"I Had a Nightmare that My Father was Dying." A Dream Interpretation.

Upcoming Dream Workshop

This practice of community dreamwork at The Salome Institute has been an enlivening opportunity to join with others who are interested in expanding their relationship with the unconscious, symbols, and dreams. In this series, Satya will introduce some foundational elements of recording and observing dreams for those who are new to the practice, as well as our process of exploring dreams in community online. Then, in each of our six sessions, Satya will host live dreamwork for two participants who have expressed interest in “working a dream” in a live, interactive format.

Originally published on The Hairpin.

Dear Satya:

Q. I took a nap and I dreamed about my father passing away. He was laying in a coffin, but in real life he is still alive. This dream was a nightmare for me I was crying and very afraid.

Dear Dreamer: I'm so sorry! Those dreams are awful. You wake up confused about who's dead and who's alive, and maybe worried that the dream is a premonition of an actual event. As you've adjusted to daily living, you've probably come to find that your father is alive and not in literal danger. So what does this dream mean for you?

Without having spoken with you, I would gander a couple of strong possibilities: your father complex is dying due to some new events or awareness in your life, and/or you have an unconscious and confusing death wish for your father. Let me explain.

If you're anything like anyone alive, your relationship with your father is complicated. In your own particular blend of feelings that all children share, you love your father and are angry with him. You are hurt from past events and also grateful for things. Unconsciously, you balance out all of your conscious beliefs about him with their opposites. For instance, a woman may dream of her father all the time but in therapy will proclaim to have had a very good childhood with him, with nothing more to say. After months pass, however, she may begin to have conscious memories of his angry episodes or feeling his cold tone filter throughout the house. Consciously, she liked her dad. Unconsciously, things were much more complicated.

Carl Jung's notion of a "complex" is a little like what acupuncturists work on when they're seeking to clear a stuck point in the body: it's a bundle of energy in your system that, when triggered by a word or a life event or even a nostalgic smell, can release all sorts of information. Until it's triggered though, a complex sits there quietly, unconsciously, invisible to everyone except in certain patterns of behavior. Your "father complex" is your bundle of memories and experiences related to your father and other influential men in your life--including cultural images of the father or men in leadership positions. As an adult, some aspect of the way you view all men is filtered through this complex. A male guru, for instance, may appear all-knowing to a woman with a positive father complex. On the other side, for women who grew up with an angry, unpredictable father, even the kindest, simplest man may appear conniving.

So I would ask you, in what ways has your father complex been triggered lately? Have you begun dating a new man? Do you have a new male teacher? Or has your relationship with your father in life changed in any way? Listen to the image: The father is passing away. The father is dead. The father is going to be buried. What does that evoke for you? Perhaps you're moving through a chapter of growth and you are gaining your own authority and leadership within yourself, or perhaps you're able to be that much more present with a male partner now because you can see him more clearly for who he is. If you take some time to journal about this dream, letting your mind wander and your body experience the image, some significant insights are likely to arise.

As I said above, the second major possibility to explore is that you have some unconscious death wish for your father. To get into this tricky territory, let me quote Carl Jung on a woman's dream of her dead mother:

…there does exist in our dreamer the tendency to be rid of her mother; expressed in the language of the unconscious, she wants her mother to die. But the dreamer should certainly not be saddled with this tendency because, strictly speaking, it was not she who fabricated the dream, but the unconscious.

Note that Jung is careful to emphasize what I want to emphasize with you: "The very fact that she can dream of such a thing proves that she does not consciously think of it. She has no notion why her [father] should be got rid of."

Knowing absolutely nothing of your particular situation, it is hard for me to venture a guess as to why your unconscious may be harboring some infantile death wish for your father. Again, however, I wonder if your current romantic relationship status may have something to do with it. Are you seeking to enter into a relationship of which you feel your father would disapprove? Are you considering marriage and therefore--forgive my awkward heteronormative take here--needing to psychologically supplant the primary man in your life? Consider the deep cultural roots around the replacement of the father with the husband--think of the tradition of fathers "giving away" their daughters in wedding ceremonies.

Whether it's a secret death wish or simply an increasing awareness around the father complex in your life, your dream suggests a threshold time. Some significant aspect of your life is changing. The image of death says as much. It is not a sleeping image or a wounded image, it is not a near death, but death itself. Old social customs and mythological tradition holds that when an old king dies, a new king is born and begins his reign. Consider this. The ground is being prepared for a new paradigm; an old ruling paradigm is falling away and a new one is coming.

Have you had a dream like this? Leave a comment and share!

Satya Doyle Byock is a Jungian psychotherapist, the Director of The Salome Institute, and the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood (Random House, 2022).

"A Menagerie of Wild Animals in the Backyard." A Dream Interpretation.

Dear Satya:

Q: I am in a house that is overrun by wild animals. I walk into a room, the nook just off the kitchen, and I see a Monitor Lizard buried head first in a big vase full of flowers and scummy water. He scurries up and out of the vase as I enter. Outside in the back, courtyard area, a couple of large cats are sitting, maybe a Lion and Cheetah. They were in and out of the house as well. My mom was there, along with other female family members. The animals did pose some danger to us, but there were wary of us as well. It occurred to me that they wanted water, that they were here looking for water. Is that why they had come in from the wild? I assumed that wild animals have ways of getting what they need in the wild, but not anymore, I guess. Not these days. As we stood looking over the yard from above, I wondered to my mom about filling up a kiddie pool with water for the animals. She suggested we do it tomorrow as trying to navigate around them at that moment would be dangerous. I felt for them, though. Tomorrow is a long ways off if they're really thirsty.

A: Thank you, dreamer, for sending in this dream. You shared with me in writing that you woke up from this dream with the word "Menagerie" in your head, and that you hadn't been entirely conscious of the meaning of that word: "a collection of wild animals kept in captivity for exhibition." This word, and the tone of its definition, may provide an interesting insight for us as we explore the rest of your dream. You also shared with me that you weren't feeling physically well at the time of the dream and you wondered if there might be clues to that in the dream.Indeed, the animal nature of your dream suggests a reference to your own animal nature: your physical, instinctual self. The animals have come in from the wild and are invading your home. They're thirsty. I immediately began wondering in exploring this dream why they're thirsty, and what they (you) are thirsty for exactly. I wonder too what it means that they're displaced. The realities of environmental degradation and global warming are bound to show up in the dreams of anyone living in the modern era (we're consciously and unconsciously experiencing it), but the image should still also be looked at symbolically. The ever-expanding cities and shrinking natural world has a psychological correlation for us all. In the modern era, psyche becomes heavily weighted towards the conscious, literal, rational mind and further distanced from the interconnected, mysterious realm of the universe in which we live.

The modern psyche is raised to be narcissistic and sociopathic, with ever-expanding egos and ever-decreasing reverence for whatever it is that we can't understand. But, whether we like it or not, the wild comes back to us. The grass grows up between the cracks of the concrete, the ants return just when you thought they were gone, and the winds and rain may bring a city to its knees with little warning. Is that what's happening in your life? Your wild nature is demanding attention. It's reclaiming territory and making its presence known. Before exploring the deeper symbolic layers of Water, the first "interpretation" of this image might simply be that you're thirsty. Really. This fact may be buried in your consciousness, something which you're not terribly aware of and therefore shows up with your animal nature stating what it's feeling: "I'm dehydrated." Whether or not this could be a symptom of your sickness or of a tendency for you in general, I don't know, but it's a simple reading of the dream that might be valuable for you to explore. The unconscious inhabits all of us, our cells and our muscles, not just the dark reaches of our mind.

On a more symbolic level, I'm going to start by offering you what might seem like another simple statement (or a stoner's attempt at profundity): Water is central to life. Without water, there would be no existence as we know it. Adult humans are nearly 60% water. Social centers have typically been built around major water resources, rivers or lakes or oceans. Fountains have been placed in the center of city landscapes and kingdoms. Water is central, literally and symbolically. So we know, instinctively, to bow to the water within us and outside of us. What might this mean for your dream? It may be that you're feeling somewhat disconnected from life itself, that you're needing to reconnect to the life force in some way, to your emotions (another aspect of water in dreams), and to the spiritual, soulful realm that gives life meaning. This could also be seen as the Yin aspect of life, the feminine, anima, source of life that animates material existence. This nod to the feminine seems to arise in particular with the mention of your mother and the female members of your family, a theme also echoed with the particular species of cats you mentioned.

The Monitor Lizard in the vase of water is curious to me, especially in that he is situated in "the nook just off the kitchen." I'm curious here again about the way this dream may be orienting you towards very specific parts of your body. The kitchen tends to be correlated with the stomach in dream symbolism. The kitchen is the place where food is chopped and cooked and broken down, where the alchemy of food digestion begins. So the language around this lizard's hiding place just make me wonder if there might be an illness or imbalance (not necessarily serious) associated with your liver perhaps, or spleen. I also wonder this because this particular animal is named from the Latin root word Monit, to warn. What, perhaps emotionally, might be stuck in one of the smaller organs near the stomach? You might explore Chinese medicine for some answers here, or visit a good practitioner. The image of the lizard in dreams can also be related to lineage; that from which we evolved. This might tie in again with the appearance of your mother and family in the dream and what you might be working through in your physical and psychic inheritance. Perhaps there is a lineage of disconnection from some emotional depths that you are working to heal. And, of course, perhaps you have personal associations to Monitor Lizards that are valuable for further insights into why this animal is there, off the nook of your kitchen.

Finally, to return to the word with which you awoke: Menagerie... Menagerie. The notion of captivity that defines that word is resonant to me in working this dream. It makes me wonder: are you feeling trapped? Are things feeling too controlled and confining in your life? Are you needing to be wilder? Ask yourself these questions. Spend some time really sitting with the notions. Is your life feeling as though you are in captivity and that your deepest self is not getting a chance to roam and be free? If there is an inkling that this might be true, see what you can do to rectify the situation. In your psychic landscape, you can transform the wilderness, bring the flow of water back to where it belongs, and encourage the animals to return to their natural environments where they want to be. In the future, hopefully in the near future, if you can bring more flow back into your life, your dreams will reflect these changes and it will be you who is visiting the animals, out in the wilds where they are most alive and free.

Have you had a dream like this? Leave a comment and share!

Satya Doyle Byock is a Jungian psychotherapist, the Director of The Salome Institute, and the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood (Random House, 2022).

"Sexuality and the Baby Elephant Upstairs." A Dream Interpretation.

Dear Satya:

Q: I go upstairs into a room that I'm surprised I've never been to before. Then I realize I used to be up here all the time, but not for a while. There is a sweet baby elephant jumping and playing in the room, small and gray. I'm with another woman about my age and with my coloring. She's there to spend time with the elephant. I ask her if she comes up here every day to visit, but she tells me that she's only able to come up every other day for a few minutes. I think that the elephant needs more time than that. It's otherwise alone up here. I worry for its loneliness and lack of companionship. Then there is a bear. The baby elephant gets distracted. The big brown bear is in a wooden trailer, heading towards the wall opposite us. The trailer is making noise like the low rumbles of an adult elephant, and the baby bounds after the trailer. Then, I'm shocked to see the bear go head first into what I know is a shredder or meat grinder. I gasp. I watch the baby elephant jump in too. Both are immediately dead and bloody. I see their bodies deflate as if all that is left of them is their skin. I am so sad, and I turn away.

A: Oh dear, what an image. This makes me sad too. What's been happening in your life for these images to arise? You noted that the elephant is getting only very sparse attention and you reflect, "I worry for its loneliness and lack of companionship." As a dream's elements are all elements of one's own psyche, I wonder if you have been feeling only intermittently cared for yourself, lonely and without the relationships you'd like. What playful aspect of you has been relegated to a corner of your life, like a rarely visited room you once knew well? I've noticed that dreams of elephants often arise with the beginnings or endings of intimate relationships, so I'm drawn in particular to this mention of companionship in the dream. I inquired with you about this aspect of your life. You told me that you had just spent the night with someone new when you had this dream, and that you were feeling uncertain about your emotions in the days following. I can only imagine, given the way the dream ends, that you were indeed experiencing some mixed feelings and perhaps hurt. The image of the bear and the elephant being deflated makes me wonder about your own sense of emotional deflation, like having the wind and momentum of life taken out of your sails.

The archetypal layers of this dream are very interesting. I was intrigued by the association of intimacy and elephants in dreams, so I did some research into the symbol and was further struck by the correlation. In Hindu philosophy and metaphysics, the elephant is associated with the root chakra Muladhara, located at the base of the spine. This chakra, one of seven points in the body thought of as centers of vital energy, is said to govern sexuality, mental stability, and sensuality. It is the base of Kundalini energy, the place from which that fire of life initially rises; it is for this reason that sexuality plays a major role in tantric traditions. Sexuality can create physical life in the form of new conception, but it also can kickstart new energetic life and awakening in each individual. In Buddhist mythology, it is said that an elephant calf is responsible for Buddha's conception when it caressed Queen Maya's body with its trunk while she slept. Conception and awakening in one.The Muladhara chakra is also associated to the color red, a color that Jung described in his exploration of Kundalini philosophy as "the color of blood, of dark passion" (Kundalini Seminar, p. 17). This association provides a twist (a less upsetting one) on the appearance of the blood within the dream. The red is an inherent aspect of this chakra energy associated with the elephant, suggesting here more an emergence of passion and life energy than the destruction felt within the dream. Is it possible that while you were feeling a bit mixed-up after your recent evening, you might also be feeling a new energy for life these days? I found the information on the Muladhara chakra fascinating and hope you'll continue to learn more about it on your own. There is a strong correlation here between the activity of your physical body and the reflections of your psyche, one which might be a gateway to greater insight. Exploring the symbolism and diving into the literature around the various images in your dream will almost certainly provide you with greater connections and kickstart some wonderful creativity too. Dreams can provide tremendous comfort when you discover an image that, by its very emergence, provides insight into your life. If you haven't experienced that feeling yet, dive in and start exploring. Perhaps that too is the attention your baby elephant desires.

Have you had a dream like this? Leave a comment and share!

Satya Doyle Byock is a Jungian psychotherapist, the Director of The Salome Institute, and the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood (Random House, 2022).