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.
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