I transformed into a devil/monster in my dream...please help in interpreting

Hi all,

This is the first time i am posting a thread about a dream i had. Request you to let me know in case more info is required or you need any more detail in helping me interpret this dream. I will try my best to remember it.

Firstly a bit of basic details about me, I am a 30 year old, Male, single/unmarried guy living in India. I am working in a corporate and my family is in a different city and as of now i stay alone in an apartment. I do not remember dreams that often. However, this dream has stuck to me. It is very uncharacteristic of me to write about a dream which i saw 2 days ago as i forget my dreams within seconds of waking up. It is as if there is a leakage and everything goes out as soon as i wake up.

As i have said earlier that i am not too good in terms of remembering my dreams, i will tell you as much as i can remember. As is the case mostly with me, it is more like random pictures or shots rather than a sequence of events so it becomes all the more difficult for me to make any sense out of it. Now on to the dream.

I saw a painting in which three characters were painted and were having weapons in their hands, the weapons were bow and arrow and they were pointing it at each other. As far as i can remember the characters painted were normal human beings. The background in the painting was a barren ground. I do not remember the painting very clearly except these details.

Then i saw that i was under threat (maybe even my family was also) and i was running around. I was trying to look for a hotel, the name of the hotel started with the alphabet "H", i can't remember the name. I was trying to locate that hotel but was not able to. It was like as if i was running around in narrow lanes and getting lost in it. Finally i asked somebody and he redirected me to that hotel. The hotel was just one lane away and it seemed like i was missing the correct lane and was taking a wrong left or a wrong right again and again. There were few stairs leading to the door of the hotel and then a narrow corridor, i don't remember whether i went inside or not. Fade out.

Next scene i see is that something happened and i am with two people in the same position as the painting. It was as if the painting was a prophecy or something, then i suddenly transformed into a monster/devil. I don't remember the details, but it could have been a werewolf, minotaur or devil, i do not remember that exactly. I ran away from that scene. After running away from the place i see that there were two people in front of me, i tapped one of them on his shoulder. When they turned, one of them suddenly took out a gun and shot me at a very close range. I raised my hand, which was more like a claw and i stopped the bullet, without even touching it, like Neo in Matrix Reloaded. Fade out.

Next scene, I am running again towards that hotel or some place. One thing i distinctly remember is that i was thinking that my family is in danger and was going somewhere to protect them. I was in a barren ground and a group of people were coming to shoot me, they all shot multiple rounds of bullets and i just raised my hand and all the bullets were stopped mid-air, very much like what Neo did in Matrix Reloaded. Fade out. THE END

I can understand protecting my family as i share very good relations with them and love them a lot. However, me becoming a monster/devil was weird and even after that i did not went on a rampage, it was more like i was the same, only the physical appearance has changed. Can you guys please help me in interpreting this in any way as i am a completely novice at all this. I have not seen Matrix reloaded or any such monster movies recently, so don't know from where this all is coming.

Thanking you all in advance. Regards Jaded9

This is an important dream because you’ve not only remembered it at all but it’s stuck with you for days.

Just to mention that dreams use such things as analogies and metaphors to express what they mean and they often have a structure that is like a movie or a play.

For example, a time and place are set and some characters appear. Then there is action, followed by a climax and then an ending or resolution happens.

With your dream, it’s as if the painting in the opening scene is meant to show your basic situation at this time. Then the actions etc. that follow apparently show this situation in more detail.

From the nature of the painting, it looks like some parts of your personality (the three characters) are in some kind of “conflict” with each other (pointing bows and arrows at each other).

The fact that the weapons are not modern ones probably suggests that you could be caught up in a very basic inner conflict that males have found themselves in during the last tens of thousands of years.

If so, the idea is that the dream then tries to show you in a symbolic way what the nature of this basic conflict is in order to help you to handle it.

First off, it shows you and possibly your family as being under threat and this is meant to emphasize the need to find out what this threat is and to somehow end it.

The dream then shows you running around trying to find a hotel but you keep getting lost.

This tends to suggest that what the hotel symbolizes won’t be a solution for the inner conflict.

For example, a hotel is a place where anybody at all can live for a short or a longer time if they have the money.

Hotels are often big and “collective” places, owned by large companies, and this is in contrast to an individual home for instance.

So on analogy, you wanting to take refuge from the threat in a collective place won’t work, the idea possibly being that you need to be work harder at being more “individual” and less attracted to outer things that society says, for example, are the most important goals to have or the most important things to own etc. For instance, you probably would need to spend at least some time in an ongoing way developing your own various skills and abilities etc. that would add up to making you a unique person over time.

The next scene could be saying that if you stick too much with getting only what society as a whole says is good, you could turn into an unfeeling “monster”.

The other two people in the scene could be parts of your own personality which would then be left behind and not developed enough in this type of situation as mentioned above.

This would cause an “inner conflict” from which you couldn’t really run away like you want to in the dream because it will always somehow come about in some way (e.g. you catch up with two men, one of whom shoots you at close range)

That is, it’s as if undeveloped parts of you would become “angry” and attack you.

In a practical way, this could come out in the appearance of one or more unpleasant physical and/or psychological symptoms from a choice of endless possibilities.

For example, a person could feel down too often or become ill more often than usual etc.

Being shot in a dream is meant to be like a strong “blow” which is meant to “wake you up” to a potentially serious situation.

Maybe the dream then says that you could have a problem in easily coming to accept the reality of any such inner situation and it could get worse over time (e.g. at first, you’re like the fantasy character Neo and stop one bullet without even touching it, but then more men attack you while you’re still apparently a “monster” and you once again stop the bullets magically).

To sum up, your family in the dream could symbolize, for example, how you need to protect and nurture your own personal emotions, potentials and values etc.

This isn’t always easy to do in a big company where you might be working at this time.

For example, many companies tend to demand excessive loyalty to the “corporation” and this can affect an employee’s ability to form good relationships etc. because there’s so much work and overtime etc.

So this is maybe like Neo’s situation in Matrix Reloaded because he is faced with “impossible choices” placed on him by the “situation”, e.g. “either to return to the Source with his unique code to reboot the Matrix and pick survivors to begin to re-populate the soon-to-be-destroyed Zion, or cause the Matrix to crash and kill everyone connected to it; combined with Zion's destruction, this would mean mankind's extinction”.

But Neo learns of Trinity's situation and chooses to save her instead, that is, against all the odds he chooses to save the feeling side of his personality.

Anyway, without knowing anything much about you, this way of looking at your dream might not fit your personal circumstances very well, but I hope 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 very important dream.

Thanks a lot Athanor, appreciate the detailed analysis. Will think through the entire thing and will let you know in case i have any queries :)