What’s your recurring dream theme?
When you look back over a lifetime of dreams, how many recurring underlying themes spring to mind?
At first you may think about some of the common dream themes that many of us experience from time to time – teeth falling out, flying, being chased, being late, being unprepared to give a speech, and so on. Write those down and then close your eyes and relax and see what else pops up, beyond the more common dream themes.
One of my personal dream themes is walking along a path.
In these dreams I generally know my destination, but it’s the path that really draws my attention.
As a small child I had a recurring dream of being a shepherd boy, walking along a deserted path through the mountains. As I reached the point where cliffs towered over the path from each side, packs of hungry wolves gathered on the cliff edges, looking down at me. I would wake up in extreme fear. Fear blocked my path, in the dream and in my life.
In my late teens I walked along dream paths that became steps that always turned back on themselves, like a Mobius strip, or an Escher drawing. No matter how far I walked, the path kept leading me back over the same ground. Somewhere, in life, I kept going back over the same old ground. What did I need to learn to break free?
In my early twenties I walked, in dreams, along paths that were like village high streets, becoming very aware, with each step, of parallel paths just a few streets away to each side. The parallel paths featured rivers, ponds, pools, and people sitting outside their houses, happy with the colourful day-to-day, while I walked the mainstream path, straight through. In life I was enticed by the colourful parallel paths I might take – or did take at some level – so why did I prioritise the less colourful mainstream route?
In my middle years I dream-walked mountain paths that led me up such steep inclines that I couldn’t find a safe way down. In life I was meeting steep challenges while missing the security of being able to back down.
In more recent years my dream paths laid themselves before me, the terrain revealing itself, step-by-step, as I walked with curiosity and faith. In these dreams I knew my destination but had no hurry to get there. My focus was in the present, this step, then this. Where there was slippery mud, I noticed solid stones I could step on to traverse the muddy patches. Where there was a boggy pond, I noticed a sandy shore I could follow. Where the path petered out, I noticed a parallel path on the other side of the street. Each obstacle I met presented its own solution, or served to navigate a slightly different direction, providing new experiences while still en route to the destination.
On these more recent dream paths there is no fear, no going over the same old ground, no prioritising the less colourful mainstream route, no sense of loss of security in meeting challenge. There is simply a sense of being present and reading the path step by step. Intriguingly there’s also a sense, in these dreams, of co-creating the path: there’s the path I encounter, and there’s my response to it, a response that changes not only my perspective of it but also its very nature. In these dreams walking the path transforms it. Isn’t that life!
I was in the middle of writing this blog (up to about the seventh paragraph to be precise) when the time came to record a new episode of ‘The Dream Show with Jane Teresa Anderson’. I stepped up to the microphone to say hello to our guest, Liz, for episode 237, knowing I would return, in the afternoon, to complete this blog. If you listen to The Dream Show you’ll know that most episodes feature a guest who brings a dream for us to explore and interpret, to relate to the guest’s life, and to spin some dream alchemy. You’ll also know that I have no prior knowledge of what dreams our guests choose to present. The first time I hear the dream is when we hit the record button. That way, you, the listener, experience the whole process from me hearing the dream for the first time to delving into it and discovering what it means. So, Liz’s dream was about “a dry, dusty pathway, road, or track”. That pathway was the main through-line of the dream. Synchronicity was at play. (NOTE: 3 December 2020, Episode 237 is now available, listen here.)
Can you see the value in looking back through the years to see how a personal dream theme evolves?
Or maybe it doesn’t evolve, maybe it screams out to be interpreted, understood, and resolved.
As well as interpreting individual dreams, there’s a place for standing so far back from a number of similar dreams that you see a pattern you can interpret. Think of this as interpreting across a dream theme, across a number of dreams that share a theme, across days, weeks, months, years, a lifetime.
