The Psychology of Dreams - The Late One
You are getting ready to leave the house, but you are running late. Frantically late. You stumble downstairs, but you can’t find your shoes. Once you find them, the keys aren’t where they usually are. As you search for them, incredibly frustrated and feeling anxious that you will never leave the house, you notice a snake slithering through the living room but, in your odd dream state, don’t think much of it. There is a woman sitting on the sofa, even though you cannot see her face, you know she is beautiful. Yet she turns away from you and refuses to answer you when you ask her if she knows where the keys are. You feel a distance between you that adds to the frustration. You are now so late you start to panic…and then, wake up.
There are three symbols I’ve highlighted within this dream and we shall take them in turn. Firstly, time. Running late and being unable to actually get going to the place you need to go, even if you do not know where that is, is a very common dream. It is often associated with the idea that one is running out of time to do something they must do. Or that there is something they are constantly avoiding doing that they know they must/should do. It can also be associated with a fear of ageing, of time constantly ticking away. This symbol is most obviously present in ‘Hook’ when captain Hook is terrified of clocks and smashes them whenever he comes across them, to Peter Pan he is the symbol of ageing, an end to childhood, which he fears so much.
A snake is also a very common symbol, one that has been interpreted in great detail. We can’t even touch the surface of snake symbolism here, but one possible way it can be perceived, is that of a suffocating space. Some snakes are constrictors, the wrap themselves around prey and, literally, squeeze the life out of them. A snake in a dream, therefore, could represent a feeling of losing life, of something in your life that is slowly killing your self, your authentic self.
Lastly, the beautiful woman. Jung highlighted the anima archetype as the internal feminine within a male, the opposite of the animus. To be psychologically healthy one must not supress their anima – often linked with self-awareness, emotional-awareness, creativity and spontaneity. A man who suppresses these parts of himself, is suppressing his anima and therefore becomes psychologically uneven – perhaps in the over-rational direction – lopsided.
Combining our dream symbols, we have a man who is running out of time, either because of ageing or some window of opportunity and, in order do whatever it is he is running out of time to do, he must embrace his anima, the spontaneous, creative side of himself. Yet they are currently distant and can’t even look at each other. As a result, he is suffocating a part of himself and, if he doesn’t act soon, he feels he will lose it all together – he will never leave the house.
To analyse such dreams ourselves can be an incredibly powerful way of having a conversation with our unconscious. I would recommend writing down any dreams that stick with you and going through them to attempt to create a story as we have done in the last two posts. If it feels like the story you created makes sense and applies to your life currently, then it almost certainly does!