The seemingly literal, compelling emotions experienced in a dream are just as complex and symbolic as everything else. Sounds simple but it is deceptively difficult to remember, especially when we wake up feeling terror, horror, or fear (and also when we feel ecstasy, profound love, or awe).

Nightmares 

The most vivid way to talk about this is to look at nightmares. We mammals have been having nightmares since our earliest evolutionary form.For that whole vast sweep of time, the main point of our nightmares has always been to get our attention; they assume a distressing form because they carry valuable information that we need to remember and  understand more fully. The feelings of distress that are the primary characteristics of the nightmare turn out on closer examination to be a very reliable, archetypal marker of the primary importance of the messages carried by the nightmares.

We mammals are predisposed to give immediate attention to nasty, threatening stuff. Countless millennia of experience living on this planet have taught us that paying attention to the earliest intimations of fear and threat is a primary survival issue.

When we talk about inherent predispositions that we all share we are talking about what psychologist Carl Jung calls archetypes of the collective unconscious; writer George Lakoff calls them basic metaphors, and author Jeffrey Kripal calls them mythemes, metamyths, and Super-Stories (more on this in my article "Learning and Teaching Archetypal Thought - without being a Jungian," in the October, 2012, issue of this newsletter).

The main point of a nightmare is not that it makes us feel bad, but rather that the feelings evoked by the nightmare are universal triggers for provoking our involuntarily focused attention. In my experience the nightmares that seem the worst, also turn out to carry the most important information about our waking lives.

Death in Dreams 

For example, whenever "death" appears (named) in a dream narrative, it is a reliable (i.e. archetypal) indication that the dreamer is in the midst of a process of profound growth and psycho-spiritual change in waking life - such an important process that the total withdrawal of life energy from "who I used to think I was" is the best metaphor of the depth of that developmental change. It looks like "death."

Over the decades I have worked hundreds of dreams from people consciously involved in serious efforts to grow and evolve spiritually. Many of these people have shared their nightmares about death, almost invariably including terrible emotional distress associated with the threat, and in many instances the experience of seeming to "die" in the dream(s).

Seeing at the Symbolic Level 

The biggest hurdle to get over is that the power of the feelings can simply blind us to seeing any other level of meaning: it's fight or flight. We feel the need for immediate action, not contemplation of the symbolism. This can be very tricky to do on our own, but one good way to start is just to remember to ask ourselves what the feeling might mean symbolically. And of course other people can be a great help; they may be able to project into our dream without the same level of fear that we feel and thus help us see the symbolic level. The initial experience of the terrifying death nightmare can be transformed into a more consciously understood symbolic reflection of the dreamer's waking life success in bringing about the deep psycho-spiritual changes she or he was striving to achieve. The original feelings of terror and distress can be transformed into emotions of awe, wonder, and deep satisfaction; the previously hidden, unconscious, not-yet-speech-ripe levels of meaning can be accessed.

The archetypal metaphor from ancient world folklore turns out to be true in our post-modern world: the magic mirror of our dreams never lies. We may misunderstand its deeper messages, but they are there, below the surface of obvious appearance in the original dream. The emotions experienced in all dreams, (not just nightmares), are all just as multi-layered, symbolically polyvalent, and over-determined as all the other images, events, words, numbers, colors, etc. in the dream.

Next Time...  

In the next Newsletter (August) I'll look at the symbolic levels of meaning in those wonderful dreams we have which are filled with feelings of joy, love fulfilled, ecstasy and awe.