Place Environment

The environment in which the action of the dream takes place signifies the background of experience or circumstances that support the situation dealt with in the foreground.

A helpful way of defining this is to give it a name, a name such as one does with dream people. You do this by trying to sense what your main feelings are about regarding the place, or what happened to you there, and how that left you feeling. You might have felt a lot of conflict in a certain town or while living in a particular road. So you could call that ‘My conflicts’. Or a place may be linked with a loving relationship, so could be called ‘My ability to Love’.

Example: I was near a lake in the countryside. Everything was frozen. I saw some horse droppings still steaming and this seemed to be the only living thing around. Kevin K.

Kevin’s comments on this are that the frozen lake and countryside express his feelings about the world around him. He sees it as cold and uninviting. It is frozen and there is no life in it for him. That is, he cannot find anything in life to excite him or have meaning. The horse dung he realised is the resources he can use to change his life. The dung can be manure or food for growth, or fuel to burn for energy and heat. This made him feel as if there is a way to transform his old unsatisfying patterns of ‘frozen’ emotions into something growing and satisfying.

So Kevin’s dream setting illustrates his view of the world – that it is a cold uninviting place. So it is the feeling state he lives within most of the time.