What Does a Dream Mean?

The most common message I receive in my work is, here’s my dream “…” What does it mean?

Dream interpretation is basically what we have been taught to believe we are supposed to do with dreams. The widespread assumption is that dream workers, like me, tell you what your dream means, drawing on mythopoetic, archetypal, symbolic, or scientific frameworks. But I really don’t have much interest in doing that.

Sometimes I wince a little bit at the idea that dreams have any meaning at all. I think it’s because there’s actually two senses of the word. There’s meaning, like the meaning of a word, or a dream, that you would look up in a dictionary, an objective definition, what’s “really” true. And there’s the meaning of of a word, or a dream, that you experience in your whole body, that you feel in a particular way, the energy it carries, what it means to you, to your soul.

These two senses of the word meaning are also lines that we use to outline what’s real and what isn’t— meaning as an objective definition is what’s real about a thing; and the subjective, internal meaning of a thing is often seen as unreal or illusory. The collective assumption that our waking life is real, and our dreams are not; follows from this.

This has not always been the pervasive cultural/social view of reality. Not long ago, before capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal monotheism began its systematic destruction of the earth and indigenous earth-centered societies around the world, consensus reality was understood to be dualistic, i.e. consisting of a dynamic relationship between the rational mind and the irrational soul/heart/spirit. One can imagine in those times that we had more access to the capacity to dream, see visions, receive creative inspiration, and have sacred encounters while we were awake. Simultaneously, the dream realm was taken quite seriously as a shared plane of existence to facilitate communication with the dead, nature spirits, animal spirits, and each other’s souls, and as such dreams were recognized as sacred and deeply impactful and relevant both individually and collectively—in other words, quite real.

Those days are mostly gone now, as a dream’s message has become fundamentally devalued. Even though millions and millions of people wake up every morning intrigued, disturbed, or just plain curious about their dreams, few ever pursue it. Of the those who do, many are looking for reasons to continue to deny, avoid, or repress the experiences they are having in the dream.

This is a natural inclination when awakened by a dream, and I still wrestle with it myself. The medicine of dreams is quite potent and requires deep introspection—grasping for definitions that allow me to mitigate the dream’s somatic impact is many times a vital impulse. But when we constantly privilege our waking, objective, rational, linear experience and data as what’s real, we denigrate and devalue our resting, subjective, irrational, non-linear experience as illusory or insignificant. So many of the problems facing the world and our society today can be linked to this imbalanced way of evaluating our conscious experience.

The issue is not that objective reality is not important or meaningful—just that it is not the only aspect of reality. Rather than insisting that one experience of consciousness, being awake, is real, and the other is not; we can take a third perspective, holding space for objective and subjective truths and realities that unfold in a dynamic dance while we are awake and when we are asleep.

I long for the day when we collectively understand reality is what happens when the dream realm within dances in harmony and balance with the material realm without; since human consciousness has full access to both. So for me it’s not a small thing, this violence we do towards our dreams, when we seek to find some kind of objective, rational meaning of our dream that helps us to dismiss and diminish their subjective reality and impact.

So for me as a dreamworker, when someone asks, what does my dream mean? The first task will be to determine what kind of meaning is being asked for, and ensure that the question is being asked with reverence. What do we intend when we seek meaning from our dream? Is our approach respectful, humble, devotional towards the medicine the dream is offers? With my dreamers, I am seeking to render a space where we can attune to the meaning our soul is offering to us in the present moment. This is a meaning whose depths can never be found in a book or a protocol or even a symbolic framework—but instead one that we can find alignment with through practices of rest and presence.

I dream of finding meaning in our dreams the way meaning blossoms in us as we stare into the exquisite beauty of a piece of art, the way it emerges slowly through ongoing struggle, conflict, or suffering, the way it peeks its head in briefly when we notice a leaf falling from a branch. I want us to find meaning in our dreams the way we find meaning in our lives, that in fact the practice of that, of being present with what the dream means to us in this very moment, is actually the same thing—-it is how we develop the capacity to experience the soul’s sense of meaning, and celebrate its reality fully.

If you dream of a similar world I would love for you to join me for the Dream Circle, it’s a devotional circle for the dream where we hold space for each other to be present with all the richness of experience that a single dream moment invites us into. They are monthly online the 3rd Thursday of each month; and monthly in-person in New Orleans, LA the third Sunday of each month. The space is $10. Click here to sign up 🙂

And if you have a dream that has been on your mind and what I’m writing here resonates with you, let’s chat. I’d love to answer any questions on your mind about dreams and how I might be able to support you in deepening your personal practice. Click here to sign up for a 1:1 Consult :)