Phrases in Dreams
Have you had a dream where you wake up with a strange or unexpected phrase in your head? Or felt a strong emotional resonance with a statement another dream character has said?
These phrases can be advice or commentary on things we've been pondering in waking hours, but they are seldom literal. That doesn't mean they're not straightforward. In the language of dreams, metaphor, they can be actually rather concise and clear.
Consider this example:
You're dreaming an interaction with a friend. She's leading a circle of teaching, where she is getting participants to write down responses to open ended questions. It's kind of a workshop for business founders.
Seeing the students writing down their answers you say, "I've tried this before in my work, but it doesn't seem to work for me." She defends her process. You have a short conversation where you assure her you trust the process works, but it hasn't worked for you. She looks and you and simply says, "it's a loveless marriage."
The dream ends.
This dream has an odd phrase in it, and what's more, it ends on that phrase. It's like the echoes ring out from the final cymbal or trumpet blast, and leave us with a feeling-state in the morning. We want to get to the bottom of it.
Since we weren't discussing marriage, and since for purposes of this example, we might say we weren't concerned about relationships, we're not going to take the quote at face value.
We are going to instead break it down.
If we look at its resonances we could say:
Loveless: without passion, without drive, without deep feeling
Marriage: a commitment, a structure, an agreement, a form
This is simple - you could go deeper. But I already sense I might have the meaning, something in these synonyms / metaphor meanings has reminded me of a feeling I get.
In fact, I might be reminded of it because it's been on my mind in waking hours. For this example, we'll say that we've been working on our business, and felt we are missing passion for it, felt we are hindered by its structures or the way it's running. We are trying to find our way back to passion and sympathy with the work we do and the business we run... and when our dream friend is both a) running a business workshop and b) we confess something that feels true waking or sleeping about our lack of results, her response "it's a loveless marriage", is the most direct, clear diagnosis we could ask for.
Does it say what we should do? Does it pass judgement on this? No. We are free to take this insight or not. We could pass it by entirely, and many phrases we hear in dreams we do. We don't remember whole conversations often. But since this one had emotional resonance and stayed in our head upon waking, it was worth spending time with it.
What we do from here us up to us, but now we have the awareness of the situation, we're likely to change our behaviour, or be more noticing of how we are in relation to our business, where our passion is, and how the structure might be holding us back or preventing deeper belonging.
What phrases have you heard in dreams? What did you deduce from them?