Have you ever had a sex dream that has freaked you out? It is not as unusual as you might think. We are used to our dreams being a bit strange, sometimes hard to understand and cryptic, and sometimes seemingly mundane (actually they are rarely as ‘mundane’ as we think they are but that is another thing….). But what about the shocking ones? The ones which leave you uncomfortable for hours, days, months even afterwards and which you just wish you could banish from your memory? Most people have them.
In such disconcerting dreams we can become monsters. We kill, rape, sleep with utterly inappropriate people. Sometimes people see a side of themselves in the dream which they don’t recognise.
Sleeping with the enemy dreams are a case in point here. It is surprisingly common to dream about sex with someone who you had not been aware that you were drawn to in waking life. People often find it very difficult to come to terms with these dreams, fearing that they are harbouring a desire for intimacy with this (inappropriate) person which is in some way ‘surfacing’. Often this brings great shame with it, and anguished secrecy follows.
So what is it about? I don’t know. I mean I don’t know what THAT dream is for YOU. But what I do know is that it is about something (in the sense that it is probably not random), and it is almost certainly not about actually sleeping with, or wanting to sleep with the person you are dreaming about. Perhaps you want to ‘join’ with them in some way – for example they might have a quality which you need to develop so you are being shown a dream of ‘taking in’ that quality, or of ‘becoming one’ with that way of being. It might be that you long to be close to that person. Perhaps you want to neutralise something about that person and the symbol of sex stands in some way for smothering them or more precisely this aspect that they hold. Deep reflection, and maybe a skilled helper, can help you discern what the dream might be offering you.
You can’t be a fundamentalist about dreams. They are ‘as if’ scenarios. They are revealing your inner world in pictures in order to show what it is like, not what it is. It is AS IF you wanted to join with this person, or as if you wanted to join with someone LIKE THIS. Once you grasp this about your dreamworld it all begins to fall in to place. The unconscious reveals itself in symbols. Dreams tell you what it is LIKE, not what it is.
So welcome the mornings when you wake up and start to blush. It could be the key you need to unlock the next stage of your knowing.
by Alchemical Garden: the Body of Spirit (Katy Baldock's exploration in transpersonal psychotherapy)
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