Sometimes dream imagery makes use of an expression so common
in our daily speech that it’s amusing. We wonder how our subconscious could
come up with anything so corny. The following, told recently during a dream
class, is a good example:
In my dream I was
playing an informal, pick-up game of basketball. It was just me and some other guys
I know, and we were having a good time. But then I looked down and noticed that,
instead of basket balls, we were using pairs of shoes tied together by their
laces. In fact, I saw that we were using my
shoes, and one of the guys shot a basket with them. The next thing I knew, the
shoes were separated from each other. One of them made it through the
basketball hoop and fell to the ground. The other shoe somehow ended up on top
of the basketball hoop’s backboard and was balanced there, teetering back and
forth on the edge. We all just stood around waiting for it to lose its balance
and finally come down. That’s when I woke up.
Class reaction
When the dreamer finished relating his dream, the whole
class started to chuckle at the obvious cliché: “waiting for the other shoe to
drop.” The only person who didn’t get the subconscious joke right away was the
dreamer himself. That is very common. When you are immersed in the plot of a
dream, really taken in by its odd imagery, it is often difficult to pull away
from your emotional involvement in the scene. It’s like going to a great movie—one
that is really gripping (to use another common visual metaphor).
But this kind of separation is vital for understanding the
dream message. As long as the dreamer is invested in the dream’s action, he
will tend to take it literally, and he will neglect to pull away in order to study
the dream event metaphorically.
The value of interpreting
dreams in a class setting
That is why dream classes are so useful. Simply being
with different dreamers has benefits. Knowing that there are others who experience
bizarre nighttime scenes takes away the stigma of being weird. Beyond that, a
dreamer benefits from the more objective viewpoints of others who are
completely un-invested in the dream.
That was the case with this dreamer. Without anyone actually
saying anything to him, he was, at first, startled by the sudden laughter.
That, in turn, forced him to look at his dream from a different perspective. In
a matter of seconds he, too, was in on the joke. And further, he was truly
amazed at how witty his own subconscious could be. That it would come up with a
pun-like image as common and as amusing as that, really made an impression on
him.
Dreams make frequent use of such images. And understanding
this image right away gave the dreamer a head start in working on the other
images in his comical dream.
More on Wednesday!
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