Recurring Dreams: Familiar Friends or Cause for Concern?
How do we make sense of dreams that keep revisiting… and why is it so important to pay attention to them? (Free video for paid subscribers)
We’ve all had the experience of waking up from a stunning yet completely mysterious dream. They can carry such a sense of meaning and potency, yet couched in a form that we simply can’t decipher. They can be populated with people from our past that we haven’t thought of in years. Or immerse us in bizarre locations or situations that feel awkward or frightening. When such dreams keep repeating, they are especially important to pay attention to.
Our dreammaker is telling us something again and again because there is an aspect of the dream dynamic that we haven’t resolved. Often dreamers lament that they are still dreaming of their ex-partner, a person they feel they have well and truly left behind. Perhaps it was a difficult break-up and it’s painful to keep having nocturnal reminders of them. What such dreams are saying, however, is that there is something about the person that is still alive for you and needs attention. It doesn’t mean you want to re-engage with them, even if you are embracing them in the dream.
Recurrent dreams are usually negatively-toned and can be annoyingly insistent. They will fade away once you have truly come to terms with them. How might you do that? My sense of this, after working with literally thousands of dreams, is to let go of trying to figure them out using daytime logic. Dreams have a poetic sensibility and it’s best to think of them as images driven by the strongest emotional undercurrents in our lives. They can also carry images of our unresolved trauma.
Rather than thinking your way through a dream, trying feeling into it, immersing in its strangeness with an open mind. This will be easier said than done because recurrent dreams often carry an inherent challenge or something we are resisting.
Be a little bit contrarian. Try on the opposite of your initial reaction to the dream. For example, imagine you are the character in the dream that you have an adverse reaction to. What is it like from their perspective? What about them might actually be helpful in your own life situation? Or step back, open your mind to all possibilities, and simply ask, what does the dream itself want? (The video below includes a guided experiential practice to help you answer this.)