Reoccurring Dreams/ Dreaming of Strangers

[Triskele16]

When I was 12 years old I first started having very vivid dreams that involved a person I had no knowledge of knowing in real life. The person was actually a 7 year old girl whose personality and physical appearance were very distinct. Flash forward ten years and these dreams continued occasionally as did the gradual growth of said child who aged just as a normal 7 to eventual 17 year old would. Very recently, I came in to connect with someone who made me completely stop in my tracks by the almost identical physical appearance and personality traits I'd come to associate with this little girl I'd grown up dreaming about. I don't know exactly what to make of it.

[Athanor]

This is, of course, a very unusual happening and I don’t recall anything close to it being described on any dream forums that I’m familiar with over the years, but although it would usually be best to have some additional background information about you in order to attempt an interpretation, a few general ideas can be tried out to help explain what might have happened. For example, the dreams started around the age of 12 which could possibly be linked to the important transition period into puberty and therefore related to your overall development as a person. Around such times of transition, the deep layers of the unconscious mind are active, basically in linking the person as well as possible to crucial factors of his or her unique potential as a person. The unconscious has a timeless instinctive reach which is mostly pooh-poohed in today’s mostly rationalistic society in spite of many genuinely verifiable instances of such “non-rational” happenings. One school of psychology calls such events “synchronistic” or more simply, “meaningful coincidences”. The events that happen are joined by meaning and not by “cause and effect”. This can be a hard idea to grasp, but for example, your dreams over the years of the little girl who grew into a 17 year old did not “cause” your meeting up with the very similar outer person. But the dreams are linked to the outer girl by a strong emotional sense of “meaning”. You instinctively “know” that all this “means something”. You don’t mention if you live in a large or small city for instance, or how you came to meet the girl, but perhaps the girl was in a fairly close area in general to where you lived. If so, then it’s possible that your paths may have distantly crossed over the years. You as the ego would not have noticed her, but various sense impressions would have registered as well as intuitive “recognition’ of, say, her basic nature as a person. This isn’t a kind of “hocus-pocus” idea. As the eminent psychiatrist C.G. Jung writes in “Man and his Symbols”: “But we all see, hear, smell, and taste many things without noticing them at the time, either because our attention is deflected or because the stimulus to our senses is too slight to leave a conscious impression. The unconscious, however, has taken note of them, and such subliminal sense perceptions play a significant part in our everyday lives. Without our realizing it, they influence the way in which we react to both events and people”. Because we have a such a long series of dreams over 10 years followed by an unexpected and baffling meeting apparently with the girl who was “in the dreams”, it’s at least safe to say that the whole situation is an extremely important one which should be looked at very carefully. If you are a male, some thoughts might include the idea that the girl symbolizes the nature of your feeling life in very precise details and maybe this side of you was kind of “growing on its own” through your teen years and beyond without much attention. This growth may have also sort of “lagged behind” in some way (you were 12 around the time of the first dream and the girl in it was 7). In this line of thought, the organizing center of your personality “knew” early on that this would occur, given the reality of your outer and inner circumstances, and so “arranged” as it were a very striking and important “meeting” with this side of yourself in order that a balance could be restored possibly at a strategic moment in your life for your own good. If you are a female, then the little girl would at least symbolize an important part of your overall personality that maybe would get “left behind” too much, or she could even represent your basic nature and potential as a person. In any case, a “meeting” with this important side of you was also “arranged” to help make things run more smoothly as you advanced further into adult life. Of course, without knowing anything about you, these ideas likely won’t fit your circumstances very well if at all. The best way to look into this very striking event would be to write down every spontaneous memory, thought and feeling that comes to mind when focusing on each image and event in your dreams about the girl that you can remember. Then do the same thing while focusing on the outer girl’s image. Hopefully, by sifting through what emerges, a basic clue should appear about the meaning of the event overall. If you’re a male, some people might automatically say you’ve found your one and only soul mate, but with anything related to the unconscious and to coincidences etc., it’s always best to move forward with caution. Anyway, if you’d like to learn more about “meaningful coincidences”, you would probably enjoy analyst Robert Hopcke’s book “There are no Accidents”. Also very good is “The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self” by analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen. I hope that these ideas will be helpful in some way to unravel this intriguing mystery of why the girl in your dreams then appeared so clearly in your outer life.

[JoannaB]

Then there are of course also ideas that some people believe in while others do not which can be found in the Beyond Dreaming section of the forum, including shared dreaming and precognitive dreams. If you are a person who believes in such ideas, your interpretation of this would be very different than if you believe that such beyond dreaming phenomena are impossible.