Ceremony Ritual

Your dream is probably emphasising something that is taking place in your life. For instance at puberty your body carries you from youth to manhood or womanhood. This is an incredibly important event, yet society seldom acknowledges you as a changed person. Your dream may do this, and even reveal some of the mysterious new qualities you have ass you move from one stage of life to another.

Similar to initiation. Such dream ceremonies or rituals often mark a point of change or transition, as ceremonies do in waking life – baptism, marriage, graduation, etc.

Ritual is also used to focus feeling or sexual energy in some way to gain an effect, such as healing or insight. So a ritual can point to important change – such as entrance into puberty; entrance into deeper levels of yourself; the opening of new attitudes or skills, just as marriage is an entrance into a new type of life and social situation.

As with marriage, a ritual can mark a promise of some kind. But occasionally rituals are the performance of habits – a ritualistic carrying out of actions that no longer have meaning or feelings attached to them.

Our unconscious has a wider sense of self, and things are seen as important that we might consciously feel are trivial. A ceremony in a dream brings such things to our attention.

In the example the girl is with her boyfriend. She may thus have been ‘initiated’ into sexual activity. Sex with her boyfriend has changed her image of herself.

Example: ‘A ritual began whereby a large knife was drawn and a few deep cuts were made to both our faces. I put my hands to my face and saw them covered with blood, crying and crying.’ O. S.

Useful Questions and Hints:

What is happening in this ceremony, and what change, promise or new way of life is suggested?

Have I recently begun a new phase of my life, and is of what does it involve me in?

In what way am I involved in this – and what way am I involved in what I face in life?

Use Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Talking As