Thread: Is my dream answering my problem?

Personally, I do not think dreams are prescriptive - they do not tell the waking mind what to do, your waking mind needs to make up its mind on its own with your full conscious thought. What a dream can show one is what is currently on one's subconscious mind (that you are considering this as an option). However, then it is up to you to analyze this dream while awake, think about it whether your awake and fully conscious self thinks that this is the right decision. During dreams often we do not have full access to all our inhibitions, moral value, and all rational reasons, and thus a dream may not show a major decision like this accurately taking everything into consideration that needs to be considered. However, dreams do at times bring to our conscious attention our subconscious thoughts. If your waking mind analyzes this dream and thinks that this is the right approach for you to take in waking life, then that is your choice. However, if your waking life is undecided on what to do or wishes to make the opposite choice from the dream, remember that the dream shows one possible way of thinking about these issues, but you yourself in waking life need to believe that the waking decision you take is the right one, and noone else can take that decision in your stead, and that includes your subconscious. Also sometimes dreams show us the opposite of what we really want to shock us, and your waking reaction might show you if that is the case.

if it's recurring then it is trying to tell you something

This is of course a very painful time in your life which needs great care in order to navigate through it in the best way possible in the circumstances.

While dreams can be very helpful in filling in various aspects about which the dreamer is unaware in any given situation, it’s safe to say that relying on only one dream in an important, potentially life-altering set of conditions isn’t the best way to go.

So what a professional analyst would never do applies even more to a person such as yourself who understandably has probably never studied anything related to dream analysis.

A medical analogy may also be helpful such as where a person who is feeling a minor symptom might try looking it up in a book of symptoms published by the American Medical Association, or she or he could go online to a professionally-run site such as the Mayo Clinic.

After reviewing the information, some self-help might be appropriate if the symptom appears to still be a minor one.

But if a given medical symptom is very painful, professional help is of course best right at the outset.

Similarly, in your current difficult situation, it looks like a professional marriage counsellor might be one option if you haven’t already considered this approach although it's not always easy to find someone who is compatible and effective.

In any case, just to offer a couple of ideas related to your dream, it’s usually very difficult, to say the least, to interpret a dream very accurately without knowing anything about the dreamer and in this case, about your husband as well.

Also, although it goes against how we all naturally react to the image of someone we know in a dream, it can’t automatically be assumed that the image of your husband in your dream mostly represents the outer man.

It might, but it might not. Or it could symbolize an amalgam between the outer man and an “inner man” who symbolizes your so called “masculine” traits as related to such attributes as being focussed, assertive, and using “mind” along with critical thinking to find out what’s really individually best for you and then going after it.

So we’ve only looked at a single aspect of the dream, the image of your husband, and various questions have been raised already, showing how hard it can be to find out what a dream really means.

But tentatively, one interpretation could indeed be that deep down, your outer husband realizes, or could come to realize, that you have to go your own way and find a man more suitable to your overall personality.

On the other hand, a valuable inner part of you could be seen as solidly encouraging you to “sift and sort” your thoughts in a new way (as symbolized by the other man) that’s not been exercised as much in the past and which you should explore more fully as you’ve been forced into doing by the unhappy current state of your marriage.

Only time and much more work on this heart-breaking situation could clarify whether an outer divorce is the actual way to go, or whether your outer husband perhaps would have to allow into the marriage more fully, as it were, your own individual views and scrappy independence if by chance you have tended to look to him unconsciously to mostly run things in his own way.

One example of a couple comes to mind which may be helpful. Jane and Joseph Wheelwright, who later became analysts, were married either in the ‘20’s or early ‘30’s. In any case, their marriage soon foundered because they just couldn’t get along.

After working together with a therapist who gradually led them to realize that they were essentially different psychological types, they were able to adapt themselves to this reality and remained very productively married until Jo died in 1999 and Jane died in 2004.

So maybe as a helpful primer which can help you and your husband explore what effect, if any, your different ways of orientating yourselves to reality might be, you may like to read the short but very valuable book by analyst Daryl Sharp called “Personality Types”. You can download this particular book for free from the publisher at innercitybooks.net or buy a used copy from a site like Amazon for example.

I hope that these ideas can be helpful at this difficult point in your life.

I agree with the other responses, you can't look to the dream to tell you what to do. Its just information about how you feel about something.

When you say "we realize our lack of friendship", this implies you can talk to your husband about your relationship? Most men that I know hate talking about their relationships. If you can talk that way, I think that's quite a lot to work with to start building a friendship. And even if you don't have that kind of communication, the dream just says how a part of you feels about where you are now. Maybe you can start off again at the beginning with your husband, or maybe its better or even mostly inevitable that you'll separate. But a lot of that is up to you.

Pretty much everyone I've ever talked to who is married has problems and dreams like these. It takes a lot of patience to have a successful relationship with anyone. Things get easier, things get harder, depending on circumstances. I'm in an 'easier' stretch with my wife currently, and neither one of us wants a divorce, which would be a bad thing for both of us. But I still dreamed recently that we were about to divorce. The dream means the thought is there, but it doesn't show the whole picture, just one small part of it.