Thread: Disturbing dream. Dont know what to make of it

It might not mean anything, and just have been a random dream generated by your subconsious. That can happen.

Unless someone on here has a PhD in analytical psychology, I don't think you will get a full overview of even the possible interpretations for a dream like that. However, the idea that dreams are all wish fulfilment is very much contested and was even qualified by Freud.

People may have fears that they are not going to be good parents and envision themselves crashing a car with their family in it. Others may have sexual identity issues and find themselves having dreams of having sex with hermaphrodites. The mind represents anxieties, fears, and hopes in many different, often indirect ways. Unless 100% of your dreams are literal manifestations of your explicit desires, don't take this one literally. If you are that passionate about being a parent, there is more than enough emotional material there for you to have an anxiety dream or nightmare related to it.

One possible way of how this could have happened: In your dream you see your son lying next to you, and he just happens to have just his underwear on. Your dream self notices this, and thinks to yourself, "Oh my goodness, why does he not have his underwear on, and is lying in bed next to me! Does this mean I had sex with him? That must be it. I can't believe it." Only your mind kind of did a shorthand memory there, and just leaped from the lying next to you in just his underwear mental leap to ergo you must have had sex with him. In dreams a lot of times one thought leads to another through random association of thoughts which ultimately do not always add up right.

Btw, as a mother of two small boys I can assure you: once you have kids, sooner or later it will happen that one or both of them will be in just their underwear lying next to you in your bed. And this will not be because you have molested them or would ever think of actually molesting them. Little kids like lying in their parents bed, and they do take up more space than the adults do somehow, but they are so cute and cuddly you will not think to really mind. And little kids do not necessarily always have all their clothes on even when they are supposed to. But since I have absolutely no inclination of molesting my kids, I do not ever look at my undressed or half dressed kids and think anything other than that I love them, and they need to get dressed, which luckily is now their responsibility, though sometimes we do run out of clean shorts or none of the pants in their drawer happen to suit them on that day because they have zippers or lack zippers, do not have stripes, are not soft enough, or fall off their butts because the size is not quite right. And I have two boys - I hear the getting dressed routine is even harder with girls. Don't worry by the time you are actually ready to have a family, you will be able to cope with that somehow.

Regardless of whether you have latent pedophilic tendencies or not, this dream is not about having sex with a child. It’s a warning that you will reincarnate. The sex represents union and the child represents a future incarnation.

There is something you are either doing or not doing that is nailing you to this world and keeping you coming back for more—which from a spiritual perspective is hell. I believe it has something to do with watching TV. And of course, we’re not really talking about TV. It’s a symbol for something in your life.

I don’t know what it is. But you should think on it some. That’s what this dream is about. If you don’t like the idea of sex with young boys then don’t worry about having a boy as your child. Again, this dream is not about sex, boys, or TV.

Good luck in figuring out the symbol of the TV.

Sincerely,

Ed

Originally Posted by RedNaxela

Unless someone on here has a PhD in analytical psychology, I don't think you will get a full overview of even the possible interpretations for a dream like that.

Sure, he will. That's what this forum is for. It's not even a complex dream.

As you were an adult, you were thinking ahead - perhaps of having a family.
Now here's the test of this theory:
Do you think a daughter would be boring, but a boy - you could really relate to, and be close to?

The TV is your vision or mental program you were watching here.
The symbol of sex is also explained by you being passionate about being a parent, particularly to a boy, and is the best way a dream has to show closeness.
Whether you did or not, it seems you were close to the boy idea. But maybe you didn't because you actually didn't connect fully with the idea, or because it hasn't happened yet.

One of the main reasons for the split between Freud and Jung was how to interpret the incest motif which was common in dreams; while Freud took the motif literally, Jung saw it symbolically, and the elaboration of this in Symbols of Transformation (1912) marked the intellectual split between the two, because the Oedipus/incest motif was the cornerstone in the Freudian school and was not to be tampered with by his disciples.

The reason I'm pointing this out is to let you know, if you didn't already, that the incest motif is universal on the one hand, and that you may be better off if you viewing your dreams symbolically rather than literally, on the other -- I think very few these days are very fundamentalistic about Freud's earliest works, either.

Incest is tabu and of course an incest dream is very disturbing, but my advice obviously is that it mustn't be taken literally, it has nothing to do with your sexuality. In short, the incest motif can be seen as an archetypal image for a holy union, and you know that incest thus is very common in mythology (the Greek is notorious for this, isn't it?), and perhaps you also know that in some cultures, where kings and queens were of the gods (such as the Egyptian), incest was allowed because they were of another kind. That is what happens when people identifies with an archetype, it often results in madness.

I don't know what this dream "means", but it can be an archetypal, symbolical expression for a longing to be one with the inner child, which is a strong symbol for what Jung called individuation, and that is in itself a common image. If these lines of thought are interesting to you, and if you were so inclined, you could pick up "The Psychology of the Transference", an essay in which Jung writes quite extensively about these matters.