I’ve noticed that dreams resemble the concerns of waking life more literally during those 10-15 minute snoozes when you drop straight back into a light dream state, than during those longer and deeper periods of dream sleep. This may seem obvious, and important to keep in mind when indulging in dream interpretation.
But perhaps they can still be useful!
Example: I woke up in the early hours (that annoying 1.5 hours before alarm will go off when you feel awake but you KNOW you will drift off again about 10 mins before alarm and that extra 10 mins of sleep will make ALL THE DIFFERENCE to your day (even though you know by now that it won’t FFS just get up would you)), worrying about money, feeling a little like my spending had become out of control over the last couple of months, and how I would need to reign it in for some upcoming plans, including moving to part-time work hours in order to spend more time making art (now that I am an artist with a day job).
Eventually I was able to let go of the thoughts for a while and drift off into short, dream-filled snoozes. In one of the dreams I found myself in a block of toilets. It was very busy. A woman rushed into the cubical next to mine. She seemed upset and I was afraid she would be sick. Through the gap between the bottom of the partition and the floor I could see the woman’s handbag. When she got up to leave she inadvertently kicked it across the floor into the cubicle next to her. She didn’t notice and she left without it!
The handbag meaning seems obvious. Handbag = money (also, having it all together, being prepared etc etc). Woman in a rush, lost her handbag, hadn’t noticed it had gotten away from her – clearly related to my immediate waking worries about overspending and not paying attention to it for a time. No great mystery there.
But what about the toilet image? Toilets and bathrooms occur a lot for me in dreams. Perhaps I can use this dream to more accurately confirm their meaning?
I already suspect a link to an an early touchstone memory – a very strong and early memory of an event that has had a lasting impact. The fear that the woman in the dream was going to be sick was a bit of a clue to this. The memory: in my first home, in the downstairs toilet watching someone being violently sick. I recall feeling a shift somewhere in my brain, a feeling that something had changed and that things might never be the same again. I was frozen in fear, then began creeping away very slowly to get as far away as possible. As I was only 5 years old I couldn’t go far.
Given the situation, it is possible that toilets/bathrooms in dreams represent fear and lack of control for me, feeling trapped. This makes sense given that emetophobia is largely based on lack of control. And it makes sense as the worries around money are about not having been as accountable to myself and just feeling a bit out of control with spending recently.
So even though the meaning of THIS dream is obvious, related directly to what I was thinking about before drifting off, it also confirms to me the meaning of the less obvious dream image, one the recurs often*. Snooze dreams can be calibration dreams. I can apply this meaning to future dreams and pay more attention to the finer details.
Easy as that.
*Why didn’t my touchstone memory take place … I don’t know, at the Taj Mahal or Machu Picchu or something? Bognor Regis?
