The Stuff of Dreams: 3: Strong Emotions are Your Dreams Yelling, “Pay Attention!”

About this Episode

Dreams from this episode:

A dream of supportive musicians that makes the dreamer cry
A dream of 2 trees: a juniper with hundreds of songbirds and a dead cottonwood with a raven
A dream of a path between a brick wall and a wall of trees, ending on a cliff overlooking a lake
A dream of eating a black kitten on a rooftop at night
A dream of a frozen castle floating above an ocean of molten lava
A dream of a shining, pulsing light above a flat rocky expanse

Themes from this episode:

One important question to ask yourself about a dream is, “What conscious attitude is this dream compensating or balancing?” If your conscious self is becoming too one-sided in some way, your unconscious may send you a dream meant to counteract that.
- For example, when we are feeling particularly disconnected or discouraged, we often have dreams that show us unconscious figures who are supporting us.
Pay attention to the emotions you feel in a dream, as that is one of our most basic languages.
- For example, the musician dream made the dreamer cry, but it felt like a good cry releasing pent-up frustrations, so it was a dream of support and release rather than a dream of sadness.
Dreams often choose extreme or exaggerated imagery in order to evoke as much emotion as possible from us so we will pay attention.
The geography or layout of a dream can tell you a lot.
- For example, the dream with 1 living and 1 dead tree on opposite sides of the yard suggests contrasting choices. The dream of a path hemmed in by walls and trees suggests being forced along a certain course without much choice until the path ends overlooking a vast lake, which feels like new possibilities and new parts of the unconscious.
- For another example, in my dream I was on a rooftop, symbolizing being up in my head, or maybe being inflated.
Cats in dreams can have many different meanings, depending on context and what’s going on in your life. They can represent the feminine side, or the physical/the body, or feminine wisdom (cats were the “familiars” of witches). Wild cats can represent the wild, aggressive aspect of the feminine.
Your logical, reasoning, thinking-mind interpretation of a dream may not “click” deep down. Listen to your gut about what resonates and what doesn’t in dream interpretations, because that’s important input from your unconscious.