Hi Jewel,
The best way to start looking at a dream image is by remembering that it’s most often an “as if” image. That is, it’s usually, but not always, a metaphor/symbol of a part of yourself. So a person, landscape or building etc. usually represents an aspect of your personality in some way.
The dream-ego as seen in a dream can symbolize the dreamer’s current outlook or even what it might evolve into shortly. It often usually includes how a person mostly orientates herself in an everyday way. For example, you yourself might tend to rely on your feelings as a basic guide in making decisions and if so, this would tend to be part of the meaning of the dream-ego.
A “friend” in a dream of the same sex can often picture a way in which the dreamer also tends to orientate herself on a secondary level. For instance, you yourself might have feelings/valuations about “objects”, that is, the friend would symbolize your skill in perceiving the world through the five senses. The nature of these two images together (the dream-ego and the friend) can also hint about whether the dreamer is mostly an extroverted person or more introverted.
Other figures in a dream can symbolize how the dreamer looks to others (often according to their actions and how they’re dressed; this figure is often called the “persona”), how certain faults and failings may appear on the scene in one’s outer life (often called the “shadow”), and how an inner “contra-sexual” figure is currently operating in the dreamer’s inner life (in a girl this figure is a male while in a guy, it’s a female).
Another figure which can be extra important is one that has a certain meaningful feel to it. This can be enhanced by the presence of forms or structures in the dream related to circles and squares of some kind which are obvious or not so obvious. This figure is a sort of center of the personality and it can even be helpful to imagine that this center is the “dream-maker” which organizes dreams in an incredibly complex way and in anything but a random manner. The reason it does this is apparently to help the person (if they have a knack for learning how to understand their own dreams reasonably accurately, or instead, if they can find a reliable person to look at their dreams) to move through the everyday obstacles and challenges of life in order to reach a reasonable degree of completeness as a person over a lifetime.
In your dream, you’re discussing a male celebrity with a friend. Since dreams try to constantly balance out the views and attitudes of the ego in order that the person can move forward more successfully in developing her or his personality to the fullest, it’s likely that whatever this male celebrity and your excited reaction to him symbolizes should be understood more fully. This is especially true because the dream made you sit up and take notice by having you remember on waking that the “memory of seeing him before” was actually from a previous dream that you took little notice of (e.g. you didn’t even write it down). So the dream could be saying something like “You really do have to remember this guy and keep an eye on him”; that is, on how this inner figure could be affecting your decision-making processes and overall direction in life without you really being very aware of it.
Something likely happened recently that was similar in tone to what occurred in the past to cause the earlier dream of the celebrity to appear. You can possibly find out something of what he symbolizes by seeing what spontaneous memories, thoughts and feelings come to mind when you focus on the idea of this male celebrity in your dream. Writing down what appears and then sifting through it carefully can be helpful in coming to a clearer understanding of his meaning over time.
It’s also known through careful observation of thousands of dreams by trained professionals that there is also a kind of natural rhythmic movement in the unconscious where certain figures and motifs appear, disappear and reappear over time.
In any case, without knowing anything much about you, this way of looking at your dream might not fit your personal circumstances very well, but I hope that these ideas can be helpful in some way.
If you’d like to explore the overall approach used here in looking at your dream, a very good starter book is “Man and his Symbols” edited by Carl Jung.
Please feel free to comment on, or to ask any questions about, this particular way of looking at your dream.
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