What does this recurring dream mean?
Asked by
prolificus (
6583
)
March 22nd, 2010
from iPhone
Background Info: It’s been years since Iived on-campus at my undergrad college. Since then, I’ve lived in other cities and another state. The experience I had at the college was life-changing in a good way—I studied theology, sexuality, and Christian literature. It was a conservative college. However, my beliefs and lifestyle are no longer congruent with the culture this school.
For the past couple of months, I’ve been having this recurring dream:
It’s present day. I’m aware that I have my belongings in my old dorm room. It is urgent that I go back to the school, pack up, and move out.
In some of my dreams, I try to store my belongings with my parents.
In some of my dreams, I go to the campus and search for my former mentor.
In some of my dreams, the campus itself has radically changed in appearance. In this particular dream, I search for familiar things.
Regardless of the scenario, one thing is consistent: I need to pack up my belongings and move.
I get the surface meaning: it’s time to move on from my past.
But, I wonder what the different elements could be telling me. Any thoughts?
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4 Answers
Taking your belongings may also mean that you have left unresolved issues in your college past, or a part of you which mattered.
Looking for your mentor, may mean you feel a lack off guidance or clear direction in your life right now.
The fact that the campus has changed may reflect your change in beliefs. This would probably happen if you have in the past tied the environment to your inner life, which back then was more conservative. Perhaps your current lifestyle lacks of few of your past values or behaviors.
If anything, I don’t really believe you need to completely move on from your past. If you do keep telling yourself that this is what you must do, then this is what may actually be causing the dream to come back: part of you needs elements of your past which you may have left behind.
Freud would say…(psychoanalyst interp) your ego is tired from a long day’s work of supressing the id and your id is finally able to assert itself. The id represents your unconscious desires, so apparently you DO want to move on from something, but of course it’s also something sexual.
McCarley and Hobson would say…(physiological interp; I think this is a super interesting interp) all dreams are simply your mind trying to rectify the sensations of your body. In other words, while you’re asleep your body is in a strange state relative to your waking hours: you’re lying down flat, muscle movement is inhibited, and your visual and body systems are activated (so you see and feel without real external sensory input). Therefore, people tend to have many typical dreams (e.g., feeling of falling, trying to run but can’t) and dreams are really devoid of meaning. It’s up to your forebrain to synthesize all this crazy info while DRAWING ON YOUR MEMORIES. The content of your dreams comes merely from your forebrain stealing ideas from your hippocampus (memory center). So these researchers would probably say that you have this same recurring dream content because apparently your forebrain has found it to fit nicely with your body sensation activation and has activated it in your memory bank, making it easier to draw from over and over again…Sorry to burst your dream bubble but it’s just arbitrary that this particular content keeps recurring!
So it seems that my responses tend to ramble and I don’t make my point until the last few lines, but in my mind the background info is necessary. I apologize for the long read!
Dreams don’t mean anything. Forget them and focus on reality.
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