In my blog titled “A Special Dream,” I shared a dream that gave me reassurance that things were well in my inner life even though at the time I was feeling down and limited in my outer, day-to-day life. That dream helped me to feel better and to get more on track with what mattered in my life. I’d like to share another dream with you. I had this dream at a time when at a conscious level I was feeling like things were going quite well.
Here is the dream: I am a teenager and have a sister who is a little older and who disagrees with everything I say and makes a point of getting in the way of my being able to carry out my ideas. Knowing this, I haven’t shared ideas with her for a long time and I have avoided her in general because she’s so hateful, but somehow she still always finds a way to block me from moving forward. I feel frustrated with her interference and her seeming power over me and I don’t know what to do to get away from her.
This dream is an example of how our dreams bring unconscious content to consciousness. On a conscious, ego level, I felt as though things were going along pretty well. This dream revealed to me, however, that a part of my psyche, my negative feminine aspect, was causing major problems. The positive feminine aspect of myself who wants to grow and move forward in life is being held back by the negative feminine. In Jungian terms, this negative aspect is my shadow. This dream reminded me that, even though I thought things were going pretty well, it needed to be brought to
my awareness that that wasn’t so. There’s a part of my psyche who doesn’t want me to be creative, to grow, to change in a positive way–and the dream was pointing that out. I was able to use this information and made time to do some writing that I had been putting off; I hadn’t been making it a priority and I believe my dream was telling me I needed to. I think there’s a good possibility the dream was given to me to help me not only to make writing more of a prioriety and to stop making excuses for not having enough time to write, but also for other reasons that were not
readily discernable by me. It often happens that after some time has passed, I realize a dream might also have been referring to another area of development that is needed. That’s why it’s so important to think of dreams as giving us information about what is happening at the time we have the dream and also to keep the dream in mind in the days and weeks that follow.
