Is Dream Interpretation Real?
Channel: Rev Jonathan Barlow Gee
Date: 2023-08-25

PODcast 010 B

Is dream interpretation real?

It depends on the dream and the interpreter. I’ve found people are much more astute analyzers of their own dreams than most other people could be for them. Most people’s dreams reflect their current emotional stress level on the subconscious and unconscious levels. So say you have a dream of a unicorn in the woods and it wanders into a fenced enclosure and becomes trapped; as you awaken you feel the fear and anxiety of the trapped unicorn. Such a dream would obviously indicate feeling “penned in” and your unique creativity being entrapped. Or say you have a dream about a black bear running in the woods at night, and it comes across an amorphous “dweller on the threshold” and just as the bear realizes this is a symbol of death, a car hits it and you jolt awake. One could interpret this scenario’s proximity to a likely reality as being a form of “out-of-body” experience that can occur during sleep. Or one could analyze the scenario symbolically, such that the black bear would be a symbol of strength, it appearing at night would be a sign of its stealth, and the end where the dreamer dies with the bear is clearly indicative of fear of a sudden and irreparable change to the fundamental conditions of one’s being. One may dream of being a butterfly and wake up a caterpillar. Usually dreams of dying or repeated “false awakenings” in “dreams within dreams” indicate severe levels of repressed and often unidentified stress of a chronic and usually deeply personal degree. Lucid dreaming is also possible, however sustaining it for any prolonged duration has proven difficult even to those who attain and practice lucidity. In such dreams one can easily fly, so “interpretation” of lucid dreams becomes pointless.