· Your unconscious is putting you in a dream to (hopefully) communicate to your waking-self that you aren’t connecting to people/situations/symbols in an authentic way. This is why the dream ego is meant to be analyzed in a way that could help your waking-self question behaviors/motives/responses and allow the more authentic connection or association to occur. Dreams will always tell you something you don’t already know.
· Everything in a dream is an aspect of yourself. It is quite literally how the ego is relating to objects and symbols in the psyche. It’s helpful to question where/why your essence is placed in another figure or symbol in the dream – where am I in my partner? Where am I in a boat on the ocean? Where am I in an elephant crammed into a bathroom? Where am I in my second-grade teacher that yelled at me?
· It’s just as important to look at what you aren’t doing in a dream. Sometimes it might be obvious – someone was killed in my apartment and I didn’t even call the police, I just started trying to hide the body. This is where your waking-self will start to question ‘why’? Where in my life am I willing to cover something tragic up, rather than asking for help? Other times, it won’t be obvious – my ex and I were fighting and he threw something at my cat. You might wake up and feel just as pissed off, and identify with your dream-self. But once you step back and realize all of these aspects are you, you wonder why your inner ‘ex’ is angry, why your inner cat is being abused, and why you aren’t sad about this process? Your dream-self will typically be acting out normal ego-defenses in a dream, but when you question the dynamic, it will bring you to a hidden part of yourself that has been avoided or neglected.
· The feeling-tones of a dream will be where a lot of the authenticity is hiding. If you don’t already, make notes of how you are feeling during the experiences of the dream – I was in a hotel and felt confused because it was unrecognizable. I was walking rather fast in the grocery store, something felt urgent. I saw some people from high school and felt bothered, like they were judging me. Not having any feeling-tones is also information, it might indicate a defense around expressing an emotional response in waking life. It’s helpful to link the feelings in a dream to the last time you felt that way in waking-life. You might not think it’s related, but your unconscious keeps tabs. Once you question the defensive feelings and break down the surroundings and their purpose, you might start to feel more authentically – pain, loneliness, grief, heartbreak, longing, helplessness, etc. That’s where dreamwork stops being ‘fun’, but is absolutely necessary.
· Once you can connect with the hidden feeling, it will often help in making decisions that are more aligned with who you are. Maybe you grieve your relationship rather than being pissed off. Maybe you show empathy to a person or situation that you wouldn’t normally acknowledge. Maybe you start a creative project or jump into something you know nothing about. Maybe you make more time to be alone. Some things might lead to big choices and others might feel like a small shift in the psyche, but it’s all movement happening within you.
· Other ways to communicate and understand what dreams are trying to tell you could include breathwork, active imagination, meditation, drawing or painting dream imagery, recording yourself talking about a dream, journal prompts in identifying with the symbols/figures in a dream and linking things that occurred throughout time, writing the dream as if it’s a presented story rather than identifying with it (‘a story about a man who hates his neighbors’), imagining yourself as the other figures/symbols in the dream, exploring what could have happened if you made different choices in the dream, etc. There’s a lot of ‘playing’ when it comes to dreams, and the meaning can shift in multiple different directions, but something will start to feel ‘right’.