Posts Tagged ‘context in dreams’

Context Theme

Understanding dreams is in many ways similar to understanding language. Important to both is context. The events, people and environments of dreams are multidimensional, just like words in a sentence. Morton Hunt, in his book The Universe Within illustrates how words have an unusual dimension. For instance, what do you make of the following sentence? “Mary heard the ice-cream truck coming down the street. She remembered her birthday money and ran into the house.”

You have probably already have an image of Mary, her age, skin colour, an approximation of what she is dressed in, and what she is doing. You believe she is going to buy an ice cream and she is young. Ask yourself what hair colour she has for instance. But where does it say this in the sentence?

However, if you change any of the words – say truck for bus or money for gun, an entirely new image of Mary arises.

The factors relating to how we extract meaning out of words and images is crucial when considering your dreams. In your dreams any one factor – such as teeth or boat, alters enormously the meaning because of its context with the other dream factors, such as objects, people, setting and plot or theme. Get a sense of this overall connection when looking at the various parts of your dream. Get a view of the various parts of your dream then put them together like sentences in a paragraph.

Also context explains meaning. For instance in this following quote from Leslie Weatherhead’s book Psychology in Service of the Soul, context is very important.

“For instance, in Mesopotamia you might have an officer who had blue blood in his veins and who at Oxford had been a blue. Rarely would he be a blue after dark when the whiskey went round, unless of course he went out on the blue on some stunt or other. Then he might be in a blue funk, and the air would be blue with his language. But in time he would recover from his fit of the blues, get his leave and pay, and blue the whole of the latter in a single day of the former, and he wouldn’t spend it on blue stockings either.”

So when interpreting, although we have to understand each individual symbol, we also have to see that symbol in context with the rest of the dream. Only in this way can we understand it properly.

See: Key words – Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – Secrets of Power Dreaming