We Dream About Ourselves using Metaphors for Language

By David Rivinus

We all dream. When the circumstances are right, most of us also remember an occasional dream, especially if it is unsettling. But then what? What do we do with the garbled images that we’re left pondering?

This is where most dreamers become confused and might even get into trouble. Dreams can lend themselves to multiple, imaginative leaps of interpretation because the imagery is often colorful and suggestive of many possibilities. For example, one of the leading causes of missed dream interpretation cues is trying to take a dream literally. Very occasionally this is valid, but the vast majority of dreams are about something other than what they seem to be depicting.

It is all complicated by the fact that dreams can, quite literally, be about anything. Name any situation in the human condition, and a dream can express it: conflicts, personal triumphs, warnings, issues with relationships, prophesies, traumas, insights into past lives, travel to other planes and dimensions. The list could go on and on.

With so many possibilities, dreamers get into trouble when they indiscriminately jump to conclusions. Sometimes these leaps are based on centered, intuitive knowing. As a dream analyst, I can testify confidently that the majority of such conclusions are based on a fear response, a desire for ego fulfillment, or sometimes simply the association with something that the dreamer casually saw or heard in the course of his daily activities.

Any of these stimuli can be relevant and useful. As a dreamer, how do you discriminate between what you need to understand about your dream and all the extraneous possibilities that might lead you to erroneous interpretations?

The answer is simple and consists of two understandings: Dreams are always about the dreamer, and dreams speak in the language of metaphor. We’ll take each of these understandings and examine it separately.

Dreams are Always About the Dreamer

While it is true that dreams can be about anything under the sun, it is also true that, regardless of the seeming subject of the dream, dreams are about the dreamer. In more than four decades of facilitating the interpretation of dreams, I have never known of an exception to this. Every image, every individual, every feeling, every fear, every color, every sound, every sense, every perception that one experiences in a dream is a depiction of some aspect of the person who is doing the dreaming. And that is the place to start with the interpretation process.

Here is an example: Let’s say a dreamer dreams that she has been rebuffed unfairly by her boss. Typically, a dreamer unfamiliar with dream analysis will begin by taking the image literally. She might carry resentment of her employer for a whole day or even longer. She might confront him and cause a legitimate conflict that might not have arisen otherwise.

It has been my experience that the chances of this scenario being literally true are far less than 1 percent. I am not suggesting that the scenario is impossible, but it is unlikely. Instead of taking the dream literally, what if the dreamer understood “her boss” as an aspect of herself? Suppose she understood that the dreamed rebuff was coming from her own inner “person-in-charge.” In her dream, this inner person-in-charge rebuffed her. Was she giving herself an advisable course correction? Or was she being unduly critical of herself?

Only the dreamer would be able to provide answers to those questions. Take note of what happened: Any sense of me-versus-the-world was eliminated. The focus was on an issue taking place within the dreamer and nowhere else.

Even if a dream also speaks to issues outside of the dreamer, in this case, the workplace, the principal concern has been resolved if she understands that the conflict and change begin in her own psyche.

Dreams Speak in the Language of Metaphor

In the hypothetical dream above, “the boss” was not literal, but was a symbol for something else; he was a metaphor. Metaphors are the vocabulary used by the language of dreams.

It might surprise the reader to know how often we use metaphors in daily speech: “It was a political football.” “She gave birth to a new idea.” “We should put that on ice for a while.” None of those three sentences is intended literally; no one is going to go to the freezer to stick something on a piece of ice. These sentences convey abstract ideas which are made easier to understand by associating them with a clear, visual image: a metaphor. In general, we use this form of communication frequently, and dreams use it almost exclusively!

Let’s take the above metaphors and make a story out of them:

She gave birth to a new idea, but it became a political football. So we decided to put it on ice for a while. None of the actions described above actually took place; no one started throwing a football around. Despite the metaphoric imagery unrelated to its real meaning, I suspect every reader understood what this story was about.

Now, let’s turn it into a dream:

In my dream, I’m going into labor. I see the hospital delivery room and all the medical personnel. When the baby comes out, it’s not human. Instead it’s a football, and on one side of it there is a picture of a donkey. On the other side, there’s an elephant. Suddenly, I see my boss, only he’s dressed like a quarterback. He wants me to throw him the football. Instead, I get up off the delivery table, grab the football and put it on a huge chunk of ice over in the corner of the delivery room.

We can all identify with the odd juxtaposition of the dream’s implausible events; dreams are often disjointedly like the one just related. I suspect we can also see the similarity between the metaphoric story told four paragraphs earlier and the dream version immediately above; the two are almost exactly the same. It’s only that the dream version expresses the metaphors as literal, visual images, and that makes them particularly poignant and strange-seeming. By contrast, when we use those same images in speech, they lose some of their impact and sense of immediacy; to talk about a political football is different than actually seeing the ball with political images painted on it. But the two images have identical meanings, regardless of how they are depicted.

This dream has provided the dreamer with a concise and invaluable overview of an issue or a dilemma she is facing: She has “given birth” to an idea that she is ambivalent about. And instead of trying to make a difficult choice right away, she has decided to wait. With that understanding as a basis for subsequent decision making, she can proceed to resolve her quandary from a more balanced perspective.

Ultimately, the key to understanding the dream’s important message was, first, to realize that it was primarily about the dreamer herself and no one else. And second, to view all the cinematically depicted scenes as metaphors for abstract concepts, not images to be taken at face value.

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About the Author

David Rivinus has been a dream analyst since the late 1960s. His subsequent discovery that one can analyze startling daytime events as dreams revolutionized his approach, and he has lectured and facilitated dream workshops internationally ever since. Recently, he documented his findings and methods in the book, Always Dreaming. For more information, please visit http://www.teacherofdreams.com