Two lions, a wolf, a bird, a boar, and a house

[Kyrie]

I had a peculiar dream last night that I would like to bring before everyone and see if anyone else can make sense of it. First though allow me to give you a background on myself. I am a creative type. I am artistic, a writer, technologically-savy. I am a young adult and male and am soon beginning college. As far as personality goes I am rather shy and quiet unless around a familiar crowd. I have social anxiety and in the past I have battled depression. I have a mother, a step-father, and a younger sister. I have many grandparents and a group of close friends, one of which I have a romantic interest in. I am about to begin to learning how to drive, considering I held off from it a few years and now I have no choice. I am having difficulty finding a job, and I am a highly spiritual person. That is my life situation right now. Here is the odd dream I had last night: The beginning of the dream was rather fuzzy, but I remember night falling. I remember being in the woods and the sky was very clear and filled with stars, and it had a purplish hue. I remember running through the forest, although I remember it being more of a float, as though I were running atop thin air. I was being chased by two lions and a wolf and feared them. I remember feeling that the lions and the wolf seemed to be enemies, but they put aside their differences to chase me. I ran down a long path that had been cut out of the forest, it was made of dirt. They chased me finally into a field where there was a bit of stone ground near the center. Then they seemed to disappear. By this point it was morning. I remember seeing a wild boar standing on the stone and a small bird dropped down from the sky. It was very dark and had a frightening feel to it. It reminded me of a vulture, but it was extremely tiny. It grabbed the boar and lifted it up into the air. The boar was a hundred times the size of the bird and it seemed impossible for such a tiny bird to pick up the boar, but still it happened. The bird dropped the boar from a high height, and it hit the stone. It did this repeatedly (three or four times, if I remember correctly) until the boar died. This happened in sight of a large crowd of people which had suddenly appeared during the killing. My family was amongst the crowd. Everyone was shocked and perplexed by this. Me, I did not feel anything in that moment in the dream. There were no emotions in the dream at that point that I could make out. No remorse or anything. After all of this, I remember being lifted into the sky and delivered to the house I grew up in. There I saw many designs painted on the walls of the inside of the house that reminded me of memories I shared with the friend which I mentioned early, the one whom I have interest in. While inside the house, I ate tons upon tons of random food. That is all that I can remember. Is my subconscious trying to tell me something with this? Or was it simply a random dream?

[Athanor]

Just to start off by saying that basically no dream is random. Most involve the balancing out in some way, large or small, of an attitude, general outlook or habit etc. which the ego is tending to stay with too much and which could potentially result in a one-sided and narrow approach to life overall in a worst-case scenario. Each dream arises from the specific state of affairs in which the dreamer finds himself or herself, so the detailed description of your current circumstances is very valuable in narrowing the focus of a possible interpretation. Also, the sketch of your basic personality is probably vital in determining the main theme of your dream. For example, from what you’ve written, it’s probably safe to assume that you are mostly an inward looking person who feels more comfortable with the inner life than with the outer one. The terms “introvert” and “extrovert” are often used in a largely uninformed way by the media but it’s likely that you fit more in the range of an introvert although no person is strictly one type or the other. “Preference” is the key word and a reasonable balance between the two types should be maintained in any given individual. While you appear to be successful in doing so to some degree by having a small group of close friends beyond your family, it looks like the dream is showing that more work likely has to be done in certain areas of your life. You mentioned that you have social anxiety and have battled depression in the past. This may be partly the result of the fact that the quiet or “introverted” person is not supported or admired by American society in general. In fact, the latter has been described as being “compulsively extroverted”. Also, your artistic temperament plays a part because, in a nutshell, the perfection and beauty of artistic creations clash sharply with the many unpleasant realities of real life itself and this can result in a kind of understandable withdrawal from various challenges. As one example, this idea is probably the basic meaning of John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” although of course many other interpretations have been put forth. In your dream, being chased by the lions and the wolf who have united in a common cause symbolizes that unfortunately, for whatever reasons, your instinctive and earthy side has apparently been left out of the equation too often, resulting in this side of you becoming “angry” and “chasing” you with some unpleasant anxieties and in feeling low too often. The forest and the starry night probably represent that you’re mostly “in the dark” about this natural and instinctual part of you. But any unpleasant symptoms a person experiences often describe symbolically what the underlying problem is and are meant to drive the person to uncover it more consciously. And your dream apparently is attempting to make the cause more conscious for you (e.g. you follow a hewn path, dawn arrives after the frightening night and you come to an open, less oppressive field). The dream emphasizes the importance of what you should look at by placing the stone area and the subsequent action in the center of the field. There, a tiny frightening bird lifts a heavy boar into the air, smashing it to the earth many times until it dies. Very briefly described, this likely means that your intellectual and artistic side (i.e. the bird) has become “much too strong” in everyday life, such that it keeps out and even could make your instinctive side totally unconscious (i.e. “dead”) if its “unnatural” strength in your personality isn’t gradually reduced in some way. The shocked crowd likely represents how you SHOULD be emotionally reacting as opposed to how you feel nothing in the dream since it’s important to stay close to instinctive reactions and gut feelings etc. If not reconnected to and therefore causing you to perhaps remain too “airy” (e.g. lifted up into the sky), the result could be a repetitive and maybe too intellectual re-examination of certain “patterns” in your childhood which you might have found upsetting in some way (i.e. the various designs on the wall which brought back memories of the talk with your friend). Without an emotional component as was probably encouraged by sharing the memories with the friend you mentioned, little progress can likely be made in reducing your feelings of anxiety and depression. Eating so much food could symbolize the need to become “grounded” and “solid” as opposed to remaining too “airy” and “spiritual”, but if acted out in real life, consuming too much food and becoming overweight of course would not be helpful and would likely leave any underlying situation unresolved. So to sum up, it looks like the unpleasant symptom of your social anxiety could be replacing consciously experienced emotions such as doubts, confusion and fears etc. which can be difficult to face but which it would usually be better to do. Similarly, it could be that your feelings of being depressed were too make you feel “low” in the sense of becoming closer to the “earth” and less airy so that you would be less separated from reality as it is albeit in an unpleasant and disruptive way. Unfortunately, such symptoms are being experienced by very many young people and even children in today’s overheated society but getting gradually in touch again with one’s natural instinctive reactions usually goes a very long way to improving the situation. If these ideas seem to fit your personal situation in some way, you might like “The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World” by Marti Olsen Laney, Psy.D. Also, you would likely find the ideas of Carl Jung to be ones that you can relate to easily and a very good introduction can be found in “Man and His Symbols” which was directed to the general public and edited by Dr. Jung himself. His own first chapter deals extensively with dreams which you would probably find very interesting and valuable. A couple of books about how to get closer to your emotions might also help, for example “Nothing’s Wrong” by David Kundtz, and “Emotion: A Very Short Introduction” by Dylan Evans. Anyway, I hope that these ideas can be helpful in some way. Please feel free to ask any questions or to make any comments about this particular way of looking at your dream.

[Kyrie]

Thank you very much for this. You're interpretation seems spot on and lines up with everything. I would say you hit it dead center. I am very appreciative.