Dreams: "Grade"

(Boris - man, age 46)

Dream:

"I am on the school bus. At one of the stops when the door opens I am surprised to see a big river instead of the road. I see a man swimming upstream of the river.Someone says that a lot of people around here just swim like that to work every day. The river seems quite wild and dangerous and I am amazed at this man's courage and his dedication.

“Screws fall out all the time, the world is an imperfect place.” - Breakfast Club

When I arrive at school I need to use the toilet but there is a queue and it turns out that only three people are allowed in despite there being so many more toilets inside. I say to someone that this is stupid and ridiculous to make people wait. Finally after I came out of the toilet I changed my trousers, but it turns out that I have put on someone else's trousers. I feel as if they do not match my adult personality and there are some stains on them as if they had traces of childish carelessness. It turns out that I came back to school after a long break to finish the last year of high school and I feel anxious whether the math's teacher will give me a pass, because I haven't attended any classes for a long time. I met her in the school hall and asked what grade she was going to give me. The teacher informs me that I will only get two, because as a rule she cannot give me a higher grade because as she says if someone "knows but doesn't care", gets only two. I was relieved because I just wanted to pass, but with the relief comes the thought that I could do more."

Dream interpretation:

School trip symbolises a journey to the memories and emotions that relate to Boris's adolescence. Reliving emotions repressed from consciousness in the dream often points out to unresolved inner conflicts linked to the same period of one's life. The man swimming in the river in a symbolic way stands in opposition to the dreamer, who is trapped inside the school bus taking him to the past. Swimming against the stream manifests intention to free himself from unconscious conflicts associated with the school period in his life. At the school, Boris has to queue in order to use the toilet. He is waiting with a sense of absurdity to limit the toilet capacity for no rational reason. The urge to use the school toilet in the dream is a metaphor of his need to release certain traumas related to childhood. He lives in the constant conflict of his adult Self, which continuously has to act-out itself in reality on the adolescent note, which can often not be adequate to the situation. To put it otherwise, Boris feels frustrated by how irrational are his uncontrolled responses (that resonate with the child's trauma) to certain stimuli to reality. The presence of this undeveloped (childish) part of his Self in his unconsciousness is symbolically uncovered when he puts on someone else's pants by mistake, a pants that resonate with some kind of immaturity which does not suit him in his opinion. His final grade, is in fact a symbol of closing the chapter of childhood that is still open in the subconscious and resonates with something that, despite the passage of years, still torments him. In consequence, now an adult man in his late forties dreams about being anxious that his teacher may fail him because he has not attended classes. In a dream, he comes face to face with his subconscious fear and asks the teacher how she intends to grade him. The teacher's words, "If someone knows but doesn't care" (can only pass with the lowest grade), can be interpreted as an liberation despite avoiding what is known in therapy as “working through” these difficult childhood emotions. In a sense, such "success" brings relief but leaves a scratch in the image of his Ego. The symbolic absolution is essentially the result of a self-acceptance that arose naturally over the years at a deeper level of the Self.

Dreams: "Gun"

(Dannika, woman - age 25)

"In a dream I live with my husband and my two children who are not his, but are from a previous relationship (In reality I don't have any kids and I am not married). I want to leave my husband. There is another man with whom I am in love, and he loves me too and asks me to leave my husband and run away with him. I have the same feelings about him and I want to leave my husband, but I am afraid of him...

“One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Suddenly the three of us are in the same room and my husband tells my lover to not to trust me, and he says that I have a gun in my left hand. And at this moment I am stunned to realise that he's right, and I do indeed have a gun in my hand. I hold the weapon in my left hand, hidden behind my jacket. On the outside my hand is replaced with an artificial hand. I shot the man in the head. I felt guilty but is strange feeling, I feel guiltyfor pretending that I did not have a gun and that my husband was right after all more than about the fact that i killed him. If that makes sense. After that, I still want to leave my husband and I try to escape twice, but I get caught each time. First time my husband was waiting for me outside and I had to listen to him and come back inside. I was afraid of him, but at the same time I saw a bit of decency in him because he took me with two children who were not even his and he cared for them and me on the way. Another time I wanted to lock him in the bathroom and escape, but just as I was about to lock the door from the outside, he suddenly opened the door and knew what I was going to do. I felt like I couldn't escape, wanted to look normal and wore sunglasses so people wouldn't see me cry and I woke up. In tears.

Dream interpretation:

In her dream Dannika is cast as a prisoner of her own morality, portrayed in a character of the husband. She perceives him, as if she owes him gratitude for the home that he made for her and her children. She is afraid of him and she wants to leave him, yet at the same time she recognizes a dose of decency about what he represents. These feelings in fact are a reflection of the feelings of gratitude towards her own parents. She is loyal to the figure of the husband in the dream, in the same way as in the parallel of reality she is tied to the ideals that were imposed in her early childhood by her parents. Plot of the dream twists when another man shows up. A dream figure of her lover manifests desires that are repressed from her consciousness. Dannika wants to leave her husband. This scenario reveals an unconscious moral conflict. The figure of the other man, symbolises Freudian "Id", that is, the part of her Psyche that demands to satisfy primordial instincts more than anything. The fact that Dannika intends to leave her husband and run away with her lover, can be interpreted as the urge to satisfy her unconscious desires. Her lover represents passions that need to be repressed in order to obey the Reality Principle. The scene where she shoots him resonates with the touch of the everlasting dilemma of humanity. The dilemma that arises from the conflict of the need to control one's own desires in order to be accepted and function in reality. It is her Superego embodied in the figure of her husband that metaphorically puts a gun in her hand. A gun that she didn't even realise existed, until it was brought to her attention by the figure of husband. The artificial hand, which covers the weapon, symbolises her Persona; the outer mask underneath which lays her power of free will, and consequently (in Dannika's case) the reason for repression of her emotions. In metaphor, and quite literally, "the choice is in her hands”, and she can either choose to fulfil her desires or to obey the reality and keep the image of her Persona. She shoots her lover in the head, and by doing so turns the object of her desire into a repressed part in her unconsciousness. As a consequence of this choice, she lives a life in line with her moral values, yet it is likely that she feels trapped and unhappy in her skin. All further attempts to escape are unsuccessful, and she becomes imprisoned in the image of herself that she had creates in reality. The tears of her soul are as real as it gets and she wakes up from the dream. Crying.

Dreams: "At the lake"

(Dannika, woman - age 25)

"In a dream, I see everything from a third person perspective as if I were watching a movie. I see a strong man at the lake shore who throws a body of a young woman into the lake. I see how the body sinks to the bottom of the lake and drops on the huge pile of other bodies that the same man must have killed before and dumped in the lake. There is also a woman who is very close and is watching the whole situation from hiding.

“The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions.” - Sigmund Freud

When a man takes another body from the huge pile of bodies by the lake to drown it, a policeman appears and now two men are fighting. The woman tries to run away, but she can't move because her foot is stuck between the wooden boards of the pier. During a fight, a policeman handcuffed a man to a body that the man was about to drown in a lake. Then he pushes the man into the water along with the corpse, and they both sink under the water. Weight of the corpse pulls a man down. When he is at the bottom of the water, falling on a pile of corpses, suddenly the dead body of a woman to whom he is handcuffed opens her eyes and comes to life. She asks him for help in getting out of the water. The only way out for them is to kiss. After the kiss, they both start swimming towards the lake's surface.

Dream interpretation:

The man who throws the corpses into the lake portrays the Shadow, which is the part of the personality which Jung believes defines its dark nature. Following Freud's theory, we could say that this man is the "Id" of Dannika’s psyche and appears in her dream as a mirror of her primal instincts driven by the overbearing need to satisfy her needs and passions. The bodies thrown into the lake embody her repressed thoughts (needs) and emotions (passions), which cannot be accepted on a conscious level. Anything that crosses her moral boundaries is automatically rejected. This is quite vividly illustrated in a dream when the man (the Shadow) throws a corpse under the lake's surface. The first part of the dream reflects her psychic Defense mechanism. Whilst the fight that follows, unveils the feeling of guilt: the policeman (her Superego) attacks the man (her Id). The superego appears in a dream as a policeman, to make sure that nothing "wrong" gets into consciousness, and rejects everything that is not in line with her own image of herself in reality. The woman who secretly watches the whole situation from hiding, symbolises Dannika's emotions. Specifically those feelings, that she is unable to accept and release from her subconscious. In the face of the battle of a mind against the passion, she feels powerless which is illustrated when she attempts to escape but her foot gets trapped between the wooden boards. The dream ends in pure Hollywood style. Darkness of her soul and the Shadow are thrown into the netherworld of her personality. The Shadow falls into a pile of bodies that in her dreams manifest her fears and hidden desires, which she is unable to consciously accept. At the very bottom Dannika brings this back to life through a kiss, which in fact symbolises the integration of her Shadow and acceptance of what she is so afraid of. A kiss at the lake bottom runs a parable of inner acceptance of what she is unable to let into his consciousness. When this happens in a dream, the man comes back up to the surface of the water. The dream suggests that deep in the dreamer's unconscious mind there is a pile of repressed emotions that need to be noticed, worked through, and accepted. In this way, she would be able to integrate this part of her Self into her personality and use it as her own strength. Instead of carrying it as a burden on your shoulders.