Did someone or some situation affect you so much that they inspired a dream that night?
If so, there are two big questions to ask. Answering them can save you aggravation and improve communication.
Living your life, meeting people, and encountering troubling situations during the day trigger dreams at night.
When you figure out what the dreams are really about, you’ll understand how the person or situation inspired the dream. There’s something about them or their actions that didn’t make sense. When you dreamed about them or the situation, your subconscious was probably trying to parse the situation out.
Or maybe the dream made perfect sense to you. Maybe it’s something that shocked you, leaves you utterly speechless.
Deep down, maybe you realize that if you had to endure that situation, it might break you.
When it comes to dreamwork, these feelings are common. People like to feel like they’re adequate to their challenges.
Question #1: What is it like to walk in their shoes?
This is the first question to ask. Sometimes your dream is doing it for you.
“Walking in their shoes” is a way of saying “being in their position.”
In one dream, I very much wanted to go to see the Arizona Diamondbacks play. Unfortunately, I kept pooping on the floor. I had to decide whether to leave my poop on the floor and go anyway. Or, alternately, I could clean it up and deal with the poop right then and there. If I stayed to clean, I might poop again and have more poop to deal with. Or, I could go to the game and poop on the floor of the stadium, which would be gross and embarrassing.
This dream was inspired by a patient I had who was reacting poorly to her colostomy and the dilemmas she faced. She had a hard time mentally dealing with it, how she pooped into a bag that was pasted on the side of her abdomen. Insurance doesn’t cover colostomy supplies. She wondered if the colostomy could ever be reversed.
Her behavior, considered in terms of people who don’t have colostomies, could be baffling. The frustrating dilemma that I had in my dream hinted at the emotion she felt. There was no easy way for her to “fix” the colostomy. For me, understanding this intimately meant there was no call for frustration on my part. It built empathy in me for her situation.
Question #2: Does this dream directly apply to you, or is it for your background information?
Once, I had a dream after spending much of the day with a black patient who was proud of being black. That night, I dreamed of an outfield that was covered with “negro juices.”
The former all-black baseball league was known as the Negro League. Nobody uses the word “negro” anymore.
Why the outfield? Well, for me, that’s a position I associate with great black players. When I fell in love with the game, I was entranced by Ozzie Smith who was a black shortstop for the San Diego Padres and St. Louis Cardinals. He was always great, of course. But other black players like Dave Winfield and Dave Parker were showstoppingly great with the throws they could make from the Outfield. Parker, especially, blew my mind when I was watching the 1979 World Series, and he threw out a runner all the way from the outfield.
Willie Mays, too, is associated with the outfield. Kenny Lofton, too. I could go on and on.
The combination of interacting with the proud black man and my love for baseball produced that dream.
Realizing that I enjoyed the athleticism of these great black outfielders is more “background information” than anything that’s immediately useful.
The idea that there was once a league for black Americans, while interesting, is unfortunate. Baseball fans didn’t get to see the best players compete against each other. That had to wait for Jackie Robinson in the National League and Larry Doby in the American League.
The idea that black players (and now players from all over the world) have had a big impact on the game isn’t particularly insightful. Lots of sportswriters have written about it. The dream is useful for me to note because of the emotion. According to the Negro League Hall of Fame, the black players didn’t have as trustworthy records kept about their feats. We’ll never really be able to compare players like Honus Wagner, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Ty Cobb. Baseball, after all, is a war between a pitcher and a batter AND a game of statistics.
That we won’t is a tragedy.
If your dream is inspired by an encounter with someone who makes you think, ask two questions:
1. What’s it like to be them?
2. Does the dream apply to you, or is it for your background information?
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James Cobb, RN, MSN, is an emergency department nurse and the founder of the Dream Recovery System. He aims to provide his readers with simple, actionable ways to improve their health and maximize their quality of life.