When you get angry with someone in a dream.
Have you ever been so angry with someone in a dream that you shout at them at the top of your lungs, squeezing out every last word until you lose your breath?
Or have you been so angry that you’ve been violent with the person in your dream, perhaps picking them up and throwing them around with superhuman strength?
With all your anger spent, you wake up, horrified at your dream action, but strangely calm.
Why do we have these kinds of dreams from time to time, what do they mean, and how can they help us?
These angry dreams often occur for people who withhold their anger, the dreams providing a safe space to release this powerful emotion. The more repressed the anger, the more it lets rip in the dream. The same is also true of unconscious anger: while we may be aware of repressing anger, unconscious anger is much deeper, pushed so far away, and perhaps so long ago, that we lose touch with it entirely. Except that it roils, and boils beyond our conscious awareness, and subtly affects the way we interact in the world. What made us intensely angry long ago, and remained unexpressed or unresolved, shapes the way we respond in the world. Exactly how unconscious anger shapes us is different from person to person. Interpreting angry dreams can help us to identify and understand these patterns. From that point, we can discover how to release the angry hold and change those patterns into more supportive ones.
But what about the person you get angry with in the dream? Why that particular person?
Sometimes it will be obvious. You’ll wake up remembering what really irritates you about that person, or why you are angry with them, or what you’d really like to express, but don’t. You might then brush off the dream as a release of your anger and leave it at that, especially if you are feeling the post-dream calm. And that’s ok, if that’s as far as you want to take it, though it’s helpful, in the long run, to acknowledge that you repress your anger and ask yourself if there are healthier ways to process these feelings. On a deeper level, such a dream also gifts you the opportunity to know yourself more deeply, as you’ll discover below.
At other times the person you raged upon in the dream is someone you barely know, or someone who is ultra-polite, or someone who is a fictitious dream character. That’s when you need to sharpen your dream interpretation tools and get to work.
Working out what the person in your dream represents is half the battle, whether it is someone you know from waking life, or whether it is a dream character. When you learn the art and science of interpreting your dreams you learn techniques to work out what the people in any dream symbolise. If you’re courageous and ready to dig deep and really get to know your inner workings, your best bet is to look at people in your dreams as representing aspects of yourself. They might represent parts of yourself you know about (your tendency to polite rather than honest, for example) or they might represent unconscious aspects of yourself (perhaps a tendency to goad yourself for not being good enough, for example).
In the simplified example I have just given, you might dream of being angry with someone who represents your tendency to be polite rather than honest, or you might dream of being angry with someone who represents your deeply unconscious tendency to goad yourself for not being good enough. It’s yourself you’re thrashing in the dream, exhausted from being ultra-polite, or having reached saturation point with striving for perfection, unaware of the deep nagging ‘not good enough’ voice that drives you.
When you confront and battle these people in your angry dreams, you’re really confronting and battling the aspects of yourself that they represent. Yes, you feel some calm because you have released an avalanche of withheld emotion, but unless you explore what the dream reveals about your conscious or unconscious anger (why it is there, why you withhold it, which aspects of yourself you are angry at) and how this affects your waking life experiences, the anger will build again.
Whatever makes you angry in the waking world, justifiably or not justifiably, frequently has a counterpart in your inner world, a counterpart revealed in your dreams. Acknowledging that counterpart and communicating with it to reach a place of peaceful co-operation or healing, results in finding more productive outcomes in waking life too.
Celebrate those anger dreams! Then get to work on unwrapping their gifts.
