Making Sense of a Dream
Let’s face it, on the surface dreams don’t make much sense. Dreamers all over the world are falling asleep tonight and finding themselves onboard a cruise ship in the desert, pulling apples out of their ears, and finding themselves at work. Oh, how we love to dream about work! Anthing can happen in the world of dreams which often leaves us scratching our heads wondering what just happened to us.
Dreams don’t seem rational to us because we’re applying the logic of our everyday world to them. For example, let’s say you enter a dream where we’re on our way to the ophthalmologist (eye doctor). As you approach the office you have this image appear in your mind’s eye of Earnest Borgnine being your eye doctor. You see him stabbing large shards of glass in one of your eyes. You’re overcome by fear and immediately wake up.
The first thing you may ask is why would I have a dream about Earnest Borgine? I’m not even a fan. Why would he be doing such a thing to me? And perhaps the biggest question of all, Why is he my eye doctor?
While all these questions are going through your mind, you’re completely missing the point that the reason Earnest Borgnine is even in your dream at all is because his last name is actually Borgnino which transalates blind in one eye. The dream is telling you that something that appears to be beneficial in helping clarify the vision for your life could actually cause great harm to that vision.
There’s so much that you’re missing in this wonderful wold of dreams because your logic bound mind is trying to make sense out of the most confusing part of your dream. Now, it’s important for you to know that everyone’s done this. It’s a natural inclination of a dreamer to fixate on one strange image in your dream and it ends up clouding the meaning of everything else.
If your dreams don’t seem rational its because you’re trying to decypher it with the rationale you use in your everyday life. How, then, do you tell that Earnest Borgnine is in your dream to extinguish some aspect of vision for your life? You must look through at your dream through the eyes of higher logic. The first tip I have for you is to change the way you look at symbols in your dreams. Instead of asking why Earnest Borgnine is your ophthalmologist (eye doctor) and why he is trying to kill you with sharp shards of glass, ask something like what connects him to the sense of sight? If the answer isn’t obvious, then review the list of movies and television shows he was in. If you think back over your life and don’t remember being drawn to his acting and never meeting him, then you’ve hit a dead end.
Next, ask what’s the most basic definition of Earnest Borgnine. A man? Yes. An actor? Yes, of course. But there are a lot of actors in the world and even more men. So then you’re left with the question. Why this man? Why this actor? Why not Steve Martin? Why not Anthony Hopkins? Why not Nicholas Cage?
When I go through the list of questions to get to the bottom of the most basic definition of a dream symbol,I’ve learned to listen to my intuitive side. In a case like this it is not uncommon for me to hear something like ‘Look up the meaning of his name’. A suggestion like this often comes after I’ve tried everything else, so I give it a shot. That’s how I solved the mystery of this dream, by simply researching the meaning of a name.
How, then, do I arrive at the conslusion that something that appears to be beneficial to your vision will actually be detrimental? In the dream you’re on your way to get an examination from a doctor — one who is supposed to help in keeping vision not take it away. How did I know the dream was talking about a life’s vision and not physical vision? Symbols in dreams are metaphores for something else.
EB