Questions & Answers about Dreams
Questions & Answers #2
Q: Does anyone dream in color? Most of my dreams are black and white. Is it normal?
A: Every dreamer and dreaming experience is unique and analyzing how someone sees their dreams may provide valuable clues about this person’s perception of waking life.
When people openly share their dreams in groups and forums, their statistics usually shows that great majority of the dreamers are able to see colors in their dreams. But even among these dreamers there are some who occasionally have black&white dreams.
What can it possible signify when someone sees only two opposite colors in their dreams?
One of the first questions that comes to mind is about dreamer’s extremely polar perception/ideation in the real life that’s being reflected in such dreams (for example, excessive judgement, divisive thinking etc.)… Another view on the black&white scenarios may be related with “absence of colors” in the dreamer’s life (e.g. lack of strong emotions, monotonous experience etc.)… Or based on the associations with old black&white pictures, such dreams may point at the fading memories of certain events from the dreamer’s past…
For anyone who is learning to interpret dreams this is quite useful exercise: to figure out what may be represented by the black&white dreams and what kind of pattern from our waking life may be reflected by such visual presentation.
Q: Since any story is built with archetypes and dreams are stories, has anyone used the archetypes symbolism to interpret dreams?
A: When we are talking about the dreamwork in the light of the Law of One, firstly I would like to divorce the archetypes presented by Ra from the Jungian archetypes, so that there is no misunderstanding in this area. Ra’s teaching of archetypes describes 22 types of architectural elements of reality, whereas Jungian archetypes refer to the typical meaning (or myths) attributed to certain symbols that can be common for the whole group of people.
Based on this distinction, there are two different answers to this question.
Archetypes taught by Ra are used in dream interpretation quite rarely (so far). Mainly it can be explained by the rarity of this knowledge. Though I noticed that some people do have dreams that can be interpreted from the perspective of Ra’s archetypes, but usually (and unfortunately!) such dreams are not fully understood by the dreamers who are not familiar with this teaching. On the positive side, if someone seriously starts studying the archetypes, dreams are capable of adding a lot of useful information to this knowledge!
Regarding Jungian archetypes, they are widely used in dream interpretation, especially by the Jungian therapists. But as with anything else related to dreams, this approach needs to be carefully re-examined in every individual case. Dreams are personalized messages, therefore their symbolism is mostly drawn from the “database” of dreamer’s personal associations (as a first priority), and these personal associations may be similar or may be completely different to the archetypal meanings. In other words, individual symbolism has much higher rank and overriding qualities over the meaning of Jungian archetypes.
To illustrate it briefly, we can look at the example of Mother’s archetype. If dreamer’s real-life mother has certain qualities that are not typical for this archetype and these qualities adversely affected dreamer’s life (it means this is potential area for the inner-work and dreams often point to that), then using purely archetypal symbolism for interpreting this person’s dreams about his/her mother would be a mistake in this case.
So, in the process of gaining experience in dream interpretation, we always come to the same conclusion again and again: in order to retrieve the right message from someone’s dream, it’s not enough to learn some general or archetypal meaning of certain symbols, but it’s extremely important to know the dreamer and his/her personal symbolism that was shaped by unique life experience of this individual.
Author: Margarita AoteaRa.com
