Home Invasion Dream
“I dream that I desperately try to close and lock all the doors and windows against an intruder but he gets to the last door before I do and gets inside. What can this possibly mean?” The dreamer is a very together, polite and professional 25 year old man.
This is our forth post in our workshop on working productively with our dreams. So far we have mentioned that we can see a therapist who is proficient with dream work, or we can join a dream group, being careful to get one which is not interested in power-tripping on us. The other thing we can do is work with our own dreams. This work is generally undervalued by our culture, but can be enormously productive, personally and professionally.
If we are to do our own work, our theme needs to be that we will attend to our dreams systematically, consciously and conscientiously. I am starting to appear next week in a series of guest posts on D*I*Y Planner, where I am going to speak about the best way to catch your dreams in a journal. In short, put a journal book by your bed, and, without getting up, write down what you remember from the night. If you must, use a tiny night light painted red with a magic marker. It preserves your night vision and should not disturb your partner.
Dreams that are self evident are unusual. Most of he time, when we think that we know what a dream means we are still on a sort of power trip and have not even begun to understand its message. By the time you have finished these posts, you will have a workable basic method for dealing with your dreams.
Some people would take the home invasion dream to mean that they need to have better security. Many would check the door and window locks. Some would start a contract with a home security firm. Some would get a big dog and a few would even get a gun. Many would be made nervous by the dream feeling less secure in what had felt like “their castle.” But are any of these actions an appropriate reaction to the dream?
I go back to what I said once before, namely that we dream almost exclusively about ourselves. So let’s start at the beginning. What was this intruder like? We think immediately that he was aggressive, violence prone, and angry. No doubt further reflection would come up with more like characteristics.
Now the question that we must ask ourselves is in what way are we aggressive, violent and angry? We may not be aware of ever being like that. Perhaps we watch violent movies, or TV shows but never are we violent in our everyday life. This is likely the problem the dream is pointing out: We are not like that day to day. But if we are not like that towards others, how do we treat ourselves? How critical, nasty, even violent are we towards ourselves? Generally the answer is that we tend to be very self critical, and unforgiving. The dream was trying to get this young man to pay attention to this inner struggle and not to get him to beef up home security.
Does this make sense to you? What have you done to deal with similar dreams?