This week, to mark the publication in paperback of Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams, Jungian analysts Lisa Marchiano and Deborah Stewart interpret a selection of short dreams and fragments of dreams sent in by listeners.
Many of us dismiss shorter dreams as unworthy of our time. We await the arrival of epic, cinematic dreams, while perhaps overlooking the gold that can be found in more “ordinary” dreams.
Honoring short dreams by writing them down and spending time with them can yield powerful insights. It can also work as an incentive to your unconscious, helping you remember more dreams, and more of your dreams. The time you spend on fragments and snippets strengthens connection with the unconscious.
There are 120 dreams in Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams, and this includes numerous short dreams. They show readers the rich potential of the one or two sentence dreams we’re often tempted to dismiss.
As we work through a selection of short dreams, we discuss some helpful interpretive lenses you may wish to use in your own dream work (and which are elaborated more fully in the book):
- The lens of dramatic structure – asking the right questions about the theatrical arc of the dream.
- Using the “when/then” concept to look at which action in the dream leads to an important outcome.
- Subjective vs objective interpretation of a dream – how do we know when a dream is commenting on a real-life situation (objective), when it is offering insight on our own psychological development (subjective), and when it might be doing both?
We hope you enjoy our discussion of five listeners’ dreams: an overfed fish raising big relationship questions, a meeting with Greek mythology’s star-crossed lover Thisbe, a harsh landscape of volcanic rocks and blood, a bleached Christ figure, and a biting spider at a crossroads in the dreamer’s life.
The Dreams We Analyze
1. My fiance and I walk into a room to encounter a table, where five glass containers with beta fish have tipped over. I direct us to slowly and carefully, right the glass containers, discover any leaks, and feed the fish. I find later that my fiance has entirely filled one of the containers with food, thus suffocating the fish.
2. I was outside at night beneath the moon, near a tree, sensing danger, when a woman dressed in white linen ran by me and went into a cave to hide. A voice said to me, “That was Thisbe!” As I awoke, the same strange voice commanded me, “Go find your Thisbe.”
3. I am lying exhausted on an island of black, hardened lava with ice cold choppy dark water all around. My ex and his ex-wife are parading away in a ceremonial way, while she plays some instrument behind him and rings a bell. My feet are bleeding and I realize I can’t follow them. I lie watching the blood run down my feet while I watch them walk away. They don’t see me.
4. I’m on a country road – the air around it is whitish. At an intersection, there’s a shrine with the life-size head and torso of Christ that is also all white as if covered in flour or talc. He has ropes around his torso, one is tightened so much that the Christ’s belly starts bleeding. His eyes open.
5. I see a spiderweb with a furry dark grey spider that almost looks cute. I am scared of it. It jumps on me and bites me.
Related Episodes
If you enjoyed our episode on working with short dreams, you might also enjoy: