Begin with a symbolic lens

Symbolic thinking has many gradations, beginning with the specific meanings of signs: the familiar man/woman icons for public restrooms to animal crossing signs on roadways to skull and crossbones poison warnings. We can move a notch up to figures of speech: he froze, she’s an angel, and they’re all wet. Feelings are often conveyed through body-oriented equivalences, from I can’t stomach it to I have a lump in my throat—and by the way, my new boss is a pain in the (you know where). What about feeling hot under the collar—or antsy or blue? Actions are also described symbolically: she’s drowning her sorrows and he cut off his nose to spite his face. 

Moving to more complexity, what about tried-and-true tropes about the symbolic significance of oblong objects and boxes (c’mon–you know)—or intuiting that underground structures from caves to basements may represent the unconscious? From here, symbolic thinking may extend to the eldritch forests of fairy tales, where weird things are practically guaranteed to happen—or the sea, the vast unconscious that is both the bountiful source of life and bringer of brutal death.

Symbols in dreams

Dreams use symbols, too. The symbols in our dreams are not “created” but arise from a vast repository of pre-existing images in the unconscious. Almost everything has a taproot into the human storehouse of primordial and archetypal images, from honeybees to hunting, or mermaids to money. Dream symbols ask us to turn ego’s perspective upside down, spin it around, and consider multiple—even contradictory–facets of meaning.

Let’s go with bees. If someone dreamed of bees and was allergic to bee stings, we might assume bees represent something feared, perhaps fatal. We might even ask if the dream bees represented a warning about being “stung” in a waking life situation. But what if the dream bees represent stinging the dreamer into a new possibility? What if they show up in their worker bee aspect, conveying assurance that current labors will yield the honey of success? Bees may even represent the eternal hive of being and building to which we all belong. Symbols beckon us to experience a new perspective, the ‘aha’ of discovery: that’s it.

We aren’t used to this kind of symbolic communication. It comes from depths we’ve all but forgotten: our ancient language of image and feeling. Like electrical transformers, symbols convert the voltage of instinct to meaning consciousness can receive. The symbols in our dreams may be perplexing or perturbing, but they exert a pull on our attention, invite us into psychic realities, and help us be more of who we truly are.