I’m not normally inclined to write
about my dreams. Most of the time, they don’t make a lot of sense (at least to
me). Often they are a bit too personal. But every once in a while they carry a
message. And of the several dreams I have had in the last few weeks, three of
them seem to be of this latter category. They have a feel of the mantic. I
think they are pre-cognitive, to use the language of experts. In a word, I think
these dreams are warning me about the future.
I don’t presume to receive dream
messages for others. So I write about these three for my family only. I also
send them out into the world in case they ring true to anybody else.
The first dream that impressed me a
great deal was of a visit I made to the office of a lawyer friend of mine. In the
dream, it was the first time I had visited him at work and I was extremely
impressed by how large and expensive everything was. The ante-room was three stories
high and probably over 4,000 square feet in area. All the walls were lined in
gray and white Italian marble. And the building was filled with clients, so
many that I couldn’t count them all.
Every one of them was coming to see
my friend about handling their bankruptcy. I remember being surprised by this
because I knew that my friend was not a bankruptcy lawyer. I was also a little put-out because my friend
did not even have the time to say hello to me. He was just too busy.
I was about ready to leave when I
saw the wife of another lawyer friend of mine. She was dressed in a thick
diving suit and she was very busy too. She was polite enough, however, to say
hello. As she moved out of the office building, she said there were so many
that were drowning that she had to save.
In my second dream, I found myself
surrounded by many credit cards. This troubled me a great deal since I don’t like
credit cards. I have one bank card and a couple of store cards and I pay them
off each month. In my dream, though, I was defaulting on all these cards. I
also noticed an elderly friend of mine that I suspect is not very wise in his
financial decisions. I tried to catch his attention but he refused to notice
me.
When I told my wife about these dreams
we both agreed that they were a warning about difficult economic times ahead.
We also felt that they were warnings about avoiding debt. I guess you don’t
need to be trained in psychoanalysis to draw these fairly obvious conclusions.
The third dream was quite short.
More accurately, I only remember a part of it. In the dream I found myself with
my family in the world of a few hundred years ago. It took a little getting
used to – as we were all fully comfortable in a 21st Century American
culture. We did, however, find things to be alright. Instead of frustrations
and culture shock, we found ourselves getting by nicely, although quite a bit
more simply than we do right now.
These three dreams have left me
quite concerned about the future. Hopefully, they are a type of dream that
means nothing more than a personal reshuffling of my waking thoughts. This
would be nice, of course, except for the fact that before the dreams, I had no
thoughts whatsoever about worrisome economic times to come. That is no longer
the case.
Carl Jung identified several types
of dreams from antiquity. The un-inspired dreams are hardly worth noting as
they are usually about our personal preoccupation with food, money, love, hate,
prestige, etc.
But ancient cultures (and most
non-Western cultures today) also have many traditions of divinely inspired
dreams. Sometimes these dreams are oracular – meaning that an honorable important
person appears and gives counsel on what we should be doing (or avoiding) or
maybe about the future. Other inspired dreams might be visionary dream of the
future. Supposedly, these kinds of dreams are visions of how things will
actually be.
A third category is the figurative
dream. These are dreams involving symbols of one kind or another. In other
words, the actual events of the dream may make no sense at all by themselves,
but understood as an analogy, they may be quite prophetic or otherwise
enlightening. My three dreams all appear to me to be of this symbolic type.
I find it interesting that so many
cultures all recognize the symbolic nature of some dreams. Some psychologists
recognize that these symbols are individual and perhaps arbitrary. Among our
more influential dream observers, though, (e.g. Jung and Freud) symbols often represent
consistent and recognizable things. Jung, for example, believed that some
symbols represented universal stages (or archetypes) in the development or
history of humankind and they were consistent across many cultures and peoples.
I have a book claiming to identify
several of these universal symbols. After having experienced my three dreams, I
decided to look at what some of the images might mean. Did I dream using
universal symbols? I wanted to know.
I couldn’t find a reference to
marble, but stone is known to represent power or permanence. There was nothing
in my book about rubber or diving but swimming is said to represent being
surrounded by uncertainty and by something greater than ourselves. Again, there
was nothing listed for credit cards but money is fairly straight forward
indicating currency, capitalism, finance and such things. And I found nothing
on abandonment by friends but the meaning of betrayal is quite harsh. It is
associated with hanging, punishment and death.
Many other parts of the dream
(lawyers, history, crowds, etc.) were not listed either. Maybe I am to
understand these things literally. I’m not sure. I’m not an expert in dream
interpretation. That said, I am enough of a mystic, I suppose, to believe that
dreams can be important.
I come from a Christian faith
tradition that recognizes the importance of dreams anciently, even if our
contemporary understanding is a little less clear on the subject. I grew up
taking the stories of Joseph’s and Daniel’s dream experiences seriously, just
as I did the story of Lehi, Nephi and their family.
I don’t believe that our modern scientific
notions necessarily have to diminish how seriously we take dreams. There are
plenty of examples of bright people that think dreams are important. I’m not
sure I know why our culture seems less interested than others do about dreams.
Maybe dreams are just too subjective for us. It is more likely that there is
little place in our academies for prophecy and their ilk.
Whatever the reason may be, I think
some dreams should be taken more seriously than we are wont to give them. I say
this because I have had a handful of experiences with dreams that clearly
turned out to be pre-cognitive. If these
three dreams turn out to be the same, I think we should do whatever we can to
be ready for difficult economic times ahead. I’m not a fatalist, nor am I a
doomsday prepper. I am someone, however, that does believe that some dreams are
important. And I hope that my family does too.
References
For Jung’s ancient taxonomy of
dreams, see Dream Interpretation Ancient
& Modern by C.G. Jung, published by Princeton University Press this
year (2014). Another reference that comes to a very similar chategorization of
dream types is A. Leo Oppenheim’s The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient
Near East, with a Translation of an Assyrian Dream Book (1956). Transactions of
the American Philosophic Society, New Series, Volume 46 (3): 179-373. My reference
on symbols is, The Book of Symbols,
Reflections on Archetypal Images edited by Ami Ronnberg and Kathleen Martin
published recently by Taschen.
