Hello everyone! With the end of the semester on the horizon, I’m sure you’re all having stress dreams. I know I am. Today we’ll be talking about and analyzing one of those stress dreams.
Onto the dream!
Bog Body
[My dream was actually two dreams, straddling settings and switching between both. One dream took place above water and the other dream took place below water.]
When I am above water, I find myself in an abandoned preschool, fighting monsters I can’t see but can hear and feel. It is swampy, with my feet sticking in grey, muddy water. I ease through the school and out into the street where the water gets deeper. There, I find a dead body next to a silver truck. I nudge the body with my arm. I think it’s my mom. I’m pulled underwater.
Underwater, I am somewhere else. It is quiet and dark. The water is clear like glass. I hear water dripping, so I slowly turn to the side and see the outline of a skull. Panicked, I look forward again. I hear distant growls. I feel something sinister behind me but I don’t turn around. I keep popping above water to get out of the depths and being thrust into the above-water dream.
The Analysis
This dream, haunting and quite soggy, evokes fear, panic, paralysis, and disorientation. Exploring themes of nurturance and the conscious and unconscious, the dream is a deep dive into my own mind.
The settings of the intertwined dreams (underwater and above water but swampy) signify an attempt to balance the unconscious (underwater) with the conscious (above water). The swampiness of the conscious-associated setting indicates that the unconscious is filtering into the conscious, leaking out and spilling over. In the conscious world, I find a preschool, where there are monsters. These are the same monsters that were in my unconscious, underwater. They feel the same, sound the same. As I wade from the preschool into the street I find my mother’s dead body in the deeper water, which signifies that this discovery takes place closer to the unconscious.
This dream plays with levels of consciousness. Underwater, I am unconscious. Above water, I am in the conscious zone, but I range from being fully conscious to slipping out of consciousness into the secrets that are harbored in the unconscious, like the body of my mother.
My mother’s body symbolizes a loss of feelings of support and nurturance, something I know just barely consciously. The fact that the body is not certainly my mother’s body but rather a body that I think might be my mother’s body shows that the care and nurturance she represents can be generalized to other figures in my life. Her death and decomposition is the erosion of those feelings of care and love in my own life.
The preschool is another potent symbol in this dream. Monsters lurk in the preschool, haunting it. The preschool is not the preschool I went to, but it does feel familiar. Here, a motif of an abandoned childhood and abandoned childhood dreams arises. This corresponds with the symbol of the dead body that represents a lack of care and nurturance, because when one grows up, they generally receive less care and nurturance than they do when they are a baby.
In summation, this nightmare calls upon me to unify the unconscious and the conscious mind and find love and nurturance, as well as to revisit childhood dreams. Stay loose and dream lucid!