Dreams are an overwhelmingly visual experience and Freud generally treated dream images as signs. Signs are images that point to something else. Freud believed the unconscious was purposely hiding the meaning of the images from our conscious minds. He believed that dreams contained a secret, hidden key and that once this key was slipped into the lock keeping a dream’s meaning from you, almost everything could be seen to have a connection with sex, death, taboo and incest. Jung, on the other hand, treated dream images as symbols intent on bringing healing to the psyche. Images, when treated as symbols, are images which have meaning in and of themselves. He believed the unconscious was purposely trying to speak to us, in order to bring forth a sense of wholeness and added meaning to our lives. For Jung, our nightly dreams were not trying to hide anything from us but trying to communicate with us.
Many dream analysts today regard the images we ’see’ in dreams as a symbolic reflection of aspects of the dreamer’s life, in particular their attitudes and responses. By taking time to consider what it is that you are ’seeing’ in your dream and the impressions involved, you can ’see’ or become aware of what the dream is getting you to look at regarding yourself or your life. The ’view’ you have in a dream, the environment you see, reflects how you see your life and yourself at the time of the dream. It shows how limited or wide your ’vision’ is. Being looked at in a dream suggests seeing yourself from their point of view or from a point of view that is not your own.
If you have a dream in which you are searching for something, this typically indicates an attempt to find something in waking life; perhaps a past way of life, a person from the past, an answer to a problem or a sense of identity; it may also indicate a feeling of having lost something valuable, such as your youth, energy or motivation.
If you are searching for someone in your dream, you may be conscious of your loneliness and if you are searching for something but do not know what it is, this could represent an unfulfilled need or a spiritual hunger.
If a searchlight appears, this indicates concentration and focused attention. It can also indicate insight into an important matter in your waking life.
Said to be the windows on the soul, the eyes are instruments of unconscious communication as well as vision.
If you found yourself gazing into someone’s eyes in your dream, your unconscious may have been mirroring your sense of seeing eye to eye with someone in your waking life. But if you find you cannot meet someone’s eye in your dream, you may be feeling guilty about something you have said or done.
If the color of someone’s eyes caught your own eye in your dream, pay attention to the symbolism by referring to the chapter on COLORS; if you noticed a squint in your dream, could the message have been that you are looking at things in a cockeyed way? If your eyes were shut or you noticed you were blind in your dream, your unconscious may have been alerting you to your tendency to close or shut your eyes to the truth in waking life. And if you found yourself wearing spectacles or contact lenses in your dream, do you need to focus on something or someone more closely in waking life, or do you wish that others would respect your intelligence more? See also Eye entry in BODY.
Perception of color is an intensely personal experience. We only have to look at our clothes and interior decoration to see how color plays a part in our lives, whether through understatement or overstatement. Color is also a form of communication and mood; for example, red means stop and black is often associated with loss in Western society. Think about how you would describe a color to someone who is blind. What feelings and thoughts arise when you think of red, blue or yellow, for example? If a color particularly stands out in your dream ’view’ (you are wearing, for example, a color you never usually wear) take a look at the relevant entry in COLORS for some clues to its meaning; as with all things in dreams, look for the associations that make sense to you.
See Also: the Do you dream in color? entry in COLORS.
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