An Original Approach To Dream Interpretation
Dan Gollub
Is there an easy, methodical, rational, and productive way to understand dreams?
Consider the following as possibly meeting those criteria.
When you have a complete dream to analyze, a beginning step is to divide it into four parts: the beginning; the early-middle; the late-middle; and the ending. This is a simple process in short dreams. Then assume that the beginning shows what the dreamer loves, the early-middle is desirable, the late-middle is undesirable, and the ending is hated.
A man dreamed this: “I went horseback riding. The horse took me through beautiful countryside. When it was time to go back I chose another path, became lost, and came to some barbed wire that blocked the path. The horse became restless and tried to throw me.”
In the beginning of the dream the dreamer goes horseback riding. He loves doing that. The next part is what’s desired, so it’s desirable to him to ride through beautiful countryside. The third part reveals what’s undesirable: he wouldn’t want to get lost and have the path blocked by barbed wire. In the ending, the horse tries to throw him. He’d hate it if that happened.
Does that love-desire-nondesire-hatred pattern appear in all dreams? The only exceptions I’ve found are those dreams whose plots are disrupted by external influences such as noises.
But don’t some dreams seem to have happy endings?
On a superficial level some dreams appear to do so. For example, a woman dreamed:
“I am in an empty old hotel. I have inherited it from someone famous--maybe Buffalo Bill. I’m standing in the bare room, oak floors, large windows, sunshine, warm breezes. I am in a beautiful white floor-length summer gown. I am in the body of an old school chum I thought was attractive. Enter a man named Henry--another school chum, but someone I was less fond of, except in the dream he’s tall, sensual, appealing. He takes me in his arms and tells me Black Bart has discovered he can make claim to the hotel if I am not married. I am upset at the idea of losing the hotel. So Henry asks me to marry him, and we go to the justice of the peace and all ends well.”
The dream ending shows the dreamer marrying, for financial reasons, a man she hasn’t particularly liked, and it seems on the surface to predict they would live happily ever after. That plot is in the hatred section, though, and the true message is that she would hate such a forced marriage. So if she were in one in real life that inner sentiment undoubtedly would cause it to turn out badly. This message from her unconscious will be important to think about when she’s considering marriage.
A woman told me a dream about driving on mountain roads, and ended her account this way: “And then a rock came down from the mountain and hit my windshield and cracked it, but didn’t break it.”
If that was the end of her dream, it theoretically was showing what she hated. But why would she hate the rock cracking her car’s windshield but not breaking it? Wouldn’t she instead hate her windshield being broken?
It turned out the dreamer had an explanation: “Something like that happened,” she said, “and I drove with a cracked windshield for two weeks. Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer and had the entire windshield replaced. It would have been better if the rock had broken my windshield at the start, rather than just cracking it. That way I wouldn’t have had the aggravation of driving with a cracked windshield for two weeks.”
Some dreams contain emotional behavior such as laughter or crying. Most of that emotionality is opposite to the dreamer’s emotional reality. If a dream figure laughs, for example, it probably is about something which is painful in real life. Similarly, a feeling of happiness within the dream most of the time will be about something in the external world which is distressing. Those superficially-positive feelings about unpleasant or stressful topics surface within the last half of dreams.
A general rule is that a sentiment in a dream will only be genuine if the dream figure displaying the sentiment simultaneously speaks. For whatever reason, this doesn’t seem to happen often. Here is one instance of it. A woman dreamed in a hatred section: “I turned to a bully who had tormented me all through grade school, began crying, and said, ‘They told me to be afraid of you and I believed them.’” The words, the accompanying crying, and the location of that dream content reveal she hated and regretted the unnecessary fear she’d felt as a child towards the adversary, who likely would have been responsive to affection or friendliness.
A woman who was significantly overweight dreamed this in the last half of a dream:
“I recited:
‘I like peanut butter and jelly.
I like peanut butter and jam.
I like peanut butter and mustard.
And I like myself just as I am.’
And then I laughed heartily.”
Her words in the nondesire section depicted her conscious complacency about her incorrect eating habits and, as well, a complacency about being overweight. Those complacencies were undesirable to her inner self.
Her laughter in the dream ending was opposite to the inner pain she felt about eating too much and being overweight. She inwardly would hate that inappropriate merriment. (Technical note: the words and the laughter didn’t occur simultaneously, and so that laughter was opposite to her emotional reality.)
Why do dreams use symbolism? Often, the use of a symbol might be the best way to present an abstract message in the dream’s visual medium. Following is such an instance. A teenage girl dreamed this in a late-middle section. “My stepmother said to me, ‘Here’s your toast,’ and handed me a plate with a few bread crumbs on it.” Dreams typically use images of food or money to deliver a message about love which would be hard to convey non-symbolically. In this example, the inadequate “food” in the nondesire section indicates the dreamer felt she wasn’t getting enough love from her stepmother, and that insufficient love was undesirable to her.
There are many potential complexities to the use of speech and words in dreams. Fortunately, there are also general rules to apply which can provide clarity to the complications. One principal rule is that if the dreamer’s image speaks, the words reveal an orientation acceptable to or characteristic of the conscious self, while words by anyone else often will reflect an aspect of the psyche which is in conflict with the dreamer’s conscious mindset.
A pregnant woman dreamed this in the desire section: “I was back home from the hospital holding my new baby boy. An unidentified man was looking at my baby. I said something about newborn babies being ugly. The man replied, ‘I don’t think he’s ugly.’ I looked down at my infant son and saw that he had a perfectly shaped head, blue or green eyes, and was extremely beautiful.”
Her image’s words indicate she consciously was inclined to think of newborn infants as ugly. Her inner self didn’t want her to think that way and therefore had the male dream figure disagree with her. Note that the plot after that conversation shows she wanted a beautiful baby, so her conscious attitude didn’t eliminate that inner desire.
Was Freud correct in saying that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious?
Yes. The dream pattern messages which can be obtained from dreams will be consistently relevant and valuable to the conduct of everyday life.
Was Freud correct in saying that dreams represent wish fulfillment?
That statement is partly true. Dream material in the first half of a dream may indeed reflect wishes. But the scenarios which appear in the last half of the dream aren’t going to reflect a wish.
What one dreams about won’t necessarily happen, but it if does the dreamer involuntarily will feel an emotion of love, desire, nondesire, or hatred, depending on which dream section that situation appeared in. Those involuntary emotions affect our conscious adaptation.
A woman dreamed this at the beginning of a dream: “There are some refugee children in a run-down, dirty house. I befriend seven or eight of them and take them to my big house. I return to the other house and there are some more children there. They want to sneak into my group.”
Even though this dream segment was a fantasy, it was influencing her to love being motherly toward children who need her help.
A man dreamed at the beginning of a dream of being at a swimming pool with his wife and another couple, and then dreamed this in the early-middle section: “The other three were sunbathing and I was clowning around while jumping off the high diving board. I was doing can openers and cannonballs, trying to soak them. Finally a guard told me to knock it off, so on my next dive I did a perfect swan dive.”
The desire plot displayed the man’s playful urge to soak his wife and friends. That playfulness could become excessive, however, so the dream plot added a desire to be responsive to authority when told to stop those antics. Also, the dreamer’s inner self may have seen that if he only performed the graceless dives his self image would suffer; perhaps for that reason the desire section included a wish to dive gracefully after finishing the belly floppers.
A man who was a beginning fencing student dreamed in the late-middle section of making love with an attractive female fencer he knew. Why was this seemingly-desirable situation in his dream’s nondesire section? It turned out the woman had declined to fence with him because he was only a beginner and wouldn’t be a challenging opponent, and in response his dream was indicating that he wasn’t impressed with her beauty and valued more highly the willingness to help a beginner. Therefore his inner self didn’t consider her a desirable lovemaking partner.
If he had attempted to make love with her after having that dream, he likely would have been impotent. The involuntary emotion of nondesire he would have felt would have interfered with his sexual arousal.
Three more examples follow of how nondesire sections of dreams define scenarios which could result in psychological impotence or frigidity.
A woman dreamed this in her desire and nondesire sections: “My children and I were in a barn that was warm and smelled of hay. We went toward the front entrance and found a room off of it where a man was living. He told use we couldn’t go out that way, and threatened us.”
It is unlikely the woman could become sexually aroused while there was a threat either to her children or to her.
A man dreamed in the nondesire section of threatening to hit a smaller, weaker man who was a rival for a woman. In contrast to the previous example there might not be any danger for the dreamer in that situation, but nevertheless it would be undesirable to his inner self if he were to act in that way. While feeling that inner nondesire he predictably would be impotent in any lovemaking situation.
A woman who’d been experiencing problems dreamed this in her nondesire section: “I saw a snake and at first was afraid it would bite me, but then I thought, ‘Oh, well, if it bit me and I died, then all of my troubles would be over.’” That defeatist attitude is undesirable to her inner self, and if she consciously chose to devalue life in that way involuntary frigidity might be one consequence.
Note that in these four examples of psychologically-caused impotence and frigidity, the separate causes were an undesirable lovemaking partner, an unsafe environment, a flaw in the dreamer’s overt behavior, and a flaw in the dreamer’s thinking. So impotence/frigidity can occur for a variety of psychological reasons, and looking at the nondesire section of dreams can reveal the precise cause and avoid unnecessary guesswork.
The inner hatred shown in dream endings tends to be constructive.
A talented teenager dreamed at the end of his dream that he was living in a dull, ordinary environment. By causing him to hate that outcome his inner self was motivating him to seek gifted companions and stimulating interests.
After dreaming about being on a boat cruise with her family, a woman dreamed this in her dream’s ending: “I seem to remember Larry (my son) standing on a deck somewhere and looking at us but unable to get to where we were, even though he wanted to.” The dreamer reported that her son had been emotionally distant from the rest of the family and also had developed behavioral problems. So his physical separation in the dream was a symbol for his emotional and behavioral separation from the family, and the woman’s hatred of those problems could cause her to try to help her son overcome them.
At a time when I had been lazy about working on a manuscript about dream interpretation, I dreamed this in a dream ending:
A man said to me, “Do you want arthritis?”
“No,” I answered.
“Then start writing,” he said.
There were periods after that dream when what I wrote was of such poor quality that it was as if I hadn’t written anything at all. I had tried to write well, though, and I haven’t gotten arthritis.
If a situation at the end of a dream becomes an ongoing reality, an assumption is that the dreamer will be vulnerable to depression. So the hatred sections of dreams can help with identifying the cause or causes of depression, and a related assumption is that if the dreamer’s conscious behavior brings about the scenario shown in the hatred section the dreamer will be especially vulnerable to depression.
Your personal dream work based on these theories can proceed methodically. When you can recall a dream in its entirety, can you break it up into a beginning, an early-middle, a late-middle, and an ending? The next step is to ask yourself if each section has a separate emotional significance for you. Does the beginning dream content seem to depict a scenario you’d love? Does the early-middle content seem desirable? Does the late-middle depict what would be undesirable? Would you hate what is shown in the ending? But a more relevant question is whether your inner self would be inclined to feel those emotions.
