The Psychology of Dreams - The Naked One

So, you dream you are standing in front of your class at school, or you are about to receive the ball during a sporting event, when suddenly you realise you are naked…completely naked. You are overcome with the awareness that you are naked and are terrified of being seen by everyone around you. The feelings that come to you are an acute embarrassment and fear, as well as a sense of isolation – you the naked one and all of them the observers.

You’d struggle a great deal to find someone who has never had such a dream. These dreams tend to manifest during adolescents, but can still crop up during adulthood for some. As discussed in the previous post, dreams and their meanings are personal, and a similar dream can have very different meaning to two different people. However, such a dream is so common, it is reasonable to, tentatively, use the shared symbolism to abstract out a meaning. Although, it is important to acknowledge that this is exactly that – a tentative, broad abstraction and analysis – it may apply to most, but will not apply to all.

So, what does it mean?

First, we need to understand what nakedness means; what it is a symbol of. Very regularly, nakedness is a symbol of vulnerability. We often talk of the ‘naked truth’ – a truth that has been stripped of all padding. To be naked is to be stripped of all protection. To be caught naked, as in the dream, is to be found out in our most vulnerable state. We can only be aware of our vulnerabilities, when we are self-aware and self-conscious enough. That is why, for toddlers, there is often no concern at all with being naked (in fact, for some it is a preferred state of being). Similar symbology is used in the religious stories of Adam and Eve – once Eve ate the apple the “scales fell from her eyes”, in other words she became self-aware, self-conscious, aware of her vulnerability, and her and Adam both then noticed they were naked. Later, when God came down to see what was going on, Adam hid because he was embarrassed of his nakedness.

In this dream we assume that the dreamer is feeling particularly vulnerable. The next symbol, would be the activity that they are caught naked in. Sports, presentation, socialising etc. This may be a good indicator of the dreamers specific perceived vulnerability. If it was a presentation, for example, perhaps the dreamer feels that they are not strong enough academically and are afraid of this being noticed in front of all of their class/colleagues.

It is clear here how such dreams (even though this simple example lacks the complexity of an actual dream) can be an opening into finding out things about ourselves, or therapy clients, that we perhaps didn’t know. Then we can work on improving our confidence in such areas, reducing our perceived vulnerability and improving our confidence.

In the next post we will look at another common dream, with more complex symbolism within.