. It can also be accomplished simply by writing the questions down and answering them.
***The study of Jungian dreamwork is profound and time-consuming, and it is beyond my expertise to provide more than a taste of this type of dreamwork. If this methodology fascinates you, you may want to seek out a trained Jungian analyst or dreamworker, or read Jung’s work on the subject. ***
Dream Practicum
The Famous Stranger
“I was going to give a presentation to my team at work, but the table was crowded and everyone kept talking over me. Just as I was about to have the floor to introduce myself and my topic, a famous person arrived. Everyone recognized the famous person except me. He was tall and imposing. He was wearing a suit made entirely of blue beads. I wanted to talk to him, but I felt too intimidated.”
When we began to work this dream, the dreamer described the Famous Person as “imposing, powerful, and unique.” He described his dream-self’s reaction to him as “intimidated and shrinking.”
When we plugged these representations back into the dream, this was the result:
I Do Not Recognize My Power
“I was going to give a presentation to my team at work, but the table was crowded and everyone kept talking over me. Just as I was about to have the floor to introduce myself and my topic, intimidation arrived. Everyone seemed to have an understanding of being imposing and powerful, except for me. Everyone else seemed to have a relationship to these qualities that I am missing out on. I wanted to stand out and be unique. I wanted to interact with those qualities of power and uniqueness, but felt too intimidated.”
The dreamer felt a sense of immediate recognition. “Any time I am about to really step up and show what I can do, I get this feeling of being an imposter, like who am I to be in this position? I am not unique or interesting enough. And then I don’t step up at all, I back away. No one has any idea what I can really do. Including myself.”
When the dreamer interviewed the blue-beaded man, he heard the following:
“I am strong and I do not care what you think of me. I am here to be true to myself. I most desire that others will stand on their own feet and not rely on me to be the powerful one all the time.”
Through this interview, the dreamer realized he had been afraid to step into his power for fear that others would then perceive him as strong, and add to his workload. Once he realized this fear was holding him back, he was able to change his behavior at work.
He did not stop experiencing feelings of intimidation or the sense of being an imposter, but he did stop engaging in the patterns of behavior that kept him playing small, and he was able to communicate assertively when he felt he was carrying more than his share of the workload.
Later on, he told me that while giving an important presentation at work, he channeled the spirit of that tall, imposing stranger in an armor of beads. He began to cultivate a relationship with this “famous stranger”, the qualities of presence and power.
This dream is shared with permission, with some identifying features changed to protect confidentiality.
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