Thread: Dream I've been having since I was 9...

If you have read "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" then it is probably just carry over from that.

It could also just mean you think amazing things happen in other places, as if far off shores hold adventure, and simply by being somewhere it ruins the fantasy because it is no longer an unknown horizon/

One of the challenges with dream interpretation is that the two parties need to have more or less a common understanding of what dreams are, and also how our psyche works. My own view is very influenced by Jung and one central idea of his psychology is the distinction between the ego and the self, where the ego is "The central complex in the field of consciousness", the "I", and the self is "The archetype of wholeness and the regulating center of the psyche; a transpersonal power that transcends the ego." (The quotes are from Daryl Sharps Jung Lexicon, which is free as an ebook from Inner City Books.) Typical symbols of the self are fountain, castle, wise old man, but also lion and island. That does not mean that every time such a image appears in a dream one can draw the conclusion that that is the self, such labeling works rather as a smoke screen than to an understanding of the dream, just as labeling people around us hinders our understanding of them.

But that said, in this instance I believe that the lion on the island is a symbol of the self, the center of your personality. This dream is displaying an inner dynamic which go deeper than your everyday life. The reasons for that conclusion is that it is repeating itself through childhood, adolescence, into adulthood, and there is nothing in the dream that shows you anything about your everyday life. It is what is sometimes called an archetypal dream, which images from the parts of our psyche which comes from our inner life, parts of our personality which is not a reflection of our experiences, but of innate ideas and functions, characterized by universal symbols, like ocean, lion, and island.

The self is pictured as a lion on an island, because the lion is the king among animals (the self being the "king" of archetypes, a king is a symbol for the regulating forces within us, and since it is something we cannot speak with at this point, or understand, it is depicted as an animal, and not a human), and the island is a pleasant place in the ocean, where the ocean is a universal symbol of the unconscious as such. So it is a good image for that.

On the other hand, there is the ego, which is symbolized as the ego in the dream. The ego in the dream is standing on a map. That is a symbol for the condition that the ego belongs to world, the physical world of human beings, with distinctions like boundaries and countries. So the ego stands in the physical world of men, and gaze at the self out there in the ocean.

Humans seem to have a longing for the self, for self realization, sort of self integration, which is depicted in this dream as the dreamers wish to be where the lion is. So that is an inner dynamic: The strife for the self. Dreams are most often a depiction of an inner dynamic. This particular dynamic goes on deep inside of you, which has little to do with everyday life, as noted above.

But the self is not within reach for the ego, one cannot just jump into it. Jung called this process "individuation", which goes on the whole life, and is depicted in dreams, myths, legends, tales, as a struggle, an adventure, a journey, often through dark places, big sacrifices, and so on, which ultimately leads to some treasure. So to reach the goal, so to speak, one has to take the long, often painful way.

So there's a longing for the self (wholeness, self realization, whatever one wants to call it, the "philosopher's stone", the alchemists said), but the ego and the self are as anti-poles - if the ego "magically" jumps to the island, the lion jumps to the shore, and vice versa. So that's a dynamic going on.

However, if you work patiently with yourself, allow time to cook the contents of your inner life while keep doing in the outer world what men are supposed to do (and not turn away from it), the dream of the lion may one day a couple of decades in the future change.

I think Wakingyan's response is excellent, but here are a couple of additional comments from my perspective.

Although the ego can't "jump into" the self, it can experience a translation or metaphor of what experience is like for the self. It fails to capture the full essence of self, but it does express a little bit of it. If you do that, you seem to be in the place of the self, looking back at the ego, which is also the self. So to me the switching back and forth in the dream represents that shifting of identity. In other words, the dream doesn't just reflected a failure of ego to know itself as the self, there's success there too, in the movement of identity, and you can expand that by thinking about how it feels when you move between perspectives.

Many years ago I had a possibly similar experience with an island, but as is often the case for me, the image was in waking life rather than a dream. I was standing on the bank of a river. It was hot, and behind me was the blackened earth of a burnt field. In the river was a green island. Under the water there was a gravel bar leading out towards the island, so it looks like it might be possible to wade there. But the current is swift, and becomes deep out beyond where a person can see through the cloudy water. Afterwards I thought about wanting to get to that island and not being able to, and cried from the pit of my stomach, more like convulsions than crying. Eventually I made myself stop but didn't feel better. By about ten years after that, perhaps as a result of self-exploration, I feel like I am in both places simultaneously, both on the bank and on the island. I've also had experiences like being able to stand in the current. In my version of the metaphor, the water is like desire, or fate, and the current is like internally holding an experience of identity that conflicts with where other parts of me must go. So for instance if someone is different than me, and must take a different direction in life, and I want too much to be their friend, I identify with them internally and feel that struggle. Its not only a matter of my internal reaction to external events, there is an internal aspect of it too. Some Buddhists talk self-identification with your own thoughts and desires, I'm talking about self-identification with other people's thoughts and desires, which get mixed in your heart and seem to be your own. They are sort of your own also, but what makes them "not yours" is that they're incompatible with other aspects of who you must be. I think everyone has this kind of problem, even if they don't experience it the way I have described it.

Quite simply, like your dream is, where you stand might be your thought of the bright colorful world, and your place in it.
A map is how you get somewhere - get to the world.
You ponder maybe why you do not have a place to stand, but a map to get there instead.
So you see yourself as a tiny separated island, which is human nature really, and you want the courage or power you need to join the world
This is the story of life, that continues on and on.
It started at 9, maybe when you first became aware of individuality.
So you keep dreaming it probably at times you ponder on your place, or perhaps when you feel isolated too.

But you can't seem to get that courage, when you remain separated, or isolated.
So when you go back to the threshold of the great expanse of life the world is, it eludes you.
Only when you find your place or properly integrate yourself, would you find your courage or power.