Archaeologist

This is primarily about uncovering or discovering your buried past, things you may have long put behind you or tried to forget. Sometimes this links with your far distant ancestors or aspects of your present personality you carry from the far past. But even so it is about finding or becoming aware of aspects of you from the past.

Freud didn’t actually explore very far into this amazing underworld. If we think of his journey as something like an archaeologist digging into a great tomb, then what Freud ran into was a mass of rubble blocking the way to further exploration. It was rubble that in general has to be cleared before the vastness of that interior can be appreciated. The rubble, in fact is made up of the massive amount of experiences, feelings, angers, urges, that we manage to keep below the surface of awareness; that we hold beyond the threshold of waking, imprisoning them in the darkness of the unconscious.

Depth psychology began to explore beyond the boundaries that Freud reached. Its practitioners discovered that not only were there dark memories and hurts in that realm; not only repressed and forbidden behaviours and fantasies, but also huge areas of what was later called transpersonal experience. By this they meant that in that dark realm our personal self links with our family, with humanity, and with the hidden forces of the universe. This was particularly explored and mapped when LSD was used for psychotherapeutic purposes, and an unaccountable number of people could look into the realm themselves.

So in dreaming of archaeology we may uncover scenes of past murder, or babies left and our real self buried alive, but beyond that is the uncovering of vast cultural treasures, of an amazing expansion or personal knowledge.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What is the archaeologist doing and what does that suggest?

Is something being uncovered or dug up, and if I describe myself as that what do I define about myself?

What are my feelings in the dream?

You can be an archaeologist by exploring the buried message of your dreams by using Processing Dreams and Peer Dream Work.