Hello everyone! It’s been a dreary, colder week. I hope your dreams haven’t reflected that dreariness. This week we’re going to analyze one of my dad’s dreams, which he recounted to me over the phone tonight. I will use paraphrased quotes that my dad said during our conversation. This dream is short and sweet.
Onto the dream!
Junction Dysfunction
“My dream took place in the train station that I use I go to work and come back every morning and evening. I could tell it was my train station, but things were all wrong. Nothing was laid out the way it was supposed to be. It was frustrating because I knew I was in the right spot but everything was screwed up. I had done the right thing but nothing else was where it was supposed to be.”
The Analysis
My dad’s dream elicited in him feelings of frustration, primarily, but also confusion, disorientation, and a sense of being lost. At first glance the dream is simply about a topsy-turvy train station. But upon further examination, we unearth more about the dream…
The setting of a train station is significant. Because it is a train station that my dad goes to every day, there is familiarity embedded in the location. The rearrangement of the familiar location indicates a loss of that familiarity and by extension a loss of comfort. My dad is trying to maintain his routine through this loss of comfort, becoming frustrated with the strangeness and disquieting nature of the changes occurring. He is becoming defamiliarized with something familiar to him, which could apply to many aspects of life. Think of the phenomenon wherein you look at someone you love’s face for too long and their features start to appear strange and foreign to you.
A train station also invokes the idea of transition. Trains stations are liminal spaces; trains come and go and are constantly in flux. This may indicate that my dad is at a transition phase in his life that is causing him to feel a sense of disquiet.
The phrase “I had done the right thing but nothing else was where it was supposed to be” is also worth examining. It is to be distinguished from “I was in the right spot” because “I had done the right thing” has moral implications. It seems that in my dad’s unconscious, he fulfilled Jung’s Hero archetype (by doing the right thing) but still there was not a positive outcome. [Note: Jung’s Hero is an archetype based on achieving one’s goals]. In fact, the world became disorienting and difficult to navigate. This is the root of my dad’s frustration: he is a Hero who cannot right the wrongs in the world. In this situation, the wrongs are tangible, rearranged pieces of a train station.
To synthesize the analysis thus far, my dad is subconsciously falling into the Hero archetype while potentially going through a transition phase or becoming defamiliarized with something familiar to him (or both!). With all of this being the case, we know that my dad is the calm, stable, normal element in the dream. This indicates a healthy self esteem and strong connection with the self. It is the external world that is the problem.
If I were to apply this dream to my dad’s life I would say that it means there is chaos in his life that is upending his surroundings (which includes emotional surroundings) and making them unrecognizable, while he remains a consistent stable figure. My advice to him would be this: although these chaotic changes may be disorienting and frustrating, continue to ground yourself in your hard-won stability. Stay loose and dream lucid!