Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious.
Through dreams a door is opened to mythology, since myths are of the nature of dreams, and that, as dreams arise from an inward world unknown to waking consciousness, so do myths: so, indeed, does life.
I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.
Last night, I had that dream again. I dreamt I had to take a test, in a Dairy Queen, on another planet.
You are dreaming your thirst when the water you want is inside the big vein on your neck.
You're dead," I repeated. "So why are you in my dream?" He raised the bill of his olive drab ball cap with one finger. " Good question. Morbid, isn't it?" "What?" "Dreaming about dead peolpe. Creepy. You ever see a therapist about that?" "I'm not -" Even in dreams, I couldn't win an argument. Even when he was dead.
In fifty years activity as an analyst I have witnessed again and again that a dreamer after having met a personage regarded by all as influential and good,saw him again in a dream with a different face.
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
Another dream. Another long-distance call on my phantom party line. No wonder i had steadfastly refused to have dreams for most of my life. So stupid; such pointless, obvious symbols. Totally uncontrollable anxiety soup, hateful, blatant nonsense.
Later, however, I came to recognize the objective nature of these dreams or fantasies ... Thus it was that I gradually came to acknowledge that such fantasies or dreams are neither meaningless nor purely arbitrary but rather convey a sort of "second meaning" of the terms applied.
In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.
I think dreams are metaphors. Everything you do in writing is metaphorical. So it seems like the same arena to me.
A lot of the time in my recurring dreams, before I was diagnosed, iconic people would either be good or evil figures. I remember dreaming really basic stuff like trying to navigate the London underground, but then Paul Newman would be the only one who would direct me to the right trains. And I'm trying to remember who would direct me to the wrong ones.
I was in the middle of a dream about garbage cans and frogs - don't ask, and I won't tell.
