Tornado Dream

I talk to a lot of people about their dreams and I hear this one statement over and over again. “I have bad dreams. I don’t know if I want to know what my dreams mean.” Or “You don’t want to hear my dreams.” This first step of exploring your dreams will help the many people who fear what their dreams are telling them to understand what is going on.

Of the essences of a dream is allegory. Think of a dream like a short story you’re reading where people, places and objects symbolize other things. Take a tornado, for example. Let’s say you find yourself in the house you grew up in talking to a houseful of relatives, both living and dead. You’re standing by a window and and see a tornado heading for the house and take cover in a basement bathroom. You make there just in time to see the tornado rip the house above you apart. It’s totally destroyed along with all your relatives.

You awaken with a start. Your heart’s racing and you’re overcome with anxiety and many other negative emotions. The dream is so real that it takes you a good thirty seconds to realize you were dreaming. It was just a dream, yet you feel a weighty sense of importance attached to the dream.
If you’re not aware that you’ve just experienced an allegory and take a dream like that literally, like most people, you’re probably thinking that a tornado will destroy the house you grew up in the next time you all get together.

But what about the dead relatives? What if the house you grew up in no longer exists? These two questions don’t get answered unless you abandon your literal view of the dream.
Here’s the interpretation of the dream. The house you grew up in filled with relatives represents the family bloodline. The tornado represents something that comes along and brings destruction to the bloodline of your family. But what does it mean for you to take refuge in the basement bathroom? In the contest of this dream a basement bathroom represents a place of safety hidden from the destruction. The very definition of a bathroom is a place you go to get cleaned up.

A lot of dreamers who have tornado dreams or dreams that feature other natural disasters wiping our their whole family typically feel some fear when they wake up. They’re afraid, yet they feel that what they just experienced carries a weighty sense of importance. If the dreamer approaches this dream from the mindset that this is a bd dream and they’re afraid to know what it means, they may never receive the valuable message the dream is telling them.

How can a dream like this have a valuable message for the dreamer, you may ask?

Here’s an example. Let’s say this dreamer was born into a family of alcoholics and DUIs run rampant. Then let’s say this dreamer is in college and had gone drinking a few nights before they had this dream. They had no other way back to the dorm so they got in their car and drove back and narrowly avoided an accident. The last few days there’s been one thought rattling around in the dreamer’s mind about being just another family statistic. The dreamer has the desire to break away from the family history of DUI arrests, but has been afraid they will simply fall into line and repeat the past. They’ve been drinking a little more than they should have been lately, and knew they shouldn’t have driven, but they did. Then a few nights later they had the dream.

It’s understandable why the dreamer is afraid this dream is bringing them bad news, but here’s the valuable message it is showing them. Remeber the bathroom the dream hid in to escape the destruction? As I’ve stated before, a bathroom represents a place where you go to get cleaned up. The message for the dreamer is simply this: if you go to a place that is private to get cleaned up you will avoid the destruction that has so easily taken out so many members of your family.
Sounds like AA to me.

EB

Photo credit: BrianKhoury via Foter.com / CC BY-ND