You (Think you) do not want to let sleeping dogs lie. In the Dream you are the one who notices problems. Others in the family do not seem to. Something is wrong, perhaps going back to when you and your sister were closer to your nephew’s age. I get a lot of ambivalence about breaking a family pattern, going into some taboo area, or flying the coop, escaping, the bird not getting to escape from the house, but also needing to be shooed out. I would guess that some ‘area’ your family has unstated rules about not going into, you want to go into. Or no longer be like your family in some way. To do this mean not letting a sleeping dog lie. The proverb having to do with the dangers of going into issues that right now are not threatening but if you go into them, they may well be like an angry dog.
Dog is raising the troubling (to the family issue) or breaking the troubling (to the family) pattern.
Bird is escape, trapped, fragile Life caught where it should not be.
YOu might want to try mulling over what you really want to say or do these Days. Something that likely has guilt and shame surrounding it. You may not even realize that on some level it feels like it would mean upsetting or escaping your family.
Again: lots of ambivalence on your part. If, for example, you Think of yourself as a very direct person, who can make tough decisions, this Dream is about something where you may find yourself frozen or hesitant in ways that you are not used to.
Oh, yes. Blue dog. Well, it could be sadness. Blue-sad. So if you Wake up this dog it may be Contact with a lot of grief. Grief about some old event or family pattern. Or it could be grief that you need to move away from the family - at least on a psychological level - in some way.
And the fear is that your sister will not be there for you in this. She is oblivious to the issue and your pain. And likely she would be a key person for you to want support from.
That was really a lovely dream to me. Can’t quite decipher it though. The only thing that came to me is that dogs are really faithful and blue is also the color of faithfulness as in true blue.
How do you know that the dog was "pretending’ to sleep? At first you said that it “lay sleeping”. Why change that aspect of it?
And also, off the top of my head, being that it was sleeping in front of a standing “mirror”, perhaps your dream is telling you that there is something there about the blue dog for you to reflect on. Mirrors are reflections of us and so are dreams in actuality. I think that everything within the dream more or less is a reflection of who we are and sometimes - or so it has been said - the least thing in the dream that draws our attention or doesn’t draw it, is the most important thing to be looked at.
As for the bird, birds fly free. But in this case, think of that bird as your spirit. What does the above scenario tell you? It is true that in order to understand dreams, we do have to be aware of something which is going on around us in our daily life. Or perhaps you just happend to spot a bird outside in a tree and that image stayed with you and became part of your dream. Dreams are so wonderful aren’t they even the really scary ones.
I see that your negative view of me is reflective in your reply… something to work on, perhaps.
I think that the dog lying where it was was so that my focus would be on it as opposed to myself (my narcissism) and I left it there through pure contentment on it’s part not lack of ability on mine - I think this scenario is reflective of my relationship.
The bird scenario probably reflects the family dynamics.
But pretending to not notice the other is foolish on their part, as the other will seek one who does acknowledge them, which is where my relationship was heading.
The blue dog was the state of my relationship (hence the bedroom scenario) where one was content with it (he) but the other was not (me). Playing games and thinking the other will be there regardless is very foolish on their part.
I think my family lack integrity and values, and do not wish me well… of which I have already experienced many a time, so what to do…
Indeed pretending Arc… ignorance is bliss, and my words rained down on deaf ears, and who likes being ignored
The bird/family scenario has plenty of significance Arc, but maybe it’s something I just have to come to terms with… hence the in-your-face obviousness of it.
My nightmares are not wonderful at all Arc… hence my usage of a night lamp and dreamcatcher combo to keep them at bay, otherwise they strangle me in the formless darkness of the night.
Dream interpretation books, which you can probably buy at the check out counter of your local grocery store, are pure fiction. To interpret your dream, you need to try to recall what emotion acccompanied what event. IMHO, dreams act to throw out the garbage in your mind so as to refresh it for another day’s barrage of sights and sounds. As you dream certain neurotransmitters that allow logic are shut down. Your brain tries to make sense of this mayhem, so it renders the most plausible story of what you are experiencing.
True Ierr… once I’d posted my dream I could see that the dog/mirror scenario was my relationship as it had been… things have moved on satisfactorily for some months now, and I’ve always been dissatisfied with my family’s intentions towards me… hence my exacerbation with them, and those two in particular.
No Magsjy, nightmares are not wonderful. I have my share of them sometimes. The last one I had was of my daughter falling off a boat into the ocean. Just as I jumped in after her, I woke up. I kept saying thank god, thank god - some agnostic I am. Then I sighed in relief and had to convince myself that it was only a dream by repeating that a few times.
Some dreams are easier to interpret than others if we know what it is going on in our lives. I don’t necessarily think that dreaming of this or that specifically as is written in dream interpretion books is right on - the human psyche is much more complicated than that but I do realize that material in the dream has to deciphered from the symbols and metaphors in them.
The experts also say that we have to face the scary parts, entities, in our dreams, and that they may speak to us.
How does a night lamp help you - except after you wake up? And a dreamcatcher?
Perhaps I ought to have said that they are not wonderful but wonder-filled? Same difference I guess. What I meant is that it is still quite remarkable what our brain chemistry is capable of conjuring up - the kind of landscapes given to us, out of the material of our dailly lives. And if that is the case, then what we need to do is to take care of our waking existence as best we can…figure things out, etc.
Have you ever thought that dreams might just be mostly meaningless interpretations made by your brain in a state where it is not fully able to communicate between various areas of the brain, ie those commonly associated with context, meaning or reason. When you are asleep it seems there is a significantly reduced signalling between all the various areas that generally are in play when we consciously make sense of the world. Whilst I wouldn’t be so gauche as to assume this means dreams have no reason or meaning, I might well suggest that most of it is a mix of the days experience and your minds lack of ability to put it in a narrative you could make sense of, and hence has no consistent meaning beyond general fears and doubts you experience on a day to day basis, none of which are related to specific things in a dream.
Not crazy. I spelled this out earlier. It’s the interpretation given in the Time/Life book “The Brain”. However,I do believe that unresolved problems cause nightmares. I’m retired. My worst dreams are being back at work with a co-worker who evicted me from her home when I was hospitalized. These dreams are an unwanted replay of the past ad nauseum. They are gut reactions, bearing little resemblance to rational thought. It’s almost as if that affair resonated throughout my body.
Yeah as long as we don’t start going down the road of smoking a cigar as a woman means precisely that you have penis envy or whatever other specific nonsense that we tend to read into dreams I think it’s quite right to say dreams are general and reflect a way of dealing with things broadly rather than specifically.
As far as nightmares go you do tend to have more early on in your dream state, most of which you fail to remember unless you wake up, as the night progresses you tend to have more benign dreams, dreams you are more likely to remember as you move towards consciousness. I would suspect that most nightmares are actually just a normal way of the body stressing itself without you consciously being aware of it with the ultimate result that it removes stress, and it might explain how we prime our brain so we ultimately wake up more relaxed. When of course though we have dreams that repeat themselves over time which you often remember, I think in that case you may be right this is something other than a natural de-stress and more likely to reflect unresolved issues.
Since we are nearing Christmas, I am reminded of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” When Scrooge got his first visit from spirits, he claimed it was because of something he ate. But to stop with that explanation would have limited Dickens’ elaborate symbolisms of a corrupt life. Perhaps, beneath the fantasy was Scrooge’s guilt. So why couldn’t unresolved issues, even if prompted by poor digestion, be at issue here? We seem to want the spirit visitations to be real as suspension of disbelief in the resolution of problems that may spell out the nature of the problems.
some agnostic I am. Then I sighed in relief and had to convince myself that 