What does my dream mean?

“For ten years I’ve had a recurring dream of a plane plummeting to the ground and exploding,” said Jenny, calling into a radio segment I did earlier this week. “What does it mean?”

When you wake up from a dream, what questions spring to your mind?

What does it mean? Why did I dream that? What does this dream say about me? Is my dream giving me a message? What’s going on in my subconscious? Is what I dreamed going to happen in real life? How can I stop this scary dream from recurring?

When you learn more about dream interpretation, your questions might be different: What can I learn about myself from this dream? What unconscious beliefs and patterns are revealed in this dream, and how are these powerfully and automatically controlling – perhaps sabotaging – my life? What blocks and limiting beliefs can I discover in this dream? Does this dream help me to understand how my unconscious emotions – especially my fears – are affecting the way I live my life?

Is there a key in my dream to resolving an issue, solving a problem, helping me find direction or healing?

Then, once you’ve interpreted a dream, you might ask what actions you can take to bring desired changes into your life.

How can I use this dream to fire up my creativity, shift my perspective, improve my relationships, take me to the next level, reconnect with my passion, my spirit, my purpose, my self?

What can I do to change those unconscious beliefs and patterns, to pull the plug on their power and rewire them to work for me, not against me? How can I flow and grow from the insights and new perspectives this dream work has gifted me? Are there exercises I can do to assist this wonderful blossoming and becoming?

So what does the plummeting plane dream mean?

If we’d had an hour to explore Jenny’s dream, we would have been able to answer all of the above questions, and many more. When you consult a dream analyst or dream therapist you would expect to spend an hour on a dream, and when you learn the art and science of interpreting your own dreams you’d probably also spend about the same amount of time.

The rewards you reap from the process continue to flow and touch your life in wonderful ways that cannot be counted, especially if you have moved from interpretation to applying dream alchemy techniques to assist in desired transformation.

On radio we have a couple of minutes at most to consider what a dream means.

Jenny has had this recurring dream for ten years, so we know this dream is processing something that perhaps first came up for her ten years ago, and still comes up for her from time to time. Each time the issue raises its head (or is felt rumbling in her unconscious) she has the dream. So that’s a clue for starters. What changed for Jenny ten years ago?

You can look at a dream as a loose analogy for what’s going on in your life at the time of the dream.

For Jenny, the dream paints a picture of something that should be moving along and getting somewhere suddenly losing energy or momentum or drive and plummeting. Not only does it plummet, it explodes, perhaps in anger.

If Jenny looks at the couple of days before her dream, she will find a connection. There may be a situation that follows this pattern (metaphorically), or the dream may reflect Jenny’s fears that whatever ‘journey’ she is on will not reach its destination, or the dream may reveal an unconscious belief or pattern that works hard to sabotage Jenny’s best intentions.

Working further with the analogy, Jenny may find her confidence or mood plummeting at such times, or may feel explosive and angry, whether or not she expresses it.

Our dreams can reveal our unconscious and repressed emotions, or our shadows, and even though we may never ‘explode’ in anger in life, that explosive undercurrent or plummeting doubt can take the energy right out from beneath our wings, leaving us – or the project, career plan, or relationship, or whatever it is – to crash.

On radio I sketched something along those lines, and Jenny said she could relate and felt it had to do with accepting a situation for what it was. There are certainly times to let go of plans (or planes), or to accept what is, or to decide this journey is not for you, or to change destination, and such dreams can open us to those options.

But there are other times to say, “No! This is a destination I want to make, I want to stay on course, to feel uplifted and energised, to complete this journey.”

Those are the times to call on dream alchemy techniques. In Jenny’s case this would involve visualising the plane completing its journey while summoning up sensations of buoyancy or confidence or calm or whatever emotion the deep dream work reveals as the antidote to the plummet and explosion. (The formula for prescribing and designing dream alchemy is quite precise, and a little more detailed than this space allows. You can learn how to do this in my online course, Dream Alchemy.)

If Jenny were to explore her dream more deeply than the couple of minutes devoted to it on radio, she would discover answers to every question in that long list I posed earlier in this piece.

Jenny surely gave a quick summary of her dream for the purposes of radio. The actual dream would have been ripe with detail, and it would have included what happened in the lead up to the plane taking off. These details provide the rich material for analysing a dream. They are the puzzle-pieces that dream analysis and dream therapy put together to discover the whole picture of what’s going on and why. Further dream therapy, including dream alchemy, can then be employed to change that picture, shift perspective of it, or transform it in a whole new way.

It’s an art and science you can learn, whether you want to work with your own dreams, or help others with theirs, or go the full journey and become a professional dream therapist. Begin here.