There is a kabbalistic assertion that one should only tell their dreams to a close friend, because an interpreter who does not have the dreamer's best interests at heart is likely to give a wrong or negative interpretation. In my own experiences, (which have included telling my dreams to people who did not have my best interests at heart) I have found that the best guides are those who do not try to dazzle or impress either the dreamer or the dream, but rather those who can wonder with us, and ask interesting, insightful and meaningful questions. Further, the archetypal world is nothing if not ambiguous, so I am wary of anyone who claims to have definitive answers about the way it works. Similarly, the guidebooks which I have appreciated the most and to which I go back, again and again, are the ones which refrain from making definitive, encompassing statements or broad generalizations. When I talk about dreams, I try to remind myself and others that what I say is absolutely true for me at that moment, but it is not absolute, nor may it even be true for anyone else.
The same is true for the hundreds of books on symbols and symbolic language. I have found some of them to be very helpful, especially when I find myself curious about how, for example, a dream animal behaves in the natural, visible world; or the nature of something I have otherwise encountered which I know to exist in the visible world. If I dream about a certain plant or flower, I like to find out about that plant or flower, its varieties, its growth cycle for my zone, and so on. There are many wonderful references, and the internet makes satisfying my curiosity easy and fun. However, it is important to remember that our own felt associations are the place to start and the place to which we must circle back -- no matter what any other authority suggests.
So caution is in order. The archetypal world does not appear to be a matching game. There does not seem to be a one-to-one correspondence between a symbol and a fixed meaning. Jerome Bernstein, in his book Living in the Borderlands, tells a marvelous and eloquent story, first told to him by Edward Whitmont, which goes to the heart of how important it is to honor the dreamer's felt associations, and equally how vital it is to refrain from coercing the dreamer to accept a different association, no matter how universal and archetypal that association may be or how strongly we feel otherwise. This is equally true if we are the dreamer. We mustn't coerce ourselves.
To wit: a woman dreamed of a butterfly. Now, surely a butterfly is one symbol everyone can agree about, right? A butterfly is about positive, beautiful, numinous transformation of the psyche. Except of course, when it isn't. For this dreamer, who was a gardener of a certain sort, the butterfly was a predator because it cross-pollinated her flowers. It wasn't until her analyst finally accepted this (the woman stood her ground, bless her) and gave up insisting that the butterfly was a positive symbol that the analysis opened and the two of them could make fruitful progress. I had a similar experience with the image of a motorcycle in a dream. I once owned a scooter, and I still miss it. For me, scooters and motorcycles in my dreams are about freedom, lightness, agility, not being tied to the collective, and energy efficiency. All very positive. But when I mentioned my associations, the dreamer shook his head and said, "Man, not for me. When I owned a motorcycle, it was a pain. Just to ride it, I had to put on all this heavy clothing, and a thick helmut which was hard to get on and off, and when I was out on the road I had to worry about not getting hit by some jerk in a huge pickup truck. Freedom? I don't think so. Just the opposite." Since in the dream, the dreamer was giving the motorcycle back to his parents, paying attention to and accepting his association was particularly important.
Likewise, I have found it helpful to remember that dreams are not isolated psychic events. They live in a rich stew of other dreams, past and future; of outer world events, situations and circumstances, which include more than just the personal, individual field of the dreamer. And they are interwoven as well with a somatic field and a nature field. Further, the environment in which the dream is revealed also becomes part of the dream, so protecting and preserving a sacred temenos is important, even, perhaps especially, when we are not in what we think of as 'sacred space.' If you are standing, as I was recently, in line at the local bakery. My friend could not wait; his dream was that important, and indeed, the imagery—of whales—needed to be witnessed to. Under such conditions, I rarely offer more than a few words. But I do try to listen the dream into holiness. Into wholeness. To try to do more is to profane and diminish the gift.
Next section...