The Fox's Secret

So far I’ve posted narratives and interpretations of my own dreams. I’ve tried to demonstrate some of the ways I’ve learned about myself through reflecting on my dreams and the ways I have used dreams as insights into my own life and as inspirations for creativity. It is my hope that others can then find fruitful ways to apply similar methods of interpretation and reflection to their own dreams in order to gain these similar kinds of benefits. But I’ve been writing far too much about me!

It’s far easier to see how this kind of interpretation can be used in general if you can see how it applies to more than one dreamer. Today I want to give special thanks to “taciturnu” over at Beliefnet for allowing me to share her unique dream narrative, the suggestions I made for interpreting it, and the conclusions she reached combining my interpretation with her own self-reflection. I think that it will serve as a good example of the kind of work I hope this blog will allow others to do in the future. Here is the dream as taciturnu described it:

I had a horrible nightmare about a week and a half ago that still is plaguing me. It started that I am very pregnant. My baby was “magically” transferred to my best friend, K, who birthed her. (In my dream, I woke up not-pregnant, and K showed up with my baby.)

The baby looked just like K’s daughter, and I remembered thinking I wasn’t going to be able to get anyone to believe it were my and my husband’s child. She handed her to me, and left.

I never named the baby, but I swaddled her and put her on my nightstand. My husband didn’t come home that night, (???) and I went to bed.

The next morning, I turned to look at the clock and saw that I had slept for 12 hours. I rolled out of bed, got in the shower and prepared for the day completely forgetting about the baby. I left to go meet a friend of mine, M, who I haven’t seen for about a year. When we met, he was excited that my husband and I had a baby, and asked why I didn’t bring her. I panicked and lied to him saying “I thought she would be able to sleep better at home, but we should probably check on her because I don’t know if the babysitter showed up.”

M drove me back to my house, and I ran up to check on the baby. When I picked her up, rigor had set in, and she was very clearly dead. I turned distraught, screaming and crying.

All of this is very bizarre to me. Of course I would never treat a baby like that, I never sleep for 12 hours (!) and my husband is home every night. I have an overwhelming sense of guilt from dreaming something so horrendous, though. Any insight?

Dreams can be confusing, frightening and deeply troubling. We often say and do things that we would never do in real life. But with a little reflection, we are able to look beyond the literal actions of a dream to see what it might be saying about our state of mind. Here was my reply:

Dreams usually speak to us in symbols.  The literal content of the dream, while important, often represents something else.  I don’t think it’s the case that the same dream event always symbolizes the same thing, I think it’s different for each dreamer.  But that being said, babies or pregnancy can often symbolize the “birth” of something that has to “gestate” or that is “coming to be” inside us.  For some, it’s a symbol of a creative breakthrough or a new understanding of something.  It could be a hope or project or career goal.  It could be lots of things, and dreaming of being pregnant or having a child (or killing one) isn’t a reflection on your moral character in waking life.  Heck, I’m a man and I recently had a dream in which I was pregnant–surely that’s not about my fears of getting pregnant literally!  (At least I hope not.)

In the dream, you’re the one who’s first pregnant with something, but then your friend takes it from you and gives birth to it.  You now feel afraid that it’s not really yours, and then you neglect it until it dies.  I would think about this more metaphorically.  What are your feelings about this friend?  Does she often seem to steal your ideas or do you feel like she is better than you at performing certain tasks?  Do you feel that you are jealous of her talents or something like that?  All of this could be way off the mark, but it’s just  a starting place for thinking about it.

What ideas or projects or hopes might you be “pregnant” with right now?  Might your friend have realized one of these hopes while you were still wishing for it?  What is your relationship with this friend like?  (And remember, the brain associates linked things interchangeably in dreams–my best friend from when I was six might stand in for my best friend now, or my girlfriend from high school might stand in for my current girlfriend–it doesn’t mean I’m comparing them or wishing for an old one, it’s just the way dreams work!)

In trying to help taciturnu explore the possible meaning of her dream, I wanted to emphasize not only looking beyond the literal content to the symbolic, I also wanted to discourage her (and all of you!) from turning to some “dream dictionary” that would tell you a “dead baby” always symbolizes “x”. I can only offer helpful questions for reflection. I can’t possibly know what each element of her dream symbolizes or might mean for her. All good dream interpretation should have this conversational and reflective quality to it. Don’t look for a simple, easy, one-size-fits-all answer from someone else.

Taciturnu read my response and did some of her own self-reflection. She then came to these conclusions:

Thanks.

I was under the impression that there was something I needed to “nurture” that I wasn’t. It had never crossed my mind in the slightest that my friend played a part at all! (The dream itself was just so terrible- if you can imagine picking up a dead baby and feeling like it was your fault…)

My friend and I get along great. (She is my best friend for a reason, after all.) As it turns out, she and I were offered the same job. I was offered first, but without me accepting or turning it down, it was offered to her, and she took it (not realizing I hadn’t given an answer).

I didn’t think it affected me, but I am still looking for a job. Perhaps this is my subconscious trying to tell me otherwise.

Thanks for all your insight!! I will think this one over.

As you can see from her answer here, I did not tell her what her dream meant. I just offered some things to think about, and her reply suggests that she did find those suggestions to be insightful. The dream did seem to mirror a situation from her waking life, if inexactly. I was then very happy to see that she would continue to “think this one over.” There could be other meanings that neither one of us had yet considered, and a dream interpretation should never be seen as an open and shut case that can be closed once and for all.  If nothing else, though, she was able to ease the feelings of guilt at having done something terrible!

I would encourage anyone who has been intrigued by the content on this blog to offer his or her own dreams for interpretation. Just click the contact button at the top of the page and e-mail your narrative to the Foxfoot. Please know that I will not share your information publicly without your permission, but I hope that if our exchanges are fruitful, you’d be willing, as taciturnu has been, to share your experiences with others to aid them in finding meaning in their own nighttime visions.