HI all,
I would like to share this dream and hear your feelings and interpretations.
I am at a very important point in my life and this dream feels very important and archetypical but I cannot really grasp what it wants to tell me:

I am in the countryside.It is night.There is a profound blck big lake.I suggest swimming in it.I have no fear.Me, my partner(it is a new intense relationship) and my child(it is none of my real life sons, but feels like my child) of six or seven enter the lake to swim.
I swim quietly,in peace, on the surface, feeling the calm.All of a sudden I feel that something terrible has happened ,I turn around and cannot see my child.We desperately look for it.I undertsand that an unspeakable terror, something without form and name abduced it and it has been lost.I feel a deep grief and wake up.
Looking forward to your thoughts.

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 49

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Hi Margit

So many symbols here seem to point to the unconscious. The big black lake, night-time.

The child I would say is not one of your real life children, because it is a child of you.

The terror without form and name I would suggest is your shadow.

Connecting the dots, I think it is in reference to something terrible that happened when you were around the age of six or seven, something that you have repressed, thus has been 'abducted' by your shadow.

Is there anything 'terrible' or some sort of 'terror' that occured when you were around the age of six or seven that you have hidden away from your conscious mind?

Cheers,
Rook

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 28 - Perth, Western Australia

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thanks for answering, I haven't seen your message until today which is very syncronical since last week my therapist concluded after several other dreams I had that I have suffered a sexual abuse as a child which I disociated and cannot remember. I had a very strange dream about an island of slave girls. I will write it this week when I have a quiet moment.

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Hi Margit

I am not a dream-speaker like Jerry, that's his great strength, but if I may I'd like to add a comment from a different point-of-view.

Jung, when he talked about dreams, urged us not to look back to childhood trauma, not to reduce our dreams to autobiography but to expand them outwards to the future, to see where our dreams might be leading us, to how they might be pointing the way forward.

You have wonderful dreams, and they are powerful guides. Don't be frightened of them. In the East the gods even in their most terrifying forms always have one hand held up in a gesture that says "Don't be afraid!" The guardian statues at the temple gates are often terrible looking and say "Stop! You enter here at your peril." But the other hand always beckons you and says "Don't get scared, come on in anyway." Our dreams are the same, they be terrifying but they ask us to accept them anyway and let them point the way.

Jung taught that our dreams are a natural side effect of our psyche struggling to go forward, to individuate; like a pot of boiling water naturally gives steam, so our "boiling" psyche gives us dreams.

I would also add, to please be very cautious indeed about uncritically accepting the idea that you have repressed memories, especially if that idea originated with someone other than yourself. It is of course possible you have repressed memories but they are, in my opinion, very rare. If memories are repressed there is usually a good reason. Trust your self and your unconscious. If those memories are there they will be shown to you when the time is right.

Take care.

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 70, Aotearoa/New Zealand

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Thanks for answering, so what would be your interpretation of this dream?

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 49

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Margit,
Swimming in a large body of water, especially if is black would represent a need/desire explore unconscious aspects in your life. You probably have been comfortable with your waking life, on the outside, but some new aspect has interpreted that peaceful tranquility. Enters your new partner.

Most often the inclusion of a young child would be focusing on early life experiences of the dreamer. Because the child is a boy the dream could be addressing an early life experience {possibly when you were six or seven} having to do with a male {possibly a boy, or perhaps an older male}. That experience was so strong it has remained within your deep unconscious {profound big black lake}. So much so it could be a governing force in your adult life, an unconscious influence that partially if not more so governs your waking life in some aspects.

The desperate need to look for that child {repressed early life experience} is now surfacing to conscious recognition. This is usual when one reaches mid-life and is part of the mid-life adjustment. The psyche naturally begins to seek, and remedy those out-of-balance parts of your life. If there are traumatic or unresolved emotional conflicts {as it seems to be in this dream} then the psyche will bring those emotions back to life either in your dreams or through other mechanisms such as conscious recollection. The unspeakable terror may not be so drastic as it sounds but a 'terror' because of a realization in your present life that is controlling and you have no control over. "something without form and name induced it and it has been" would be related to childhood experiences and may be addressing the 'induced' actions you display in your adult life.

Jerry

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 60 Murfreesboro, Tn

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