Dream Symbolism
Category: Dream Interpretation
Universal meanings and meanings that belong to one dreamer
Dream Symbolism treats what appears in a dream not as the event it looks like but as a sign pointing to something else. Those symbols come in two layers: one that many cultures have tied to similar meanings, and one rooted in a single dreamer's own experience. Linking water to feeling turns up across a wide range of cultures, but for one person water may be bound to the memory of nearly drowning as a child and stand for fear. What dream divination books lay out is a dictionary of the first layer, and a reading that leaves out the second drops the most important part of that dreamer's dream.
An easy way to work with both layers is to set the dictionary meaning aside for a moment and write down whatever comes to mind about the symbol. If "frightening," "my grandmother's back garden," and "shedding skin" line up under snake, check which of them sits closest to the feeling in the dream scene. When the dictionary meaning and your own associations disagree, reading the second one first stays closer to the dream you actually had.
The meaning of a symbol is settled by the whole dream
One-to-one tables such as "snake = rebirth" or "losing a tooth = anxiety" are convenient, but what a symbol points to changes with the context of the dream as a whole. A dream of a snake sunning itself in the garden and a dream of being chased by a snake read differently even though the snake is the same. The first leaves room to be read as a scene of getting along with instinctive force; the second, as a scene of running from an impulse that has been kept out of sight.
The context worth noting is the feeling you had inside the dream, the distance and relation between you and the symbol, the atmosphere of the whole scene, and the aftertaste left when you woke. Even among falling dreams, one that jolts you awake in fear and one in which you fall oddly quietly point in different directions. Rely only on the single meaning in the dictionary and that difference disappears whole.
When bodily sensation is drawn into a dream
Part of the symbolism in dreams can be thought of as arising from bodily sensation during sleep. Sleep research reported long ago that stimuli applied to a sleeping person get drawn into the content of the dream. Falling asleep with a full bladder can bring on dreams of looking for water or a toilet; a numb arm can bring dreams of being tied up, and a fast heartbeat dreams of being chased.
This view looks as though it strips the mystery from symbols, but what it says is that signals sent by the body are dream material too. When you read a dream, recall the conditions along with it: your posture and physical condition before sleep, the sounds and the temperature of the room. That makes it easier to separate the part to be read as symbol from the part where a bodily state was simply mirrored. There is no way to confirm from the dream's side whether a given dream came from bodily sensation, so it is safer to leave both possibilities open than to settle on one.
How a new object becomes a symbol
A system of symbols is not fixed; every time a new object enters daily life, the stock of symbols grows with it. Dreams from an age in which the elevator did not exist naturally contain no elevators. Spreading along with city buildings from the second half of the nineteenth century onward, the elevator makes the body experience going up and coming down directly, and so it is sometimes read alongside a rise or fall in social position. A smartphone appearing in a dream can stand for connection with people or for the feeling of being chased by information.
To read something the older dream dictionaries never collected, start by asking what that object does in your own life. The device belonging to someone who cannot put it down whenever a notification sounds and the device of someone who uses it only for work messages do not mean the same thing when they turn up in a dream. This is the work of raising a symbol from the side of your own life rather than looking for it in a dictionary.
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