QUESTIONS & ANSWERS:
Dreams Department

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Question

I was dreaming that I met a girl I liked at school on the road and we had sex and she was like an animal. Then after I wanted to find her so I could ask her out. I tried looking everywhere for her but I couldn't find her. Is this common and what does it mean?

Answer

Well, they don't call them Dream Girls for no reason! Actually, it is hard to say what a dream means to another individual -- that is best left up to the dreamer to decide. However, these kinds of dreams bring out some interesting observations by psychologists. The first is the idea of what is called the autonomous psyche -- that our imagination is much more independent that we know. At one moment it provides us with our hearts desire, and at another it seems to keep what we want most away from us.

Sigmund Freud felt that the dream maker had to strike a balance between the two so we don't wake up all the time. Carl Jung found that by cooperating with this tension we can become more wholesome beings. In this sense, the tension would be between having what we want, and moving towards something better. Jung felt that dream girls (or boys) teased and played with us to draw us into a larger way of being.

If this were my dream, for example, the searching for the girl might be a way to keep me in school. If we could just have each other all the time, I might not return to the school. Another psychologist, Jacques Lacan, sees the continual searching for desire as the way of the world and teaches that instead of trying to always get what we want, we are really better off focusing more on the search itself. In this vain, it becomes my task to clearly express my loss of her, just exactly what it is that is missing and what my desire really is and can be. These are three levels at work in all dreams, there are many more, but it sounds like I better not give the whole story away just yet!

2/20/98

Richard Wilkerson is general editor for The Internet Dream E-zine, Electric Dreams, and director of DreamGate, the Internet Communications and Dream Education Center. He writes the Cyberphile column for the Association for the Study of Dreams Newsletter.