Jsbodhi

I also have nightmares that I've murdered someone and I spend the whle dream trying to cover it up- I keep making mistakes and tricky homicide detectives are onto me.
Very stressful!

( I'm a criminology major at school )

EndGameNYC

Thank you.

Other people's comments around the dream are no more or less valid than my own.

Two things (at least), based on my work, education and training.

The associations that the dreamer produces in response to the dream content are much more helpful than the associations from the person who's interpreting the dream. My interpretations of SIS's dream were generalizations based on the little I know about her and where she is in her life at the present moment. But they only tell a very small, perhaps also insignificant, part of the story. There is a corollary to this in waking life. The "distance" between how a person sees herself, understands and interprets her own thinking and other behaviors, and that of how the rest of the world sees her can be most revealing. For example, when I convince myself that I'm a "good guy," while the rest of the world consistently responds to (i.e., "interprets") me as though I'm anything but, then something is terribly wrong in terms of self-appraisal.

The unconscious mind is not bound by logic, space or time -- past, present and future all bleed into one another, so there is a great deal of largely emotional content that, though it evokes past mood states, is alive in the present. These mood states are also "present" when we're awake, though largely inaccessible to consciousness in terms of meaning and import. Hopes, fears, wishes, trauma, expectations. We're too busy with the demands of our waking lives to take them into account, and our unconscious protects us from the potential trauma that our dreams may represent. This is only one reason why many of us consider there to be both manifest content (the actual content of the dream) and latent content (the symbolic meaning of the dream).

We dream in symbols because that's the currency with which our unconscious works, and because the symbolic nature of our unconscious, and therefore our dreams, is not an in-your-face, direct assault on our ideas around who we are and how we view ourselves. Again, as a means of protection. We're not built to take all of that in in its unvarnished form. To make a gross simplification, we will be able to interpret the meaning of our dreams when we are ready to do so. This is often where the therapist comes in.

In waking life, we frequently and unintentionally "give away" our unconscious content by what we say, what we write and what we do, including things like facial expressions, tone of voice and body language. Our lives are written all over us; we only need to know how to read. We can also "get away with" anything we do in our dreams without obvious or significant consequences. In this sense, and as per Freud, dreams are often attempts at "wish-fulfillment" without adverse consequences. Drinking dreams will not get you a DUI or provoke your partner to change the locks. Having an affair in your dreams will not destroy your marriage. Killing your boss will not land you in jail. Another instance of protection on the part of the unconscious.

Second, the mood of the dreamer during different parts of the dream, for me, is significant. It represents an "older" mood state or states that persist and that reveal a great deal about the dreamer. These mood states remain largely inaccessible during waking life, except under circumstances of extreme vulnerability, recent trauma, or what I refer to as "existential moments." They sometimes appear "spontaneously," at least to the observer, and for no obvious reason. It is again the dreamer's associations around the mood state(s) that are most helpful.

In a therapeutic relationship, I wouldn't offer anything about the dream until the patient did, unless and until I thought it would be important to do so.