Thread: A very violent and graphic dream

Although in order to provide an accurate interpretation it would usually be best to have some general background information about you as well as about recent events just before this graphic dream, a few general ideas can be tried out to see if they might fit your personal situation in some way.

For example, the central character in the dream is the brown bear since it’s he or she that creates the havoc.

Since dreams use a language of metaphor and analogy, all of the impressions that you’ve consciously and unconsciously received during your lifetime regarding the image of a bear are being used by your dream to express part of its central meaning in a symbolic way.

You can try focusing on the images of the bear in your dream and write down every spontaneous memory, thought and emotion that comes to mind. Sifting through these can provide some basic clues about the meaning of a bear for you as an individual.

Also useful are the collective beliefs and impressions made by bears on people as a whole over thousands of years.

Briefly summarized, these include the idea of many cultures that the bear is the quintessential “wild beast”.

Also, its awesome strength and its supremacy in wilderness areas have often made the bear an incarnation of nature itself.

And from the earliest times, bears have formed a central part of religious practices for many peoples.

Your dream expresses an aspect of each of these examples in some way, suggesting the dream’s high importance for yourself but perhaps also hinting of its importance in a way to many others since what it’s describing might apply to our society as a whole.

For example, the church as a symbol of central meaning and belief is shown as being destroyed in the end which in outer terms has occurred in many areas, demonstrated by steeply declining attendance.

Perhaps rather than a recent, significant incident which has caused the dream to appear, it may be that you’re currently around or beyond middle age so that the issue of “meaning” has spontaneously arisen as it usually does around this time of life, and this is being described as a whole by your dream.

In contrast with the idea of the bear as being close to and even an incarnation of nature, as well as being a symbol of the “sacred“, your dream begins with and continues to show a reliance on “technology”.

For instance, you’re reviewing news stories on your computer where the account about the mauled boy appears. This changes to a television news piece on the story, followed by various amateur and graphic video images.

It’s possible that the gradual progression from a state-of-the-art means of the “ingestion of news”, i.e. of “reality”, to a less refined one could signal a need to at least reduce to some reasonable degree a “perfect”, “technical”, “mechanical” and “intellectual” approach overall to the issue being dealt with in the dream in order to be less “detached“ from it.

Doing so takes you to scenes in the country and “close to nature” but to a nature which is dangerous and destructive (i.e. the rampaging bear).

In this way of looking at your dream, the “angry” bear potentially represents that your own instinctive side is deeply upset about some kind of “abandonment of nature” within yourself, perhaps because you may rely too much on intellectual formulations etc. to the detriment of felt emotions (e.g. you don’t react much to the gruesome events in the dream or upon waking; you‘re at one point given a view of the dead bear from very high up, that is, not from a “grounded“ view but from an “intellectual“ and “detached“ one).

The increasingly poor image quality could also suggest a lessening of clear consciousness about the issue overall.

Any such situation is, of course, very common in modern society, cut off as we generally are from nature both outside and within ourselves. And as you noted, we’ve become largely desensitized to “gruesome events” as a result of various technologies that constantly bombard us with them.

Indirectly, one can perhaps see this in the proliferation of, for instance, the scientific exploration of the “brain” with little equal exploration of the “mind” and “heart“ except from a kind of mechanical view.

This phenomenon seems to represent an intensification over many decades of the 19th century “scientific materialism” view which tended to reduce everything to strictly mechanical, biochemical and related causes, leaving the area of meaning and value behind and replaced by “knowledge“.

In addition, Jungian analyst Marion Woodman has termed modern society as being “compulsively extroverted” and as long ago as the late 1950’s, Carl Jung’s colleague, Marie-Louise von Franz, spoke of the “restlessness” of society as a whole symbolizing a neurotic state.

That is, one consisting of society being “split off” as a whole from “nature” and the instincts too much.

These ideas might seem to be a digression from looking at your dream but in general, they are probably relevant in some way to its meaning.

For example, the male toddler could perhaps symbolize your own potential self whose growth has been slowed by the dominant ethos present in society which worships science, just as organized religion held sway in the past.

It’s a cliché but the “Golden Mean” of balance has an important place in human affairs. Too much “science” or too much “religion” can both have dire consequences as is evident in many areas.

Just like nature, a bear has two sides. It can be clever, prudent, “wise” and protective. On the other hand, if crossed, it can become extremely violent and destructive, going “berserk” (etymologically derived from Old Norse “berserk” = "wild warrior," probably from the stem of “bjorn “ = "bear" + serkr "shirt")

In practical terms, if a person “angers” his or her instincts too much, unfortunately an “attack” can potentially take the form of any one of an endless range among upsetting physical and/or psychological symptoms.

Retaliating against an angry “bear” doesn’t solve the problem.

As a fairly frequent example, brown bears who roam into populated areas are often killed by police. Little or no thought is given as to why the bear’s natural habitat was not adequate to supports its needs.

Usually, it’s the thoughtless encroachment by us onto its territories in the pursuit of “human progress” that is the underlying cause.

Your dream seems to speak to this issue. That is, the humans in it are understandably outraged and grieved by the actions of the bear, but don’t question why it acted in the way it did.

Instead, the “bear” is brutally killed and mutilated, just like it did to the unfortunate toddler.

The end result of killing this “sacred animal”, that is, a living connection with the instincts, appears to be the destruction of meaning itself (the church is destroyed).

So all in all, this dream does appear to have a deep and important meaning for you at this time.

But as mentioned, without knowing anything about you, this interpretation might not fit your personal circumstances very closely. However, I hope these ideas can be helpful in some way.

Please feel free to ask any questions or to make any comments you may want to about this particular way of looking at your dream.