I Interpreted a Dream and Learned Something Surprising About Myself

Gain valuable insight and aid your emotional growth through dream interpretation

I have vivid dreams, and they’ve shifted significantly during the ongoing pandemic. Are my dreams trying to tell me something? I decided to try interpreting a recent dream, and the end result surprised me.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud suggested that once we become conscious, we don’t have the means to decipher the unconscious.¹

“Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.” ― Sigmund Freud

Freud described dreams as the “royal road to the unconscious”. He suggested that studying the content of dreams could bring to light hidden and unconscious desires. ²

Perhaps the stories created as we sleep are a primitive translation of unconscious thought. If this is the case, it indicates that dreams are a form of communication.

There is always something to learn about [yourself] in a dream — Jeffrey Sumber, PHD

The story within the dream may not mean anything directly. ³ If you’ve ever been in a twilight sleep, you have probably experienced a stream of supposedly random thoughts. On the surface, the ideas don’t seem related to one another.

When we fall from twilight into a deep sleep, it could be that this thought stream continues. If so, it makes sense that our brain would try to form a pattern from these disconnected ideas.

The dreamer is highly conscious (has vivid experiences), is disconnected from the environment (is asleep), but somehow the brain is creating a story, filling it with actors and scenarios, and generating hallucinatory images. — Nir Y, Tononi G.

If you look at it that way, a dream’s story doesn’t provide a definition. Instead, the pattern that binds a flow of ideas into a story is the key to dream interpretation.⁴

Interpreting Your Dreams

Have you experienced a dream that sticks with you? If you are interested in interpreting hidden meanings in your dreams, you can try following these steps from clinical psychologist Jeffery Sumber; ³

• Record your dreams. Taking notes, even a few sentences that encapsulate the dream draws the content of the unconscious out into the realm of the concrete.
• Identify how you were feeling in the dream. Ask yourself: “Was I scared, angry, remorseful, etc.? Do I still feel those feelings the morning after? How comfortable am I feeling these feelings?”
• Identify recurring thoughts in your dreams and daily life. Ask yourself if you’ve had these thoughts throughout the day. If so, in what situations have you had these thoughts?
• Consider all the elements of a dream. You can show up in your dreams in various ways. We can find ourselves, our personalities, in many aspects of a dream, even if there is a clear distinction between us and another character in the dream.
• Put down the dream dictionaries. You’ve probably come across dream dictionaries that feature specific meanings for objects. While there may be some universal meaning for these symbols, the key is to figure out what the dream means to you.
• Remember, you’re the expert. There are no experts other than yourself when it comes to your psyche so don’t stop trusting your inner guide to your unconscious
• You can learn a lot from even the most mundane dreams. You may be thinking that your dreams just aren’t fascinating, flashy, or profound enough to explore. But even dreaming about having oatmeal for breakfast can yield thoughtful results.

Interpreting a Dream

I decided to try some of the methods I shared by attempting to interpret one of my dreams.

• Recording my dream;

The twilight sky is dressed in lavender silk — adorned with blushing pink clouds, and a splash of diamond stars. The earth is damp with recent rainfall.

The scent of the freshly showered earth and tangy fresh-cut grass are an irresistible and heady perfume.

A girl stands on the side of a black dirt road that disappears into a milky fog. She closes her eyes to a warm breath of a wind that dances with her copper curls.

Her blue jeans are well-worn, soft as suede, and fit her like a second skin. A faded black Led Zeppelin t-shirt peeks between the curtains of an oversized forest green flannel shirt.

The girl turns to looks across the road at a pond that shines emerald green with algae. There is a shadow moving in the distance, and she holds her hand out to it. On her palm is a red apple made of glass.

The shadow emerges from the mist, revealing a charcoal grey horse — silver-white mane and tail flying behind him. The horse slows at the crest of a hill that leads to the pond. He struggles to climb the hill — mouth frothy and eyes wild with terror.

Suddenly a stream of horses run out from the fog. There are hundreds — so many that they begin climbing the dead bodies of horses who have collapsed at the base of the hill and drowned in the smelly, stagnant pond.

Those that make it to the black road can barely walk. Some of the horse’s legs break beneath them just as they reach the girl.

Horse bodies pile into a mountain of dead horses. Finally, the last horse falls at her feet. It’s the charcoal horse.

His eyes have rolled back leaving them white. His tongue hangs over his bared teeth. He shudders one long breath then grows still.

The girl throws the apple hard to the ground beside him. The apple shatters.

I wake up.

After the Dream

• How I felt; The dream was disturbing. I woke in a panic. When I think of the dream, I am still overwhelmed by a feeling of dread.
• Identify recurring thoughts; There was a feeling of disconnect between myself and the scene I watched. Though I felt anxiety, it was like the anxiety I would feel watching a disturbing movie. I also felt helpless. These feelings have overwhelmed my waking hours lately.
• Consider elements of the dream; The girl in the dream could represent me. She doesn’t look like me; however, she dresses in the style I wore when I was a teenager.

Interpreting my Dream

• The girl appeared calm in the dream. She showed no emotion. She watched the beautiful horses struggle, and her expression never changed.

Conclusion; Her reaction could be a representation of my tendency to avoid unpleasant emotions, rather than feeling them.

• The girl held out an apple to the horses, knowing the apple wasn’t real and wouldn’t have nourished them.

Conclusion; The apple may represent hope. If the apple represents optimism, then it is defining hope as something beautiful but virtually worthless. It all comes back to fear.

• The horses died trying to reach her, and when the last one died, she shattered the apple.

Conclusion; Shattering the apple is a power move — a refusal to hold on to false hope.

Now What?

Interpreting dreams can help you understand yourself. Once you gain insight into your emotions and motivations, you then have the power to transform them.

If I were able to continue the dream, I would have the girl find real apples to feed the horses, and they’d gallop away. Then I’d have her strip down to her bare skin and swim in the pond. Wherever she swims, the water would become fresh and clear.

The truth is, I can complete the dream. The dream is mine, and I have the ultimate power to alter it as I see fit.

And so do you.

A Note From the Author

Further Reading on Dreams

• Memories, Dreams and Reflections, C.G. Jung
• Dream Psychology, Maurice Nicoll
• An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols, J.C. Cooper
• The Wilderness of Dreams, Kelly Bulkeley
• Dreambody, Arnold Mindell
• Dreams, C.G. Jung

Resources

¹ https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Freud/Dreams/dreams.pdf

² Schredl, M. Freud’s interpretation of his dreams in “The interpretation of dreams”: A continuity hypothesis perspective. International Journal of Dream Research, 1(2), 44–47. 2008 doi:10.11588/ijodr.2008.2.80

³ https://psychcentral.com/lib/how-to-analyze-your-dreams-and-why-its-important/

⁴ Nir Y, Tononi G. Dreaming, and the brain: from phenomenology to neurophysiology. Trends Cogn Sci. 2010;14(2):88–100. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2009.12.001