Do Dreams Have Meaning?

If that doesn't work then you can try another point of entry which is to examine the symbols in your dreams. What you do is write your dream down and you circle the symbols. Then ask yourself, "What's the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about that object or person

One of my all time favorite dreams (because it says so much about the different points of entry) is a woman who dreamt that she had a piglet stuck to her breast and that's all she remembered. You don't have to remember a whole long dream story with a beginning, middle, and end. Sometimes the picture really is worth a thousand words. So, she was shocked that she had this piglet stuck to her breast and came to me asking, "Why did that happen?" My first response (because I go for the feelings and the emotion) was, "What was happening in the dream? Were you freaking out? Were you running around trying to get the piglet off you?" And she said, "No, actually I wasn't at all. I was just standing and looking at it." And that tells you something right away, because in waking life if you had a piglet stuck to your breast you would probably be running around freaking out.

So we understand immediately that whatever is going on is related to the fact that the reaction doesn't match the situation. This is how you do dream analysis. You look at the situation in the dream: How is the person reacting? Does it match the way the person would act if that were to really happen in waking life?

My next step was to ask her to tell me what had happened the day before. She said, "I spent a little time with my mom in the morning." I said, "Well, very quickly, why don't you tell me a couple of things about your mom?" She did, but nothing really clicked. She went on to tell me that later in the afternoon she was walking down the street and ran into her ex-boy friend. During the consultation, I am working with pen and paper because I have to be very careful not to use my words or my language, you want to get the language of the dreamer because that will give you the dreamers way of using words Then I said, "What are the first few things that come to your mind when you think about that boy friend?" And the first thing that came out of her mouth was, "He's such a dependent little pig." That's the language she used! She said "dependent little pig" so now we understand who the piglet is: her ex-boy friend.

So now, I wanted to do a little further investigation. My next question was, "What happened when you ran into him?" She said he was planning a birthday party for himself and wanted her to prepare the food. I said, "Oh that's nice, when are you going to do that?" And she replied, "I don't want to do the food for his party. I don't even want to see this guy anymore." I asked her if she had told him that. She said, "No, I didn't really feel that comfortable about it." So, she didn't express herself. I don't know if you are aware of this or not but, when a mother is nursing a baby the word they use to describe it "expressing milk". Now we have another reason why the unconscious might have shown the breast.

We are very, very sophisticated about the images that we choose and it's not an accident when you get certain images in your mind. The unconscious is brilliant. Because she didn't express herself and tell her ex-boyfriend how she really felt, that's why in her dream she was looking at the pig but not caring or reacting.

Sometimes you get a very direct solution to an issue and sometimes it's less direct like this one where you need to look at the dream, take the dream out into waking life, ask what if it really happened - is this the reaction you would normally have? Is it an appropriate reaction to the situation? In this case it wasn't. In waking life if you had a pig on your breast you would be screaming.

We are self-regulating organisms and whatever it is that you under-react to in your waking life, in the dream you're going to overreact and hence the nightmare. A nightmare is an overreaction to something that you are under-reacting to and so two things happen when you have a nightmare. Number one, a balance is created. She didn't say anything to the ex-boyfriend and that's why she had this piglet dream because her unconscious wanted to balance itself and so she had the nightmare. Second, the nightmare grabs your attention (and this one literally grabs her) because she had something to get off her chest.

Another point of entry is play on words or puns. We use play on words and puns in our waking life constantly and we use them in our dreams too. Here's an example, one of my four daughters is 12 years old and if I say to her, "Get over here, I am going to kill you" then she might go to sleep tonight and dream that someone is trying to kill her and I might go to sleep tonight and dream that I am murdering somebody.

You might hear somebody say, "I was so embarrassed I wanted to die." And then they dream that they are dying. It's not that they are literally dying, it's that they are thinking about the thing that happened yesterday that they feel so embarrassed about that they felt like they wanted to die.

That's the reason why you want to get the dreamer to talk out loud because you very often catch the meaning from the words they use to describe the dream or their feelings. One woman said to me, "A snake fell over the floor and I couldn't put my foot down" and I asked, "Are you having trouble putting your foot down about something?"

Sometimes, if I'm alone and I've written a dream down, I'll read it aloud because you catch things when you hear them.

So those are the ways that you attach the dream to a current issue that you are attempting to solve. I think what's different about me is that most therapists help you attach the dream and then figure out why you had the dream and what's bugging you but they stop short by not realizing that a dream is your unconscious delivering to you the solution to the issue. When something's bugging you and you try to figure out what you want to do about it - obviously the solution is in your unconscious before it gets to your conscious. I don't want to suggest that you are not going to figure out the solution to the problem anyway, because you will. But if you understand the dream then you can propel your problem solving skills by uncovering what you want to do about something faster than if you didn't analyze the dream.