Dream #14: Prehistoric Pressure

Hi everyone! Unbelievably, we are almost halfway through the semester. Time has been catapulting forward during these past few months. Speaking of time, a friend of mine, Kenzy, shared with me a recurring dream of hers that started in childhood and pertains to the prehistoric era. Get your dream analysis magnifying glasses and pajamas because we’ll be analyzing it today.

Onto the dream!

Prehistoric Pressure

(The following is my own rendition of the brief synopsis Kenzy gave me of her dream.)

A young Kenzy sprints through the Cretaceous trees, which curl their astounding height upward toward a brilliant sun. Kenzy does not have time to admire the beauty. She is out of breath, panicked. Moving beside her are her parents, who pummel the ground with their feet as they, too, run. A frenzied roar permeates the air, choking Kenzy with fear like a vise. She runs faster, somehow, and feels her mom beside her, but her father falls behind. She does not have time to turn around and call out to him before the creature makes itself known.

The tyrannosaurus rex crashes through the trees, bloodthirsty and vicious, and clamps its endless rows of teeth down on Kenzy’s father’s leg. Kenzy, who is still running, does not look behind her, but knows innately that her father is going to be eaten. She hears the snap of jaws and knows that she has no time to grieve. She keeps running.

She and her mother make their way through the forest, massive ferns brushing their ankles, until Kenzy realizes that her mother is not beside her. She hears the tyrannosaurus rex roar and turns around to see her mother snapped up in its violent jaws. Kenzy turns back toward the forest before her and launches herself forward into the greenery, running harder than she ever has.

The tyrannosaurus rex pursues her, snarling and snapping. She feels its hot, sticky breath at her back. Bile rises in her throat. The feeling of the dinosaur’s breath  disorients her enough that she trips on a rock. The tyrannosaurus rex opens its mouth to rip her apart. That is when she wakes up.

The Analysis 

Kenzy’s dream, which was recurring, developed to replace her parents with various other people she cared about. She always ended up in the forest with the tyrannosaurus rex, but the people changed depending on how old she was at the time she had the dream.

To me, this indicates an evolving dream. What I mean by this is that the dream represented the same fear but different relationships at different times in Kenzy’s life. The question is, which fear?

Let’s start with childhood. If during the first occurrence of Kenzy’s dream she sees her parents, and they are placed in a survival scenario, it could indicate a basic primal fear that all children have of losing their parents and having to fend for themselves. The T-rex, then, would represent death by any means (a T-rex is just what a child would think of), and the T-rex eating Kenzy represents Kenzy being unable to fend for herself and not making it because of it.

However, I’m more interested in what this dream represents in future iterations. In adult life, the tyrannosaurus rex is associated with violence, history and therefore time, and  humanity’s smallness. If Kenzy has a version of this dream where she is running away from the T-rex and her three closest friends are picked off one by one, these complex associations with the T-rex figure could mean:

1) that she is afraid of violence or death being enacted on her loved ones and herself

2) that she is fearful of her own past alienating her from her relationships

3) that she anxious about the passage of time and its result, which is death

Or 4) that she is afraid of her insignificance in the face of all that exists in the world.

I think that the most likely interpretation will have some connection to the original iteration, which has to do with death. Therefore, it is probably interpretation 1 or 3.

In sum, Kenzy’s recurring dream about a tyrannosaurus rex chasing and eating Kenzy’s closest people and herself could stem from the common childhood fear of losing caregivers’ support, and later iterations of the dream may mean that she is afraid of she and her loved ones being killed or harmed or that she is afraid of the passage of time leading to death. Stay loose and dream lucid!