Projection

The realisation of what you hold within you unconsciously is projected onto the screen of your mind while you dream. This can also refer to illusions arising from within if it in any way connects with trickery. See: Film

All the images, people, animals, places we see in our dreams, are simply your own feelings, fears, hopes and wonder projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind as images. So, it makes sense to take the image of your dream person, thing or animal back into you and own it. In that way, you are actually meeting and dealing with the things about yourself you are not owning or conscious of. That is why dreams are often difficult to understand, because we are hiding things from ourselves. To do this you can use – Being the Person or Thing

 It is also important to realise that every image, every scary or terrifying thing, is taken place inside you, in your mind, as you sleep. This means that every awful animal, every scary thing or person, is created out of your own fears and must not be seen as outside you as happens in waking awareness. The problem is that we are often scared of or frightened of actually experiencing our emotions and so they confront us in our dreams. Avoiding them or controlling them is like running away from oneself – there is no escape. If you face them and feel the feelings they will transform into personal power.

Freud felt that in projection thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings that we tend to avoid taking responsibility for as one’s own we tend to see them – project them – onto other people. This is sometimes called transference. This is a defence we use to avoid seeing the negative side of ourselves. So instead of seeing that we ourselves are an awful spreader of critical talk, we accuse others of doing it.

It is a way we try to avoid seeing who we really are. for in dreams we often create an outside person – a criminal, sexual pervert, a murderer, a down and out – who are all aspects of oneself. But these are usually not dominant parts of your nature – but even so we are all murderers because we kill or suppress parts of our self; we hold within us at the baby level a completely non moral self, for a baby has no moral judgement and is purely an instinctive being.

Here is an interesting and informative quote

The way you talk about others reflects who you are (projection)
For years I walked around with my shoulders hunched, as if my head wanted to crawl into my chest to protect myself against external attacks.

In reality, this attitude reflected that I was filled with aggression, but I did not dare to admit that I harboured such (“bad”?!??) feelings.

An experiment:

Take a piece of paper and write down the name of a person you greatly appreciate.
Underneath it you write down ten individual words (no sentences) that express his or her good qualities.

If you are done you erase/delete the name of this person. Instead of his or her name you now write down your own name and you try to feel that these words reflect your own valuable properties, whether they are still potential properties or already developed and expressed.

Initially you will probably have to overcome a strong resistance to say these things about yourself. Let’s try anyway, and if one or the other word does not match the way you perceive yourself, you can at least try to find the core of the definition that applies to you.

When you learn to pay attention, you realize that each time you talk about other people you are expressing a part of yourself as well. You perceive others as you yourself are or can be. The deeper reason for recognizing and empathising or estimating and rejecting other people is in fact a kind of recognition. Understanding has something to do with consent.

Perhaps the way you perceive this experiment is: No, he or she is like that, but I am not. Maybe you do not even dare to delete the name of the other person and write your own name instead.
“Projection means that you cannot accept certain properties that belong to you and therefore you attribute them to another person. These can be so called good or bad properties. Maybe other people own these properties, but there is also a message in it about your own identity and your inner world.
If we want to learn to know more about ourselves, we must not neglect this message otherwise we deny and repress a piece of knowledge about ourselves from our consciousness. Maybe we deny and repress because we still tend to believe we cannot say anything good about ourselves, or because we believe that it is wrong to experience so called “bad” feelings.

You can then indeed try to banish illicit feelings out of you, but you do not succeed. The human organism cannot simply get rid of an important aspect of his or her life.

The “best” you can do is to banish these feelings out of your conscious life. You cheat yourself; deny your experience and put your head in the sand.

In a relationship knowing the other person is simultaneously recognition. When you are talking about someone else, you’re actually saying: “He/she too.” In this “too” you have expressed a message about yourself.

We can indeed be wrong about the person we are talking about or judge, but we cannot be wrong about this “too”. In this “too” knowledge of one’s self is hidden. This hidden message about ourselves when we talk about others is more reliable than what we say about others.

Projecting means that we not just omit this “too”, we also pretend as if it does not exist at all. So it’s a kind of unconscious displacement of the boundary between you and the others, which can cause a lot of confusion in communication.

Example: Johann feels sexually aroused by Susanne. Inside him grows the desire to touch her and to sleep with her. But these are matters he does not even want to think about, because Susanne is married and has four children.

He says: “She wants something from me. I have to be careful that she does not seduce me into doing something stupid”. His unconscious behaviour is directed towards meeting Susanne as often as possible though.

Feelings that are not owned, that are not allowed to be experienced (this does not necessarily mean that you have to express them) in an open and honest way sneak out disguised through the back door (for instance over projections) and so the responsibility for such feelings is pushed towards “Susanne”.
In the projection, we move the boundary between us and the rest of the world a little to our perceived advantage, so that thoughts and feelings that we do not want to own are pushed towards “the others”. Instead of saying: “It’s hard for me to accept me as I am,” we say, “I am not like that. “He or she is” or “Nowadays people are like that”. This way you can pretend it is not about you and push the responsibility for your own feelings away from you to the other.

People who project a lot, make a plaintive impression. They are always the “victims of circumstance”. They speak as if the circumstances are responsible for what happens and so there can be no change. But … this way you live without energy and you have your life less and less in your own hands.
Sometimes people who project a lot are very aggressive and they want to constantly change the other. Actually they fight in others what they hate in themselves, and they want to transform others to the unattainable model with which they torment themselves.

Another way to project – with which many people switch themselves (and so their energy) off – is comparing.

First they project their ideal on the other (“You cook so well, therefore I’d rather stay away from the stove” or” My neighbour is such a good mother; she is never grumpy; her four children always look perfect while I with my child … “) The qualities of the other are hyped up. Then follows the faint-hearted, lamenting: “When I compare myself with that …”

Example: Two beetles crawled simultaneously out of the ground on May fourteenth, about one meter apart. One was dark brown, the other white and they were both beautiful. The white one decided to migrate to the east, the Brown went west. So they met each other soon. It was a beautiful, almost summerlike day, and its bristles were vibrating with pleasure in the warm light. Then they saw each other; “What a beautiful brown beetle”, thought the white,” just see what a warm, rich colour”! “And then he looked at himself and was so ashamed that he lowered his eyes to never look up again.

“What a beautiful White” thought the brown beetle, “how clean and bright this colour is without any spots!” And then he looked up and was so ashamed that he lowered his eyes to never look up again.

Despondent and with downcast eyes they crawled back from where they had come. They did not fly a single time.

“People do not acknowledge me because I am a Jew” has (apart from the fact that this may be true or not) at the same time an emotional message that says: “I have not yet accepted my own Jew-Being”.

In the political field is an example of projection in the groups that I would call the plaintive progressives. “The board is not-accessible to new ideas” or “We students do not have students any influence to the administration. We have to keep our mouth shut; otherwise we are dismissed “etc. …

If we attribute power and possibilities always to the “other side” attribute (which are then circumstances or reactionary structures, etc.), then we ourselves need not do anything anymore.
The “advantage” that you reach by projecting is: You never have to fight anymore. In advance you have already appointed yourself as a loser. You then need not even admit that you are afraid of taking a risk when you would decide to fight for something.

You will, however, grow more and more dependent and you will have less and less to say. The other is the only one who can bring what you need. Gradually, you do not have your own opinion anymore, no views, no own eyes and ears, no energy.” Written by Bruno-Paul de Roeck – German: Gras unter meinen Füssen http://www.amazon.de/Gras-unter-meinen-F%C3%BC%C3%9Fen-Gestalttherapie/dp/349917944X

Useful questions or hints:

Are you aware of anyone you particularly dislike?

What is it you note so often as faults in others?

Can you catch yourself doing it?

See Self Observation – Defence Mechanisms and Resistances – Street Wisdom – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams