u/EarthDisciple18

I have seen a lot of people on here that are dealing with recurring dreams lately and wanted to share my take on them.

From the discourse is seems as though recurring dreams are treated like a special class of dream, something separate from the rest, worthy a different kind of explanation. I don't think that's quite right.

In Jungian terms, dreams are compensatory. They show up to balance something out in your conscious attitude, to say the thing you're not saying to yourself in the daylight. Most of the time, a dream says something once, your mind registers some of it whether you realise it or not, and then the psyche moves on and gives you different images.

A recurring dream is what happens when that message hasn't yet landed, or perhaps there is some sort of complex blocking its integration. I don't think this is because the dream is unusually important, but because the person is unusually good at not hearing it.

This therefore reframes the question people usually ask about recurring dreams, which is "What does it mean?!"

I think the more useful question is: "Why do I keep needing to be told this?"

That's a different kind of inquiry. There's no need to obsess about digging into the symbol harder or from a different angle, but really it's about being honest about what you've been avoiding acting on.

Here's a way to test this on yourself:

Next time a recurring dream shows up, instead of asking what the symbol means, ask what would have to change in your waking life for this dream to stop coming back. What inner dynamic in your life needs to be addressed? That question tends to get a much more honest, specific answer than symbol-hunting does, because it forces you to think about your own behavior rather than a dictionary entry.

Of course, you need to do some symbol inquiry to land on what needs to change first, but I thought this may help for those at a dead end.

I am curious whether this matches other people's experience. If you've had a dream that recurred for months or years and then stopped, what actually changed right before it stopped? I'd guess for most people it wasn't finally understanding the symbol, it was making an actual change somewhere in their life.

PS: Recurring dreams actually also present a case against dreams just being random noise, because if they were truly random, why the same thing over and over again?

Every few days someone posts a dream here and gets a reply along the lines of "snakes represent transformation" or "water means your emotions." It's well meant ofcourse, as the beautiful people of this forum always are, and I will add that personally I think common symbol conventions do serve a purpose. But, I think the whole framing is backwards.

A fixed symbol dictionary treats a dream image like a word in a foreign language: you look it up on the web and get the translation. The problem is a dream symbol isn't a word. It's closer to a name. If I tell you my mother's name, a dictionary is useless to you, because the meaning isn't in the word, it's in the relationship. Your mountain, your childhood home, the dog that keeps turning up in your dreams three years running and you don't know why. None of that has a fixed translation per se, because none of it is an actual word. It's a name for something only you can truly know.

This is exactly why Jung was wary of universal symbol keys, even though he spent his whole career studying archetypal imagery. He wasn't contradicting himself by any means. Archetypes are real, recurring, cross-cultural patterns, but they show up dressed in the specific, personal material of the dreamer's own life. A snake in your dream isn't "the snake" from a dictionary entry, it's your snake, wearing whatever it's wearing because of what it means to you specifically. Skip that step and you get a reading that could apply to anyone, which in practice means it applies to no one.

You can test this yourself. Take any dream you've had and look up the "meaning" of its main symbol in three different dictionaries. You'll get three different answers, none of which will feel like they're actually about your dream. Then try the opposite: pick one symbol and just sit with it. What's your own first association, before you think about what it's "supposed" to mean? Nine times out of ten the first answer that comes up is more accurate than anything a dictionary will give you, because it's the only version of the answer that's about you.

The dictionary isn't really wrong, it gives the general gist and that is useful, but its the fine details, the feeling and emotion conveyed, and the illogical nuances that the dream offers us which is the gold dust in determining what the dream means to you. 

Every few days someone posts a dream here and gets a reply along the lines of "snakes represent transformation" or "water means your emotions." It's well meant ofcourse, as the beautiful people of this forum always are, and I will add that personally I think common symbol conventions do serve a purpose. But, I think the whole framing is backwards.

A fixed symbol dictionary treats a dream image like a word in a foreign language: you look it up on the web and get the translation. The problem is a dream symbol isn't a word. It's closer to a name. If I tell you my mother's name, a dictionary is useless to you, because the meaning isn't in the word, it's in the relationship. Your mountain, your childhood home, the dog that keeps turning up in your dreams three years running and you don't know why. None of that has a fixed translation per se, because none of it is an actual word. It's a name for something only you can truly know.

This is exactly why Jung was wary of universal symbol keys, even though he spent his whole career studying archetypal imagery. He wasn't contradicting himself by any means. Archetypes are real, recurring, cross-cultural patterns, but they show up dressed in the specific, personal material of the dreamer's own life. A snake in your dream isn't "the snake" from a dictionary entry, it's your snake, wearing whatever it's wearing because of what it means to you specifically. Skip that step and you get a reading that could apply to anyone, which in practice means it applies to no one.

You can test this yourself. Take any dream you've had and look up the "meaning" of its main symbol in three different dictionaries. You'll get three different answers, none of which will feel like they're actually about your dream. Then try the opposite: pick one symbol and just sit with it. What's your own first association, before you think about what it's "supposed" to mean? Nine times out of ten the first answer that comes up is more accurate than anything a dictionary will give you, because it's the only version of the answer that's about you.

The dictionary isn't really wrong, it gives the general gist and that is useful, but its the fine details, the feeling and emotion conveyed, and the illogical nuances that the dream offers us which is the gold dust in determining what the dream means to you.