Wild

Urges and drives that do not conform to present social standards. This does not mean they are wrong. See Wild Side

Often, because we were trained  or brought up to behave in a certain way anything that does not conform to that may be shown in dreams as wild or even dangerous. But in dreams, and even in some measure in waking life, it is  good to allow our wild side expression, for it is often a very creative side, and allows us to gather fresh insights. But wild should not mean dangerous to oneself or others. Wild means the wildness of natural animals, that have an inborn wisdom, intelligence and standard.

The wild is that ancient and untamed parts of your inner life that evolved over millions of years and is still very much part of you. Your actual brain still carries these ancient experiences that underlie your present personality. Your base brain for instance is called the R Complex, meaning the reptilian brain. What happens with the ‘wild’ in your dream shows how you are relating to this necessary and deeply instinctive and wise part of you. See: Brain levels. 

Example: My fiancé and I were trying to ‘dispose’ of five infant bodies. We hid them amongst tree and lawn clippings which were piled up on a car trailer. We were trying to hide them and were ensuring no one could see the bodies.

I was thinking about disposing of them at the rubbish tip but was concerned that someone might actually see them as we removed them from the trailer, or that the police might pull us over on the way to the rubbish tip.

I don’t know why I felt we had to cover up the deaths; I don’t think we actually killed them. I don’t know why we thought it was our responsibility to secretly dispose of the bodies. The actual death of the infants is a mystery. I recall seeing each dead baby fleetingly and saw their bodies smeared with blood. It was a sad heavy feeling and I felt as though the deaths were out of my hands, as though there was nothing I could have done about it. I kept saying, ‘my god, five infant babies dead’. Candy

I think before you can understand your dream you have to realise that as a modern person you live a life of several levels. Your body is millions of years old and is that of a mammal. Your brain is segmented into several levels, and it carries the basic spinal, the lizard brain, the mammalian brain, and then sitting on top of that is the human brain dealing with speech, thinking, etc. So, you are a complex being. But mostly you know yourself as ‘Candy’ – a person relating to the social and physical world around you. This part of you – what you call ‘me’ – relates to the world quite differently to the other levels of yourself.

If ‘Candy’ didn’t exist – if you did not have your personality called Candy – you would still be a mammalian animal moved by all the urges common to mammals. That means you would probably have reproduced by now. The urge to reproduce is still there underneath all your social programming and consciously developed likes and dislikes, with the social needs and decisions you make.

So, if we look at you as a complex physical and mental being, in yor dream we see the opening scene is one of trimming back on natural growth, the unconscious emergence of life in you. In fact you are, in your relationship, cleaning up stuff related to your growth or development. You are at an age where as a woman you near a great change. Your ability to conceive and bear a child will go, along with the identity you developed out of being a sexually attractive and nubile female. This, I think, is why the clear up is going on. What you cut back on though are not dead things. You have cut back living growth, and as the images suggest, this means the possibility of children.

Even though you do not want children consciously – and that is fine – the mammal and fundamental life processes in you have constantly been trying to reproduce – thus the dead children. You didn’t actively kill them, but your direction in life meant you did not allow them to live. See Creative Woman

This exteriorisation of internal feelings is clear in many of our dreams, such as when we run from a wild bear, we are exteriorising our fear. Dreams might do this because they frequently portray intimate parts of us which have never been made fully conscious or verbalised. The wild animal in your dreams depicts your own urges or feelings which you feel uncertain about controlling or directing.

But whenever we dream its images are not like real life, because a dream is nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but is an image like on a cinema screen, so that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear; so, all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind. In the early days of moving pictures, a film was shown of a train coming fast toward them; the viewers all fled in terror, fearing the train would crush them. That is exactly the same response if you are terrified of anything you dream of. See Masters of Nightmares

Our animal dreams hold a great deal of innate information held unconsciously. Our animal or instinctive self holds much of this, so communication with it can lead to enlightenment.

Taming or being loved by a wild animal shows us learning to relate to urges and energies in yourself that were previously unavailable to your will or needs. So a dog may depict our natural drives that are well socialised, but still have the tendency to revert back to the spontaneous or ‘wild’ state quite easily. For instance our anger might usually be well under control, but if someone teases us we might surprise ourselves by the amount and strength of our anger. Therefore the different animals – domesticated or wild – can therefore be used in dreams to represent the socialised or unrestrained elements of ourselves.

Example: The wilderness swallowed me up, and fantasies and torment were everywhere; in my own body, on the faces of others, screaming from my mind and emotions. Behind me, the emerging from shadowing trees came an elephant. He was beautiful with tusk and eyes, with wildness, but I was afraid of a wild elephant in full charge. It ran past the end of the building and I went to the opposite window, seeing it charge another elephant. After the impact it seemed to be a strange mixture, in my mind, of elephant and rhinoceros. It then stood shaking with sexual motions, until a great deal of sperm came out and its tension was released. Again, the details are forgotten, but there was a part where a wild dog, or fox, came very close to me, because these people were accepted by the wild animals. As I was one of them, the animals were also coming closer to me. It came up and sniffed me from a slight distance. I was like Tarzan, walking through a street. Lots of people watched and walked along. They were curious. Then I began to roar like a wild animal and my feelings of ferocity matched the sound. As I walked I caught a couple of people who got too near, and threw them about. I was angry because I was a beast/man, a wild beast, who had, for the sake of children, disciplined my urges towards going to work every day to a job that did not interest me. I had restrained my desire for rest and pleasure. I felt enormous resentment that I had to restrain myself while they lived largely unrestrained.