Dreams: Apocalypse

(Boris - man, age 46)

Dream:

"I find myself in the center of the apocalypse. Me and a group of men are looking for shelter in a large empty warehouse. While others are getting ready to go to sleep, I am looking for a place among others where I can make my bed. Finally, I put my sleeping bag on the railroad tracks that pass across the warehouse.

“Take the highway to the end of the night End of the night, end of the night Take a journey to the bright midnight End of the night, end of the night” - The Doors

The strange thing is, I chose this place even though it looked rather uncomfortable. Someone advises me not to sleep there, he suggests that if the train comes, it will crush me. Only then do I realize how bad this idea was. I decide to move elsewhere. Eventually I manage to find the right spot. As I get my bed ready, a big brawl starts between the two men. One beats the other very violently, to the point when it is quite painful to even watch this. Then, while we are debating on the next steps in our situation, a huge earthquake starts and breaks everything apart. It may sound strange, but we are all floating on a rising wall made of a huge amount of empty bottles. As the wall rises higher and higher, we try to hold on, but eventually we all fall."

Dream interpretation:

The apocalypse is a symbol of a psychic death; change in the dreamer's personality. A group of men who are hiding in a warehouse as a male collective represent the dreamer himself. A warehouse (a storage), is the form of portrayal of thoughts and beliefs that are represented in a dream by a group of different men inside. The opening context; a group of men is looking to shelter in the midst of apocalypse, suggest that there are psychic defense mechanisms that protect him from the internal change. According to Freud our unconscious acts as if it's immortal, therefore the death experienced in the dreams is never literal but a symbol of an end of some unconscious process; a change. His search for a place to sleep is a sign of mental fatigue and need to rest. A train in contrast embodies a relentless anxiety and wrecking chain of thoughts. The fight between two men inside the building points to potential inner conflict and some auto-aggression. The symbolic wall of empty bottles that lifts the dreamer up high at the end of the dream, represents the growing void that causes the existential feeling of fall he experiences on the unconscious level.

Thoughts: Individuation

In a metaphor, from the very beginning of our life, we are involved in a kind of creative dance. Let's imagine that we are connected to something remarkable that is playing its music in our mind. We come into the world with a melody which needs to be danced, but as it turns out, for various reasons we are not able to bear this role. Reality is less romantic when it forces us to live up to its rules. From birth we only experience our Self through another person, therefore the features of our individuality clash with judgment from others on whom we are totally dependent on, until we become what they were. From the day we are born we just try to hang on, and survive. A relentless need to adapt consumes all of our energy. As a consequence we create Persona, behind which a void appears and like a black hole devours all that melody with a force proportional to the size of our Persona. As we go through life instead of living it, we become alien to our Self, and the growing void within us causes unrelieved dissatisfaction. On another Tuesday afternoon, we are having another glass of wine, hoping to find some answers; "I am sad, tired and unhappy for no reason." or "I feel like I have it all, but I'm still sad." It is as if there is something in us that is not quite right. In other words, out of tune.

"I don't get in there and create a character. It's more of a voice that I hear living inside the music." - Chris Cornell

The melody we bring into the world is our personality, and the dance itself is what Jung called the individuation process. The tricky part is the realisation, that music translated into the language of the human psyche, consists of both virtues and evil. Perhaps the most difficult and, at the same time, the most terrifying thing for a man is to face this truth, and the evil behind it. To defeat the demons and find peace on a level where our personal feelings merge with the mischievous affairs of the collective unconsciousness which grasps life force as it is, with no distinction between good or bad. That being so, as long as we live, we are being charged with this force, and we live to act it out. What we deny, repress and project away, is what comes back in our dreams. Some of the dreams that we have, may symbolically reveal our destiny. Some of the dreams that we have, may symbolically reveal our destiny. Jung's theory says that everyone is born with a unique blueprint for their life and in a way, from the day of birth is who he/she becomes later. Through the experience of birth and a bond that a child develops with the mother, the eternal experience is transferred from the collective unconscious to the field of the child's unconscious. Therefore, we may have dreams that reveal our path of life with what it carries. Such dreams map us through the territories of our lives and prepare for the individuation process.

Dreams: "Snow White"

(Vienna - woman, age 27)

Dream:

"I am in a flat which at the same time looks like a drugstore. I see a stand with nail polishes from different brands. The stock doesn't seem to be full but I am surprised to see a silver colour which I couldn't find anywhere and here I see it. I turn around for a moment and when I look back again they are almost all gone. Just a few left. There is a cabinet in front of me and inside I find a huge Disney candle. Also there was a picture of “Snow White” on the box which was opened but the candle was never used. I'm thinking of lighting it but I decided to put it back.

"Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.” - Henry David Thoreau

I go upstairs to a gallery room (my room in the dream), meanwhile I am listening to my affirmation/meditation and I have my headphones on. I meet a man upstairs and he says something to me but I can't hear him because of the headphones so I remove them. I don't know what he said and now he can hear my affirmation/meditation. I don't feel ashamed but for some reason I couldn't mute it so I left the room and went downstairs for a moment. When I came back I saw the same man searching for something in my drawer. I didn't feel angry or upset but I swore and told him to get out. I thought that if he has the right to search through my drawer I have the right to swear at him.

We went to his car and suddenly we both changed. He turned into a sun-touched blonde man with longer hair and was wearing black sunglasses. His voice also changed as he repeated all the words from the meditation and he sounded exactly like the man from the audio. And my hair turned blonde too. Strangely, I could see this scene from a third person view. I gave him a light kiss on the mouth and let him go.

Then I was driving a car alone. I came across the chasm at the end of the road. I saw a toothless and homeless man on the left side of the forest. He was sitting under a tree and waving at me. It was dark and I was exhausted. When I got out of the car I realised that I was topless and all I had was my duvet. It had a light pink colour. So I put it around myself and walked backwards leaving the man and the car behind. As I was walking I struggled to find the road back.

On my way back to the city, people were not paying much attention to the fact that I was carrying a huge duvet around myself. I got to the market and it was already morning. It was buzzing with a lot of people around. I saw my mother but we didn't talk, she just stopped by to see the sunrise. I continued walking until I arrived at the harbour. The moment was so idyllic and the sunrise was beautiful."

Dream interpretation:

A continuous struggle to find the right colour suggests a lack of something in the dreamer's life. With the colour of her desire, she is trying to fulfil some emptiness. In her previous dream, she was looking for sea green nail polish, while here, she is looking for silver one. The silver colour in alchemy is associated with the moon and refers to female energy. In her dream when she comes across a silver nail polish in the shop, she is surprised; it represents something rare in her reality. When she looks away for a moment, most of the silver bottles are gone and there are only a few left on the shelf; it relates to a fleeting experience in her life. The cupboards found in the dream relate to the dreamer’s mental state. Candles are a symbol of realisation, enlightenment; a candle brings light into the dark. Snow White is a fairy tale that tells about maturity and self-realisation. In the fairy tale, Snow White comes back to life after the kiss of the prince - this may be related to the dreamer’s inner integration with her masculine energy.

Since the dreamer's room in her dream is also a gallery, we can assume that this dream refers to her creativity; the way she expresses her emotions. The staircase forms a link between the dreamer's down-to-earth part of her ego (downstairs) and spontaneous creativity (upstairs). At the top of the stairs, she meets a man who has something to say to her, however she is unable to hear the message because she is drowned out by the affirmation sound from the headphones. This reveals an attempt to jam her true masculine energy into an affirmation content that she thinks serves better for her. She goes downstairs for a moment, and when she goes back upstairs, she finds the same man searching the drawer of her personal belongings, revealing an intrusive aspect to the masculine part of her psyche. In a way, she feels under surveillance of her masculinity. She doesn't respond with anger however the foreign interference makes her express her emotions.

At this point, the dreamer experiences a transformation of her male energy, the same man now literally becomes the voice of her affirmation, and the sunglasses protect her inner projection. Following the content of the affirmation, she takes over control and drives the car, discovering the freedom and the ability to love herself when she kisses the man and then lets him go. A lonely trip outside the city connects the dreamer with the areas of her deeper subconsciousness. The trees symbolise the roots in the higher self. At the end of the road, she finds a homeless man who symbolises a deeply hidden part of her psyche. Her fatigue reflects what she in fact feels in reality in reference to the energy manifested in the dream by the man at the end of the road. The chasm that she comes across at the end of the road symbolises the end of a certain period in her life. This is a symbol of mental death; The lack of the man's teeth is a symbol of getting rid of something rotten in order to give birth to something new.

Walking backwards figuratively portrays the stage of the adult personality shifting back into the infant stage. Naked and defenceless, she returns, covered only with a sheet in colour reminiscent of the colour of the mother's womb. The dreamer has difficulty finding her way back, which illustrates the process of an inner change. Eventually, as the sun rises, she manages to reach her destination and reunites with her mother at the town's market. Her mother is there to see the sunrise, which in a dream symbolises the new birth of the dreamer. A journey backwards towards the ocean illustrates the dreamer's intention to find her own consciousness and break away from family complexes.