Can dreams sometimes be straightforward?

Can dreams sometimes be straightforward?

Are dreams always symbolic, or are some dreams straightforward and obvious in their meaning?

It’s easy to acknowledge that our weird and surreal dreams are symbolic, but what about those dreams that seem very much like our day to day life, give or take a few differences? If you dream about going to work and having an altercation with your boss, might this be a straightforward dream about your differences of opinion with your boss, or is it symbolic of something else? If you dream about looking for a bigger house to move into, might this be a straightforward dream about feeling cramped at home and ready to find a more spacious option, or does it have deeper meaning on a symbolic level?

Let’s begin by exploring the one about moving into a bigger house.

If you had this dream, woke up, looked around your small home, and thought, Yes, I really would love to live in a bigger house, then you might decide that your dreaming mind had been processing your feelings about your lack of space and had come up with a possible resolution for the issue: move house. Your dream might inspire you to explore a move. You might find a way to achieve this, to literally make your dream come true. You might forever quote that dream as marking a turnaround for you.

Or, you might have had this dream, woken up, looked around, and thought, I hadn’t realised how much the size of this house has been eating away at me, I thought I was ok with it, but, hey, I’m over it! You might conclude that your dream reflected your more unconscious or repressed feelings about lack of space, and that insight may have galvanised you into action.

Either way – whether you saw your dream as reflecting your conscious or your unconscious feelings about your small home – you saw the dream as straightforward, took action, and valued the dream.

But what if you had set aside your natural inclination to accept the dream at face value, and explored it as if it were symbolic?

What if you applied the tools and techniques for interpreting dreams and discovered that the dream was about feeling a lack of emotional space in your relationship, or a lack of mental space at work, or a lack of creative space in your career? What if you discovered that the dream was about needing to expand your potential, your being, your expression in the world?

These are just some of many possible interpretations for this kind of dream, but if you actually had this dream, and applied these tools and techniques, you would discover the interpretation that was accurate for you. There are always clues in the dream details.

You’ll usually notice some oddities in a dream that otherwise seems true to life.

The small house in your dream might have a pink bathroom (that you don’t have), or the door might be in a different place, or there might be a line of ants crawling up one wall. These oddities are the more surreal symbols that you can focus on to discover what they mean in the context of your dream. These oddities are also reminders that, despite what you think, dreams are not straightforward: they are symbolic. You might conclude that the line of ants, for example, symbolises beliefs about being undermined or overrun, emotionally, mentally, or physically, which would throw light on why you feel you need more space. Or you might conclude that the ants represent feelings of regimented, altruistic work that you do, keeping on soldiering on (like lines of soldier ants) while neglecting to allow yourself nurturing space. No symbol means the same for everyone. These are just examples. When you do the work on your own dreams, you discover the meaning of the symbols and it’s these clues that clarify the meaning of the whole dream. It usually turns out that the dream meaning is not as obvious as you first thought. Exploring the dream as if it is symbolic delivers the greater and more helpful truth.

Of course, you might have had this same dream about looking for a bigger house to move into, and then woken up to remember that you already live in a huge, rambling house, and have no need for an even bigger home. At this stage, because the dream did not resemble reality, you would have realised it was symbolic.

Here’s my advice:

Treat all dreams as if they are symbolic. Apply the tools and techniques you have learned from me to discover what your dream means. You may conclude that while the interpretation rings true, the more straightforward sense of the dream also hits home. You may work with finding more emotional or mental space in your life (as a result of interpreting your dream from a symbolic perspective) while also being inspired by the dream to make a physical move. My prediction is that any physical move you might make without doing the corresponding inner work is not going to reward you as deeply as doing the inner work with or without the change of house. Straightforward, really.