How Dreams Connect Sensitives to Our Intuition.

Do you have intense dreams? Do you wonder if your dreams mean anything? Do you sometimes dream disturbing dreams? It may be a dream in which you’re having an extra-marital affair, or it may be a dream of dying.

Even though you’re curious about your dreamworld, it also feels confusing, and sometimes, downright threatening. Are you supposed to think of dreams as signs? Are they trying to tell you something? Or is listening to dreams just superstitious nonsense?

Like you, I have always been interested in my dreamworld. I have always had intense dreams, especially during times of change in my life. But a fateful experience as a 16-year-old left me feeling ambivalent about my dreams for years. It was during a time when I took a dream literally and thought that it was a “sign” telling me what I needed to do.

But acting on my dream interpretation turned out badly and affected my life for years.

It felt like my inner world had betrayed me. I felt disillusioned, almost like I couldn’t trust myself any longer. So, I turned away from my dreams for years. But I always remained someone who felt the call from my inner world.

And so it was that 9 years ago, during a period in my life when I was again having intense dreams, that I started to learn about them. I was newly married, had just relocated from India to the United States, and during this transitional time, my dreams were again alight with meaning.

These explorations became one of the greatest adventures I have gone on. Dreamwork also became a huge thread in my book The Empath’s Journey, a book about my experiments with life as a sensitive person. My research had showed me that instead of being “nonsense,” dreams were, in fact, very important.

The study of dreams is part of many psychological theories. Great psychologists like Carl Jung & Erich Fromm had not only been fascinated by dreams, but had explored them deeply. Working with dream symbols is, in fact, a huge part of Jungian depth psychology.

So, what did I learn during these explorations? And how can your dreams help you?

1. Dream characters, places and symbols often stand in for parts of our own self. While this is by no means a formula, the assumption in Jungian dreamwork is that the characters as well as the places and animals that appear in our dreams are representations of parts of ourselves. So, when we are walking through strange alleyways or undiscovered parts of a house in our dreams, what we’re really walking through are undiscovered parts of our own psyche. When strange animals show up in our dreams, they are parts of ourselves — our own instincts or our shadow self. We might have angry and biting dogs or a malnourished cat show up in our dreams. These are all parts of our own self, and their condition shows us in clear pictures the condition of the unkempt & ignored parts of our psyche.
2. Dream symbols can’t be interpreted in just one way: Paris in one person’s dream is NOT the same thing as Paris in another person’s dream. If you’ve always dreamed of going to Paris, Paris is likely a positive symbol in your dream. But if you got your suitcase stolen while on a vacation in Paris, the meaning of Paris in your dream will be completely different. This is where simplistic dream dictionaries fail and dream analysis starts to go south. We all have many symbols show up in our dreams that are unique & personal to us & our experiences.
3. Dreams speak the language of symbols and metaphors: They are poetry, not prose. For example, death in dreams is often about the death of a part of us. There are many times in our life when an old part of us needs to die for our new self to be reborn. So, to really explore whether death in our dream has a positive or a negative value, we have to ask questions. Is our dream telling us about a needed death of a part of us that will help us move forward? Or is our dream saying that we’re engaging in dangerous physical activities in our waking life and is, in fact, a warning to be careful? Remember: Context matters.
4. Disturbing dreams are sometimes disturbing because we’re taking them literally: When your dreams show you having an affair with a person other than your partner, it might feel highly disturbing. But most often, the male figures showing up in women’s dreams (called the animus in Jungian psychology)) & the female figures showing up in men’s dreams (the anima) are contrasexual elements in our own psyche. These images hold a quality that feels opposite to who we are normally. So, for a very “thinking type of man,” their emotional, unintegrated side might be imaged as a woman. Our psyches grow towards wholeness, and for that, we need to marry the different qualities inside us.
5. The greater Self shows up in our dreams: One of the most magical things about dreams is that the greater Self often shows up in our dreams. It can show up as a dream animal and come with a feeling of grace, or it can show up as a symbol that has great meaning for us, like my dreams with amethysts in them that I talk about in The Empath’s Journey. Dreams also give us suggestions about what this greater self needs & wants from us.

Dreamwork helps us find diamonds and rubies hidden in our psyche. It helps us explore the undiscovered parts of our own soul, and working with dreams may be one of the greatest adventures you ever embark on! I hope you answer the call.

With love,

Ritu

Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey, which TEDx speaker Andy Mort calls “a fascinating insight into the life of a highly sensitive person & emotional empath.”

SIGN UP HERE for Ritu’s newsletter The Highly Sensitive Creative.

This piece first appeared on Ritu’s site Walking through Transitions.