The Psychology of Dreams<>On Line Since 2012

Jungian/Psychology Based [ GO ]

www.powerofdreams.net

Dream Forum
[Since 2005]
Myths-Dreams-Symbols    www.mydrsy.com    Since 1998
The Dream is to The Psyche

As the Immune System is to the body

Dream Analysis/Interpretation by Dream Analyst Gerald Gifford
Read: Methodology I Use in Analyzing Dreams,,,,,Based on Jungian Psychology
5000+ Dreams
    /a>
Interpreted
Please Support My
Rescue Kitty Fund

Click the Kitty

FREE INTERPRETATIONS: Please Provide Age/Gender For Proper Analysis.....Follow-up Response to Analysis Requested
By submitting your dream you have read & agree to our Disclaimer/Privacy Policy

The Dream Forum is Closed
Private Interpretations Available-E-Mail: mythsdreams@hotmail.com
Power of Dreams/MDS Dream Forum
Start a New Topic 
Author
Comment
Annoying sisters

In my dream, I was an adult, living in the home that I lived in until I was 11. My younger sister (who I am very close to) had been away somewhere and had come to stay with me. I was getting very frustrated with her for going through all my things and I remember being particularly annoyed that she ate a whole bag of apples. We were then standing in the dining room of the second house that I lived in as a child, arguing about the apples, when a yellow and black centipede crawled out from behind a cabinet. She walked straight up to the centipede, and I yelled at her to stay away from it because it was poisonous. She touched it anyway and it bit her finger. I told her that she could die. Then a cat (my current boyfriend's parents cat) started chasing the centipede. I was really worried that the cat would also be bitten by the centipede. The centipede then ran behind the couch, followed by the cat, and when it emerged from the other side had turned into a rabbit, and the cat, even more enthusiastically, chased it out of the room.
This dream has me absolutely stumped! Any ideas?

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 27, Melbourne, Australia

Have You Posted Before? Date of Last Post {Use Search and Your Post Name to Help Find Last Post} Female

Re: Annoying sisters

Sheri,
Some times I use different approaches to interpreting dreams. Very often I try to give direct answers to the dream symbols {addressing the universal aspects and possibly some personal also}. Then there are those times I am better off presenting a raw interpretation and letting the dreamer find the associations in their life. For your dream I will give the raw info and let you determine where they fit.
Here is what I se from your dream.

Mature self having to relive the past. Some younger experinces are coming back to you. You are going through your past experiences and find annoying things. This is eating away at your ability to grow. Another aspect is focused on past experiences, having to do with your growth. It has to do with unconscious contents that has many legs and fragments {it has many aspects that affect your emotional life}. These are poisonous experiences. You are acknowledging these past experiences and you feel their bite. The feminine aspect needs to understand these experiences. You have hidden these aspects away and when you look at the changes you have gone through there is indecision as how to address them. You want to get rid of them.

The dream may have to do with past experinecs during childhood. Is there any unresolved past experiences that you are dealing with? Let me know your thoughts and perhaps we can gain more insights to the dream message.

Gerard

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 55 Murfreesboro, Tn.

Have You Posted Before? Date of Last Post {Use Search and Your Post Name to Help Find Last Post} Male

Re: Annoying sisters

Thanks so much for your interpretation. It has given me a lot to think about. You are right in that there have been a few isolated incidents in my youth that have been "poisonous" and continue to influence me significantly. I am a psychologist, and have recently started working with a child who had a similar experience to me. This has forced me to do a lot of thinking about my own experience in order to interpret the counter-transference in the therapy.

However, I wonder whether the dream could also refer to another important aspect of my life. One of the issues that has been at the forefront of my mind recently is that I tend to end my romantic relationships (including a marriage when I was very young) by beginning a relationship another person. This is something about myself that I am ashamed of and have been trying (usually unsuccessfully) to work on. I was thinking that my sister in the dream could represent the greedy, thoughtless, and impulsive part of myself that I have been trying to suppress. The reason I say this is that the same night that I had the above dream, I also had a second dream. This time, I was in a car with 4 other people from my work. We drove to a shopping centre where myself and a (single) senior male colleague separated ourselves from the rest of the group. The weird thing was that although I knew the person with me was my colleague, his appearance was that of my ex-husband. The colleague, who is very defensive (and somewhat narcissistic) and who I usually feel very inferior and anxious around, was being completely jovial and non-guarded in the dream. I felt as though I was now very close with this person, and this made me very happy. I'm not sure if the two dreams are linked in any way. Regardless, your interpretation of my first dream makes absolute sense in terms of my current situation. Thanks again. If you have any further thoughts they would be much appreciated.

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 27, Melbourne, Australia

Have You Posted Before? Date of Last Post {Use Search and Your Post Name to Help Find Last Post} Female

Re: Re: Annoying sisters

Sheri,
Thanks for your response. Every dream and interpretation provides new insights to how dreams function. Your dream and response gives cause to look deeper into the possibilities of the dream message. There are many regulars at the Dream Forum who are like myself, wanting to learn all we can about dreams and the psyche.

Jung taught us that every dream most always has at least two interpretations. Where your dream seems to be addressing some childhood experience, it could be interlocked with adult experiences also. The first sentence reads, "I was an adult, living in the home that I lived in until I was 11". Any shame you felt from your childhood experiences could relate to the shame you feel over your failed marriage and relationships. The influence from childhood could have some bearing on the shame, or experience, you have in adulthood. Perhaps if you analyze the experiences from childhood you will discover connections to why you act in the manner you do when ending relationships.
My childhood greatly influenced many of my adult actions and did so until I discovered Jung {via Joseph Campbell} and began to confront my shadow. I am a firm believer that childhood often dicates our actions, often unconscious, as adults. When I analyzed my childhood and then my adult life I could see the reasons why I could not stay in a relationship. Although I can not fully blame my childhood for my failures in adulthood, I can see the influences that were imprinted on my psyche that were stimulus for those failures. A lot of it had to do with father/son relationship, son like father. And of course the biological/psyche need for love and acceptance that I never received from my father.

As for your sister being in your dream. It is accepted in most cases that siblings in a dream can represent the relationship between the dreamer and the sibling and also represent aspects of the sibling that the dreamer either rejects or incorporates as a part of their psyche. So your thinking about yourt sister has great merit.

As for your dream from your follow-up post:

Cars most always symbolize the dreamer, especially the dreamer’s direction in life. 4 in Jung’s philosophy is the number for wholeness {see A Scientific Basis for 4 as a Number for Wholeness}. Work could allude to your actual life’s experience. Perhaps your wholeness has to do with gratification you receive from what you do {you are following your bliss}.

The shopping center could represent the central aspect of what psychis disturbance the dream is trying to address. You and some masculine influence has separated themselves from the other aspects of your psyche. This could be that influence I spoke of from childhood. A colleague is an association with some aspect within your psyche. You may associate all men with your ex-husband, those experiences from the relationship and also an association from childhood that influence your actions when it comes to relationships. {his appearance was that of my ex-husband}.

The colleague, an aspect of your psyche to do with the masculine, is defensive. Perhaps the inferior feelings have to do with childhood experiences and are projected on men in general in adulthood. Perhaps you feel a need to be on-guard when it comes to men {because of childhood experiences?}. The person you feel close to {here it becomes a masculine aspect of your psyche- one that you wish for, an admiration, but in your waking life may be afraid to let your guard down} is that injured part of you that has been healed. Before this inner masculine can be happy you have a need to confront those past influences that have to do with men {in childhood and adulthood}, the negative aspects.

Does this fit with your waking life? Dream symbols are clues to the personal and collective {see archetypal} experieces of the psyche. The collective can often be understood by an experienced Jungian interpreter but the personal often can only be understood by the dreamer. With enough personal information about the dreamer it becomes reasonable to assume that the personal aspects of the dream can be understood also.

The reason we need couches.

Since you are a psychologist I would be interested in knowing your experience with Jung. Even though I have always had a real interest in psychology {if I had the proper childhood I would most likely hve been a psychologist} I have no formal training in psychology, other than that of my 13 years of self training in Jung. Freud always needs consideration when interpreting dreams, especially the sexual aspects, but I have found Jung to be far ahead of Freud. If you will take time to read some of my pages at Myths-Dreams-Symbols you may discover new tools to use.
Gerard

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 55 Murfreesboro, Tn.

Have You Posted Before? Date of Last Post {Use Search and Your Post Name to Help Find Last Post} Male

Re: Annoying sisters

Hi Gerard,

Thanks for your time and thoughts. I think you are abbsolutely right that my childhood experience and my adult tendency to cheat are inextricably linked (both in dreams and in waking life). The earlier experience has obviously influenced my 'relationship templates' in some way, although I often wonder why my strong relationships with my parents hasn't tempered this.

As for your interpretation of my second dream, you're right that I am fulfilled by what I am doing in terms of work, although perhaps not so much in terms of overall life path. I liked your interpretation that the positive interaction in the dream with the usually defensive colleague referred to an injured part of myself that had been healed. Although I do not usually feel overly inferior or on-guard with men, in waking life, this is one colleague who makes me feel nervous to the point that I sometimes find it difficult to have a cohesive conversation with him. . So I am interested to see what he represents in my dreams.

I had another dream last night in which there was an amalgamation of my ex-husband and colleague. I feel like you have given me a lot to work with already, so feel free to ignore this one if you are busy:
I am standing outside a church (in my home-town) with my colleague who has the appearance of my ex-husband. It is a warm summers day, with a light breeze, and I am feeling calm and content. There are two big, thick, heavy, wooden doors with wrought iron hinges that create the entrance to the church. We struggle slightly to push the doors open. Once inside, there are a row of changing rooms, with red velvet curtains, along the right hand side of the foyer. In each of the changing rooms there is a red robe and strange-looking hat (kind of like the ones you wear when you graduate with your PhD). My colleague enters the first changing room and tries on the hat. We both laugh. We then walk out of the foyer into a big hall (which kind of reminds me of the hall at my old high school). There is a performance happening and although I want to sit with my colleague, he sits in a single seat amongst other people from work. I a forced to sit with my high school friends. (I don't really remember what the production was - it was very amateur and I remember wondering why the actors were wearing everyday clothes rather than costumes). Then the scene changes and my colleague and I are standing outside the church which is now located in a very isolated spot, surrounded by acres of lush green native forest and rolling hills. It is dusk, the mood is very sombre and I notice that the church is made out of huge grey rocks. I have a sense that my family home is on the hill above the church. My colleague kisses me passionately, and although it is very uncomfortable to begin, it very quickly becomes like second nature. ???

Thought it was quite interesting that I had a dream about the ex-husband/colleague two nights in a row, and still don't feel really clear about what it means.

Thanks for your interest in my psychology background. Unfortunately we didn't learn anything about Jung in my course, which was very CBT focused. However, I have stared educating myself in terms of the psychoanalytic side of things, so hopefully soon I will be able to make some valuable contributions to the forum. I think I might go and buy a book on Jung this weekend. Any suggestions for a good introductory text?

Sheri

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 27, Melbourne, Australia

Have You Posted Before? Date of Last Post {Use Search and Your Post Name to Help Find Last Post} Female

Re: Re: Annoying sisters

Sheri,
The home-town church could be your inner sanctum, that which represents your true inner self. The colleague is probably an aspect of yourself, a masculine aspect. This aspect looks very much like your ex-husband {what aspects about him do you identify with or imitate?}. This trait doesn't seem to be worrisome {feeling calm and content}. There are barriers to accessing this inner self. It requires this masculine identity to help open these doors.

Once you have entered this sacred place you realize there are changes occuring. The rooms are aspects of your psyche. Red is the dominant color {blood, life force, passion, sexual energy, anger, aggression, etc.???}. Robes cover up. The hat you describe is normally black. Hats often represent secrets {covering the head}.
other personal associations with the hat may prove valuable
Perhaps the hat doesn't fit your masculine self.

Halls and tunnels are often symbolic of connections between consious and the unconsciuous. Is the preformance really an act? {dreams are performances of you on stage}. Your masculine self distances itself from other aspects of your inner sanctum to be with those of the social calling? You are forced to sit with your old self.

Since the dream play demonstrates your true condition, costumes are not needed.

Your inner sanctum has become isolated but is accessible by viewing your surroundings {true desires and aspirations?}. Those things that are uncomfortable in your life have become second nature. But it has placed your true self above the reality of where you are and want to be.

I think you see where the dream is going. You stated in your post that although you thoroughly enjoy your work, your private life is not as gratifying. This dream seems to be confronting this aspect of your life. Perhaps the masculine aspect that your ex represents are qualities that he possessed that will help you gain entry into that church within, that true self. Even though as a person he was not a positive example, did he possess strong qualities of getting things done???. If so this would make him a colleague and not an adversary.

Let me know your thoughts.



Gerard

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 55 Murfreesboro, Tn.

Have You Posted Before? Date of Last Post {Use Search and Your Post Name to Help Find Last Post} Male


stats from 7-14-10 to the present