School

Your attempts or desire to learn, or what you learned at school – not lessons but interrelationships, class structure, competitiveness, authority, mortification, group preferences, etc. The school can represent habits of behaviour or feeling reactions developed during those years – puberty occurs at this time, and confronts you with many new feelings, choices and drives, and that was a part of your ‘schooling’.

‘I am back at school on the first day of the new school year. At this point it can vary slightly, but I always feel out of place, usually because I am older than the other girls now or – most common – because my uniform is incorrect and it is time for assembly – I went to a very strict convent school. There is always some feeling of panic and quite often loneliness.’ P. H.

P. H. is still uncomfortable about who she is as a person. The influence of the school years still nags at her that she ought to be other than she is. Not having a nature that easily conformed, she was led to feel isolated and an alien.

There can also be ‘higher learning’ and this is not about maths and language, but about life skills, about love and how you connect with your own wholeness and potential, and the universe in which you are intricately embedded.

In a few dreams school refers to feelings of rejection or aloneness due to the stress faced by many children on leaving their mother for the first time to attend school.

Authority: School and teachers were authorities outside of your family. How you dealt with probably colours your whole adult life.

Classroom: Study, relationship with authority, or whatever sense of yourself was engendered by school. Maybe you need to ask yourself what you actually learned at school. Also the life lessons you are learning at present.

Graduating: The tests you have met in life and relationships and the entrance into greater skill or maturing this has produced. It might suggest the sense you have achieved adulthood, or the skill leading to adult independence. It probably also associates with your feelings of personal of value.

Gymnasium: Taking risks in learning something new, or practising new skills, perhaps needing daring. It could also apply to physical health.

Library: Your knowledge and learning ability, or stored information such as memories. It can show you touching the vast reservoir of unconscious information and insights you hold

Places in school: Particular abilities you have, lessons you learned, or associations with that room.

School clothes: Social attitudes or moral rules learned at school. Perhaps pressure to conform.

School friend: Your attitudes developed in school, as you are ‘meeting’ them in the present. The positive helpful and supportive things you got from you school years or learn by being with your friend.

Can sometimes refer to feelings of rejection or aloneness due to the stress faced by many children on leaving their mother for the first time to attend school. See the third example.

Example: ‘I am back at school on the first day of the new school year. At this point it can vary slightly, but I always feel out of place, usually because I am older than the other girls now or – most common – because my uniform is incorrect and it is time for assembly – I went to a very strict convent school. There is always some feeling of panic and quite often loneliness.’ P. H.

P. H. is still uncomfortable about who she is as a person. The influence of the school years still nags at her that she ought to be other than she is. Not having a nature that easily conformed, she was led to feel isolated and an alien.

Example: ‘In the bathroom area, a school class was being held, so I had to wait for my bath, steam would be bad for the books. I didn’t have any soap with me but I was going to wash my hair and could use the shampoo.’ Leonie K.

Leonie is getting rid of attitudes or a self image developed at school, shown as shampooing her hair. The new attitudes of letting off steam would not have been acceptable at school. Idioms: Of the old school; tell tales out of school; old school tie; well schooled. See: Schoolteacher and Headmaster under Roles.

Example: Working on a dream with P. The dream included reference to a school. Children were on their way to school and waving good-bye to their mothers. I was surprised at the intensity of emotion P. displayed when she looked at the saying good-bye, and then suddenly realised that this was the child’s first taste of leaving home, saying good-bye to mother.

School Uniform: This usually expresses your feelings about the time you were at school, orwhat you feel about being at school, or being the age to be in a school uniform.

So the uniform also holds in it the possibility of the dependence, the desire to ‘get out of a uniform existence’, the desire to excel or escape, you experience or may have experienced at school.

The uniform may simply also link with learning something – what did you actually learn at school – what life lessons, perhaps learned by the experience rather than the lessons?

Shelf: Possibly your memories, of something that is a part of your everyday awareness; something that is accessible in terms of your using it or remembering what it represents. See: ledge.

 

Idioms: Of the old school; tell tales out of school; old school tie; well schooled. See: Schoolteacher and Headmaster.

 

Useful Questions and Hints:

 

 

What did you feel about the uniform either in the dream or in real life?

 

What is happening in the rest of the dream as a comment on the uniform?

 

What was your experience of school like and what did you get from it?

 

Is it a school I went to?

 

If so what are my feelings about it?

 

What was happening at the school?

 

Were there special relationships at school?

 

Am I feeling the desire to learn, or am I involved in learning at the moment?

 

If this is about life skills, if so what have I learned?

 

Are there particular themes here – competitiveness, bullying, authority, punishment?

 

See Learn – Learning the brake, gears and accelerator – Identity and dreams – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Characters and People in Dreams –  Acting on your dream