Off Topic: Dream Interpretation or The Stuff of Nightmares ...

I have no idea what other people dream about, but frankly, my own dreams can be pretty weird. Like last night I dreamed that I walked inside the kitchen, opened one of the cupboards and an oversize and goldfish fell out flapped about for a second or two and died. Needless to say, I woke up in a cold sweat and probably would have gone racing out to the kitchen to check the cupboards were it not for the fact that my kitchen is over the other side of the house from my bedroom and by the time I got halfway, harsh morning light and the urge to use the toilet stopped in me in my tracks. Cue detour to the water closet. (Yes, I am a nice, Australian girl who lives in a house that has a water closet that is separate to the bathroom. I have no idea why my American counterparts have never embraced this idea, though I guess saying going to the bathroom does sound like a neat euphemism compared to travelling to the dunny, or taking a piss or something ...) 

Anyway, dream interpretation is something that has always interested me. Apparently to dream of a goldfish is a positive sign. For a young woman, it is indicative of wealth, though a dead or sickly goldfish is negative and means disappointment. Does this mean my future is bad ...

Ah, but you see to properly interpret the dream, you have to look at other symbols and put it all together. Apparently, opening a cupboard means to reveal a truth. So, I'm revealing a truth about disappointment? Hmm. You know, now I'm starting to wish that I didn't go into it. So maybe I'll go a bit further back and look at things that I dreamed of say, during my childhood and see whether those things came true ...

When I was a kid, I used to have vivid nightmares about a human skeleton that would tap on my bedroom window at night. I'm not sure what the skeleton actually intended to do to me thereafter, because that was the point when I always woke up screaming and my mother would walk inside my bedroom and try to conceal her grumbling, while my big brothers sniggered at me from the bedroom next door. Because you know, twelve and fourteen year olds are, like, way to cool to be scared by anything, especially not the stuff that terrifies their seven-year-old sister. Ever. Plus my brothers have never had a single nightmare. Ever. Ha-ha. The dreams continued until I was about eight or nine and upon the advice of a school friend that instead of screaming when I saw the skeleton, I should raise my middle finger at it. Skelly (as I called him,) ran down our darkened front lawn and has never been seen nor heard of again ...

Apparently, a skeleton symbolises death. 

Obviously, I am not dead. No one in my family died until I was fifteen. My childhood was a happy and healthy one. So I'm really questioning the validity of that one. I think it was just something that frightened me. I've never really liked looking at those plastic skeletons, like those ones you see inside a doctors office. I'm not a huge fan of goldfish for that matter, either. I'm definitely open minded enough to say that dreams can represent our subconscious fears and desires, and I yes, have some sense of spiritual awareness but I do question the validity of a one-size fits-all meaning to a particular thing, object or symbol in a dream. We're all unique. I think our dreams all have unique meanings. 

Otherwise, I would have been dead, years ago.

Comments

Andrew Leon said…
The problem with symbology like that is that the person has to be aware of that stuff for it to work. For instance, how could I dream about a goldfish if I didn't know what a goldfish was.
5 January 2014 at 10:25
Kathryn White said…
That's exactly right, Andrew.

Also, I think as individuals we have different meanings that we unconsciously place on different things. What a goldfish represents to me for example, might represent something entirely different to you. One person might be more concerned with the colour of the fish, because colour is quite important to them, another might be concerned as to whether the fish was in or out of water. There are so many different variables there, it's impossible to give a one-size-fits-all meaning to something like that.
7 January 2014 at 20:08
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