"Someone is Trying to Break Into My House!" A Dream Interpretation

Upcoming Dream Workshop

This practice of community dreamwork at The Salome Institute has been an enlivening opportunity to join with others who are interested in expanding their relationship with the unconscious, symbols, and dreams. In this series, Satya will introduce some foundational elements of recording and observing dreams for those who are new to the practice, as well as our process of exploring dreams in community online. Then, in each of our six sessions, Satya will host live dreamwork for two participants who have expressed interest in “working a dream” in a live, interactive format.

Dear Satya:

Q: I have a recurring dream that someone is trying to break into my house. It's usually a very scary man, maybe about forty years old. (I get chills even thinking about him now). When I wake up from this dream, I often have to get out of bed to make sure the door is locked before I can go back to sleep.

A: Oh dreamer, this is such a common theme. I'm glad you brought it to our attention so we can work through it together. You want these dreams to go away and stop taunting you, I know. You wonder what they could possibly mean and why they're afflicting you. They're disturbing your sleep and penetrating your waking life with the fear they contain. These dreams are very important dreams, but they rarely mean anything like what you're likely to think they do.

First of all, I'd like to refer you to a little post I wrote about recurring nightmares. Please give it a read to help gauge what type of nightmares you typically suffer from. It can be important to identify some trauma history around nightmares, in addition to overall symbolism.

Okay, before we go on, I need to ask you to do one more thing: Get a piece of paper and a pen. Go on... I know it's old-fashioned. Now take a moment to go back into the feeling of this dream, then write down as many descriptors of this scary guy as you can muster. But write down what he's like besides being scary. Does he have a job? Does he have a family? What do you know about him that you might be surprised to know. Then, finally, ask yourself what you think he wants from you.

It's really important that you try to get to know this guy because he is your shadow. He's you. I know, it's yucky to hear that, but keep listening. This is important stuff. When we have an idea of who we are, our perspective about ourselves can become kind of rigid and fixed. Those things you avoid acknowledging about yourself to feel more comfortable don't just go away. They get cut off from your awareness and then tend to fester and get pissed. In your dreams, they turn into actual figures, and they can turn kind of primal and wild in their frustration at being neglected. These figures are part of your whole person, but they're being left out in the cold. No wonder they want to break in.

So, the underlying sense in this dream is that you feel under attack. You likely feel like you're under attack or in danger in some form out in the world too. But your dreams are telling you something very clearly here: despite all the dangers in the world that may cause a person to feel fear, you are currently under attack by your own self. Nothing more. Get real with yourself here. Try to be gentle and forgiving. Take your time. What are you running from? What are you trying not to notice? Who are you scared of being?

The answer to these questions can be found in gently trying to understand who this figure is that's trying to break in. There may also be information in what house you're in in these dreams. Is it your current home or a childhood home, for instance? Notice what time of your life these dreams are situated in, and you may gather more information about what part of your life they're speaking to.

As you do this exploration, take heart! There is always a happy ending when these dreams resolve. You will find that this man actually just wanted to tell you he loved you, for instance. Or he may hand you flowers. I know this might sound absurd, but this man is not as scary as he feels. The anticipation of jumping out of a plane is scarier than the jump itself (or so I've heard...). Similarly, anticipating an encounter with someone you're trying to avoid tends to be worse than the encounter itself. Try not to think about this too much, but work on engaging with this man a little more directly—either in your dreams, if you can, or in waking life projected onto strangers or people you don't like. Get to know him and what he wants. Try not to avoid him internally or externally. Discover what's happening when you start to feel under attack in waking life. Stay safe, but also bring your guards down a little. Get curious. You may discover that your life changes in positive ways as this happens. And you'll be surprised by how.

P.S. You may enjoy listening to this Radio Lab episode called "Haunted Dreams" in which a man who has been plagued by the same dreams as you--for twenty years!-- finds a way to make them stop. It's a great episode but--spoiler alert--they stop rather short of explaining why the dreams were there in the first place and what changed for the man after the dreams stopped. Perhaps your own exploration into this territory can illuminate those questions further.

Have you had a dream like this? Leave a comment and share!

Satya Doyle Byock is a Jungian psychotherapist, the Director of The Salome Institute, and the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood (Random House, 2022).

"I Had a Nightmare that My Father was Dying." A Dream Interpretation.

Upcoming Dream Workshop

This practice of community dreamwork at The Salome Institute has been an enlivening opportunity to join with others who are interested in expanding their relationship with the unconscious, symbols, and dreams. In this series, Satya will introduce some foundational elements of recording and observing dreams for those who are new to the practice, as well as our process of exploring dreams in community online. Then, in each of our six sessions, Satya will host live dreamwork for two participants who have expressed interest in “working a dream” in a live, interactive format.

Originally published on The Hairpin.

Dear Satya:

Q. I took a nap and I dreamed about my father passing away. He was laying in a coffin, but in real life he is still alive. This dream was a nightmare for me I was crying and very afraid.

Dear Dreamer: I'm so sorry! Those dreams are awful. You wake up confused about who's dead and who's alive, and maybe worried that the dream is a premonition of an actual event. As you've adjusted to daily living, you've probably come to find that your father is alive and not in literal danger. So what does this dream mean for you?

Without having spoken with you, I would gander a couple of strong possibilities: your father complex is dying due to some new events or awareness in your life, and/or you have an unconscious and confusing death wish for your father. Let me explain.

If you're anything like anyone alive, your relationship with your father is complicated. In your own particular blend of feelings that all children share, you love your father and are angry with him. You are hurt from past events and also grateful for things. Unconsciously, you balance out all of your conscious beliefs about him with their opposites. For instance, a woman may dream of her father all the time but in therapy will proclaim to have had a very good childhood with him, with nothing more to say. After months pass, however, she may begin to have conscious memories of his angry episodes or feeling his cold tone filter throughout the house. Consciously, she liked her dad. Unconsciously, things were much more complicated.

Carl Jung's notion of a "complex" is a little like what acupuncturists work on when they're seeking to clear a stuck point in the body: it's a bundle of energy in your system that, when triggered by a word or a life event or even a nostalgic smell, can release all sorts of information. Until it's triggered though, a complex sits there quietly, unconsciously, invisible to everyone except in certain patterns of behavior. Your "father complex" is your bundle of memories and experiences related to your father and other influential men in your life--including cultural images of the father or men in leadership positions. As an adult, some aspect of the way you view all men is filtered through this complex. A male guru, for instance, may appear all-knowing to a woman with a positive father complex. On the other side, for women who grew up with an angry, unpredictable father, even the kindest, simplest man may appear conniving.

So I would ask you, in what ways has your father complex been triggered lately? Have you begun dating a new man? Do you have a new male teacher? Or has your relationship with your father in life changed in any way? Listen to the image: The father is passing away. The father is dead. The father is going to be buried. What does that evoke for you? Perhaps you're moving through a chapter of growth and you are gaining your own authority and leadership within yourself, or perhaps you're able to be that much more present with a male partner now because you can see him more clearly for who he is. If you take some time to journal about this dream, letting your mind wander and your body experience the image, some significant insights are likely to arise.

As I said above, the second major possibility to explore is that you have some unconscious death wish for your father. To get into this tricky territory, let me quote Carl Jung on a woman's dream of her dead mother:

…there does exist in our dreamer the tendency to be rid of her mother; expressed in the language of the unconscious, she wants her mother to die. But the dreamer should certainly not be saddled with this tendency because, strictly speaking, it was not she who fabricated the dream, but the unconscious.

Note that Jung is careful to emphasize what I want to emphasize with you: "The very fact that she can dream of such a thing proves that she does not consciously think of it. She has no notion why her [father] should be got rid of."

Knowing absolutely nothing of your particular situation, it is hard for me to venture a guess as to why your unconscious may be harboring some infantile death wish for your father. Again, however, I wonder if your current romantic relationship status may have something to do with it. Are you seeking to enter into a relationship of which you feel your father would disapprove? Are you considering marriage and therefore--forgive my awkward heteronormative take here--needing to psychologically supplant the primary man in your life? Consider the deep cultural roots around the replacement of the father with the husband--think of the tradition of fathers "giving away" their daughters in wedding ceremonies.

Whether it's a secret death wish or simply an increasing awareness around the father complex in your life, your dream suggests a threshold time. Some significant aspect of your life is changing. The image of death says as much. It is not a sleeping image or a wounded image, it is not a near death, but death itself. Old social customs and mythological tradition holds that when an old king dies, a new king is born and begins his reign. Consider this. The ground is being prepared for a new paradigm; an old ruling paradigm is falling away and a new one is coming.

Have you had a dream like this? Leave a comment and share!

Satya Doyle Byock is a Jungian psychotherapist, the Director of The Salome Institute, and the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood (Random House, 2022).

"I'm Driving My Car and I Can't Slow Down." A Dream Interpretation.

Dear Satya:

I have had several dreams in which I am driving and I can't slow down. Sometimes I run red lights, sometimes I am driving and I cannot figure out how to use the brakes. I am usually very scared but I somehow manage to stay in control of the car.

A: Unfortunately, this is a very common dream theme, but it's one that is indicative of a cultural illness of manic activity. The message from the dream is clear: you need to slow down.

You may even think that you have already slowed things down in your life. If so, the dream is saying "try harder." This is your own unconscious giving you a very clear message. Listen.

Cars in dreams are symbolic of you. They're like turtles' shells, the additional homes or bodies in which we travel through the world. If you have dreams of driving, pay attention. Pay attention to the way in which you are driving, or if you are driving at all. If you're not driving, who is? Who's in the driver's seat? This is very important information. You can develop great insight into what aspect of you is actually in control of your life, or perhaps it's another person in your life altogether.

Your dreams are indicating that you are holding onto control by the skin of your teeth. You may think "but I'm killing it right now! I'm totally in control of things!" If that is the case, this dream is clearly indicating another layer of what is going on, that perhaps you're riding on a degree of mania, feeling on top of it while actually beginning to crash (pun intended). While you are safe for now, you don't really know how you're managing it. After a while, you'll start to pay the price if you don't heed the advice of your dream.

Dreams are often the first line of defense in getting us into alignment with our inner selves. If we're checked out or disengaged from our path in life, our dreams will reflect that. Sometimes, they'll turn into nightmares to get our attention. But if our awareness gets too fragmented, we can fall into physical danger too: we forget to look both ways when crossing the street, we stop paying close attention when driving our car in waking life, maybe we just get angry with people in our lives when we needn't be. It's also possible that following these dreams, an injury or illness may appear to slow us down by force. This may again be what the dream is reflecting directly, with the car representing the body. Take a good look at your immune system, your sleep habits, your eating, and your physical well-being.

Your dream world is your ally. If your dream is telling you to slow down, it's not demanding something you cannot accomplish. Find a way to spend more time alone, to breathe, to stay aware of the moment-to-moment details in your life. Bringing yourself into the moment of whatever it is you may be doing will significantly slow down your internal clock and pace. You'll be the better for it.

Have you had a dream like this? Leave a comment and share!

Satya Doyle Byock is a Jungian psychotherapist, the Director of The Salome Institute, and the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood (Random House, 2022).

"A Menagerie of Wild Animals in the Backyard." A Dream Interpretation.

Dear Satya:

Q: I am in a house that is overrun by wild animals. I walk into a room, the nook just off the kitchen, and I see a Monitor Lizard buried head first in a big vase full of flowers and scummy water. He scurries up and out of the vase as I enter. Outside in the back, courtyard area, a couple of large cats are sitting, maybe a Lion and Cheetah. They were in and out of the house as well. My mom was there, along with other female family members. The animals did pose some danger to us, but there were wary of us as well. It occurred to me that they wanted water, that they were here looking for water. Is that why they had come in from the wild? I assumed that wild animals have ways of getting what they need in the wild, but not anymore, I guess. Not these days. As we stood looking over the yard from above, I wondered to my mom about filling up a kiddie pool with water for the animals. She suggested we do it tomorrow as trying to navigate around them at that moment would be dangerous. I felt for them, though. Tomorrow is a long ways off if they're really thirsty.

A: Thank you, dreamer, for sending in this dream. You shared with me in writing that you woke up from this dream with the word "Menagerie" in your head, and that you hadn't been entirely conscious of the meaning of that word: "a collection of wild animals kept in captivity for exhibition." This word, and the tone of its definition, may provide an interesting insight for us as we explore the rest of your dream. You also shared with me that you weren't feeling physically well at the time of the dream and you wondered if there might be clues to that in the dream.Indeed, the animal nature of your dream suggests a reference to your own animal nature: your physical, instinctual self. The animals have come in from the wild and are invading your home. They're thirsty. I immediately began wondering in exploring this dream why they're thirsty, and what they (you) are thirsty for exactly. I wonder too what it means that they're displaced. The realities of environmental degradation and global warming are bound to show up in the dreams of anyone living in the modern era (we're consciously and unconsciously experiencing it), but the image should still also be looked at symbolically. The ever-expanding cities and shrinking natural world has a psychological correlation for us all. In the modern era, psyche becomes heavily weighted towards the conscious, literal, rational mind and further distanced from the interconnected, mysterious realm of the universe in which we live.

The modern psyche is raised to be narcissistic and sociopathic, with ever-expanding egos and ever-decreasing reverence for whatever it is that we can't understand. But, whether we like it or not, the wild comes back to us. The grass grows up between the cracks of the concrete, the ants return just when you thought they were gone, and the winds and rain may bring a city to its knees with little warning. Is that what's happening in your life? Your wild nature is demanding attention. It's reclaiming territory and making its presence known. Before exploring the deeper symbolic layers of Water, the first "interpretation" of this image might simply be that you're thirsty. Really. This fact may be buried in your consciousness, something which you're not terribly aware of and therefore shows up with your animal nature stating what it's feeling: "I'm dehydrated." Whether or not this could be a symptom of your sickness or of a tendency for you in general, I don't know, but it's a simple reading of the dream that might be valuable for you to explore. The unconscious inhabits all of us, our cells and our muscles, not just the dark reaches of our mind.

On a more symbolic level, I'm going to start by offering you what might seem like another simple statement (or a stoner's attempt at profundity): Water is central to life. Without water, there would be no existence as we know it. Adult humans are nearly 60% water. Social centers have typically been built around major water resources, rivers or lakes or oceans. Fountains have been placed in the center of city landscapes and kingdoms. Water is central, literally and symbolically. So we know, instinctively, to bow to the water within us and outside of us. What might this mean for your dream? It may be that you're feeling somewhat disconnected from life itself, that you're needing to reconnect to the life force in some way, to your emotions (another aspect of water in dreams), and to the spiritual, soulful realm that gives life meaning. This could also be seen as the Yin aspect of life, the feminine, anima, source of life that animates material existence. This nod to the feminine seems to arise in particular with the mention of your mother and the female members of your family, a theme also echoed with the particular species of cats you mentioned.

The Monitor Lizard in the vase of water is curious to me, especially in that he is situated in "the nook just off the kitchen." I'm curious here again about the way this dream may be orienting you towards very specific parts of your body. The kitchen tends to be correlated with the stomach in dream symbolism. The kitchen is the place where food is chopped and cooked and broken down, where the alchemy of food digestion begins. So the language around this lizard's hiding place just make me wonder if there might be an illness or imbalance (not necessarily serious) associated with your liver perhaps, or spleen. I also wonder this because this particular animal is named from the Latin root word Monit, to warn. What, perhaps emotionally, might be stuck in one of the smaller organs near the stomach? You might explore Chinese medicine for some answers here, or visit a good practitioner. The image of the lizard in dreams can also be related to lineage; that from which we evolved. This might tie in again with the appearance of your mother and family in the dream and what you might be working through in your physical and psychic inheritance. Perhaps there is a lineage of disconnection from some emotional depths that you are working to heal. And, of course, perhaps you have personal associations to Monitor Lizards that are valuable for further insights into why this animal is there, off the nook of your kitchen.

Finally, to return to the word with which you awoke: Menagerie... Menagerie. The notion of captivity that defines that word is resonant to me in working this dream. It makes me wonder: are you feeling trapped? Are things feeling too controlled and confining in your life? Are you needing to be wilder? Ask yourself these questions. Spend some time really sitting with the notions. Is your life feeling as though you are in captivity and that your deepest self is not getting a chance to roam and be free? If there is an inkling that this might be true, see what you can do to rectify the situation. In your psychic landscape, you can transform the wilderness, bring the flow of water back to where it belongs, and encourage the animals to return to their natural environments where they want to be. In the future, hopefully in the near future, if you can bring more flow back into your life, your dreams will reflect these changes and it will be you who is visiting the animals, out in the wilds where they are most alive and free.

Have you had a dream like this? Leave a comment and share!

Satya Doyle Byock is a Jungian psychotherapist, the Director of The Salome Institute, and the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood (Random House, 2022).

"Sexuality and the Baby Elephant Upstairs." A Dream Interpretation.

Dear Satya:

Q: I go upstairs into a room that I'm surprised I've never been to before. Then I realize I used to be up here all the time, but not for a while. There is a sweet baby elephant jumping and playing in the room, small and gray. I'm with another woman about my age and with my coloring. She's there to spend time with the elephant. I ask her if she comes up here every day to visit, but she tells me that she's only able to come up every other day for a few minutes. I think that the elephant needs more time than that. It's otherwise alone up here. I worry for its loneliness and lack of companionship. Then there is a bear. The baby elephant gets distracted. The big brown bear is in a wooden trailer, heading towards the wall opposite us. The trailer is making noise like the low rumbles of an adult elephant, and the baby bounds after the trailer. Then, I'm shocked to see the bear go head first into what I know is a shredder or meat grinder. I gasp. I watch the baby elephant jump in too. Both are immediately dead and bloody. I see their bodies deflate as if all that is left of them is their skin. I am so sad, and I turn away.

A: Oh dear, what an image. This makes me sad too. What's been happening in your life for these images to arise? You noted that the elephant is getting only very sparse attention and you reflect, "I worry for its loneliness and lack of companionship." As a dream's elements are all elements of one's own psyche, I wonder if you have been feeling only intermittently cared for yourself, lonely and without the relationships you'd like. What playful aspect of you has been relegated to a corner of your life, like a rarely visited room you once knew well? I've noticed that dreams of elephants often arise with the beginnings or endings of intimate relationships, so I'm drawn in particular to this mention of companionship in the dream. I inquired with you about this aspect of your life. You told me that you had just spent the night with someone new when you had this dream, and that you were feeling uncertain about your emotions in the days following. I can only imagine, given the way the dream ends, that you were indeed experiencing some mixed feelings and perhaps hurt. The image of the bear and the elephant being deflated makes me wonder about your own sense of emotional deflation, like having the wind and momentum of life taken out of your sails.

The archetypal layers of this dream are very interesting. I was intrigued by the association of intimacy and elephants in dreams, so I did some research into the symbol and was further struck by the correlation. In Hindu philosophy and metaphysics, the elephant is associated with the root chakra Muladhara, located at the base of the spine. This chakra, one of seven points in the body thought of as centers of vital energy, is said to govern sexuality, mental stability, and sensuality. It is the base of Kundalini energy, the place from which that fire of life initially rises; it is for this reason that sexuality plays a major role in tantric traditions. Sexuality can create physical life in the form of new conception, but it also can kickstart new energetic life and awakening in each individual. In Buddhist mythology, it is said that an elephant calf is responsible for Buddha's conception when it caressed Queen Maya's body with its trunk while she slept. Conception and awakening in one.The Muladhara chakra is also associated to the color red, a color that Jung described in his exploration of Kundalini philosophy as "the color of blood, of dark passion" (Kundalini Seminar, p. 17). This association provides a twist (a less upsetting one) on the appearance of the blood within the dream. The red is an inherent aspect of this chakra energy associated with the elephant, suggesting here more an emergence of passion and life energy than the destruction felt within the dream. Is it possible that while you were feeling a bit mixed-up after your recent evening, you might also be feeling a new energy for life these days? I found the information on the Muladhara chakra fascinating and hope you'll continue to learn more about it on your own. There is a strong correlation here between the activity of your physical body and the reflections of your psyche, one which might be a gateway to greater insight. Exploring the symbolism and diving into the literature around the various images in your dream will almost certainly provide you with greater connections and kickstart some wonderful creativity too. Dreams can provide tremendous comfort when you discover an image that, by its very emergence, provides insight into your life. If you haven't experienced that feeling yet, dive in and start exploring. Perhaps that too is the attention your baby elephant desires.

Have you had a dream like this? Leave a comment and share!

Satya Doyle Byock is a Jungian psychotherapist, the Director of The Salome Institute, and the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood (Random House, 2022).

"Two women. One dream. Gum Stuck in My Throat." A Dream Interpretation.

Dear Satya:

Dreamer #1: I have a recurring dream that I have gum wrapped around my back teeth and am trying to get it out. It feels like a lot of gum, and sometimes it will start to go down my throat, which really freaks me out. I feel anxious that it's there. Sometimes, I am trying to get the gum out of my mouth because I'm doing something in which I need to speak.

Dreamer #2: I have a recurring dream that there is gum in my throat, a thick wad of it, and I'm desperate to get it out of my mouth. The more I pull, the more gum keeps coming. It never ends and I'm totally freaked out.

Whew! Here we have two different women, living in different states, who reported to me their primary recurring dream. Forgive me for being a bit of a nerd here, but is this not just the most fascinating thing? Many people have heard of the common back-in-school and teeth-falling-out dreams and might be desensitized to how very strange it is that we can dream very similar dreams at night. But it really is pretty amazing. How does that happen?? What is the unconscious (collective or personal) representing here? What human experience is being captured by these images?

Let's explore this dream viscerally. To start unlocking this dream, imagine yourself in this situation. Imagine you're in public and you have a huge wad of gum in your throat and in the back of your mouth that (of course) you really want to get out. You try to remove it... you begin to get anxious... the gum's not easily coming out... there's a lot of it... it keeps coming... What do you do? How do you protect yourself? What are the types of fear that arise?

In this dream, the ability to speak has been thwarted. One's mouth and throat are all gummed up. The capacity for self-expression has been prevented and shoved aside by more complicated feelings of fear, shame, and insecurity. As one is privately managing a fear that she is in a strange, maybe dangerous situation, out of control of what's happening, she is simultaneously trying not to let others know of her predicament out of shame. She is in a "sticky situation," managing her own fear while trying not to let others catch on. T

he images in this dream are representing certain inner experiences; as it's a recurring dream, those inner experiences are likely rather persistent and common to the individual: a difficulty with authentic self-expression, with finding one's true voice, and therefore feelings of insecurity, of being alone with one's own emotions despite being among people, and feeling that things are not easily within one's own control.

To you two beautiful ladies who dreamt this dream (should my analysis of it prove at all true), you might consider playing with this dream a little to alter it and take care of yourself in the process. Dream it forward. You've got gum stuck in your throat, and you're anxious and panicked, but you don't have to deal with this very strange crisis by yourself. Imagine the dream and add someone in who you trust completely and who you can look to for help. How do they react? What do they do? What do you need? What help can they offer? See what arises and explore what comes next...

Have you had a dream like this? Leave a comment and share!

Satya Doyle Byock is a Jungian psychotherapist, the Director of The Salome Institute, and the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood (Random House, 2022).

"Gross! I Pooped and Put it In the Fridge!" A Dream Interpretation.

Dear Satya:

Okay, this is kind of gross, but I'm really curious... in this dream I'm standing alone in a nice, big kitchen in a house that feels somewhat communal. I have to go to the bathroom, but I don't want to use one of the bathrooms because I want to avoid people knowing. The next thing I know, I've pooped in a plastic compost container and am placing the full container in the refrigerator! I know I intend to flush it all later. It's really full and gross. Later, I am in another room and there's a crew of people, in their 30s, happy, gathered and cooking in the kitchen. I have anxiety that the container will be discovered. When they leave, I go to the fridge and find that someone has dumped and cleaned the container and that it's now full of cooked white rice. What?!

Awesome! Yes, in a way this is a totally gross dream. Fine. But the symbols behind it are also pretty awesome. Here's the quick-and-dirty (so to speak) about poop dreams: they can very directly reflect what's going on in our "psychic digestive systems." The psychological processing of things is not unlike physical digestion in the way it works: we take things in, process them, integrate the nutrients, and release the waste. When life throws us things that are requiring more of our attention, poop dreams often show up. The dreams are pointing to the need to digest something, to fully take something in, or they can point out problems with the processing. With "psychic digestion," there are endless social norms that can keep us from properly integrating what we take in. Each day, the emotions, experiences, memories, relationships, stimuli, information, and conversations in our lives cannot all be fully digested because we don't have the time, or we get interrupted, or we're at work and on deadline. Too much of the external expectations and not enough of the internal awareness can leave us constipated, or sick. Symbolically and literally.

In this dream, you're scared to go to the bathroom because other people are around. This can suggest that you have needed to process something that's happening in your life away from others, or that you were unnecessarily concerned about the opinions of others in regards to what you're sorting through. I say this in the past tense because this dream has a full conclusion. To start, you do poop, reflecting that something that you were processing (a relationship struggle? a work difficulty?) has worked its way through your system (you've found some clarity with it), but before you let it go completely, you put it in the fridge! You "put it on ice." Something more was to be done.

The critical, wonderful twist to this dream comes when you discover that the poop is no longer in the bin and that there is cooked rice in its place! Wow. This kind of image reversal is known as alchemy, the act of turning stone into gold, or the psychic human equivalent, poop into food: the S*&t of life into personal growth. This is a pretty literal symbol when you look at it that way. (The compost bin, if you consider the concept of compost, is the other symbol that really points to this.)

This theme of transition is such a crucial one in dreams that I know we'll have to explore it more soon. For now, I would venture to say that this dream is reflecting that you have successfully processed through some things recently and have turned the experience into nutrients for a new beginning. Get to know those people in the house who helped you do that. They're your allies and support and good parts of you to know for the future.

Have you had a dream like this? Leave a comment and share!

Satya Doyle Byock is a Jungian psychotherapist, the Director of The Salome Institute, and the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood (Random House, 2022).

"My Teeth are Falling Out!" A Dream Interpretation.

Dear Satya:

I've been having a recurring dream in which I discover that my teeth are falling out (I've heard this is a common one). In the dream, I am doing some mundane task when all of a sudden I reach into my mouth and pull out one of my teeth. Subsequently, I realize that numerous teeth are loose. Before I know it, I have a handful of teeth in my hand. I am consumed with a feeling of panic.

Yup, you're absolutely right, this is a very common dream (and so unpleasant!). I would even venture to say that this may be the most common dream that people share with other people after having it, it's just so weird! First, let's review that recurring dreams show up when things are sort of stuck when there's an issue or emotion that is working its way through our systems and can't quite get resolved. The easiest way to get recurring dreams to go away (should you want to be rid of one) is to write the dream down and talk it through with someone who can help you objectively explore it. What you're looking for is the emotion in the images, that is, it's not an entirely intellectual process. For instance, you know you feel panic in this dream, but what kind? What does it remind you of? What are the specific fears wrapped up in it? The emotion will have to find its way out of your system and be felt. Unfortunately, no impersonal dream interpretation can accomplish this task fully without your participation. The "aha!" moments are just too personal, too particular, and have to be experienced to be transformative.

But let's see if we can get a head-start on this process! Teeth. Teeth are the very beginning of the digestion process, they break down food before it enters our stomach so that the nutrients can be better integrated into our systems. Symbolically, they can point to the beginning of a similar process of psychic digestion, trying to process information and events that enter our awareness. If they're falling out, it may suggest that we're struggling to integrate something, perhaps as a result of being overwhelmed by it. Importantly, teeth also fall out naturally at only a couple of stages of life: early childhood when we are gaining our adult teeth, and in old age. We've got bare gums when we're babies and often when we're old. The shared experience between babies and the elderly is one of a lack of autonomy, a feeling of sort of being swept along by your own physical needs and the requirements of the outer world; for both stages in life, personal choice and personal desire are something of a luxury.

You say you're regularly doing some mundane task in this dream, which suggests to me a feeling of monotony and boredom in your life. I venture to say that for you, this dream is pointing to a feeling of persistent boredom and a loss of autonomy in your life, a feeling of being infantilized (by work or school?), and then panicked about how to reverse that experience and regain a sense of adulthood and control. My guess is that your panic in this dream involves an anticipatory feeling of having to face the world now. These teeth-falling-out dreams may be a version of the naked-in-public dreams: pure panic, terror, and a sense of desperation — "how am I going to get out of this situation and make this go away?"

So, I'm terribly curious about the nuances of your emotions when you discover that you're losing teeth. I wonder about that panic. Perhaps the notions of not being in control of your day-to-day existence, of having to face the world before you're calm and collected (a bit naked), resonates. What more is in there? These images may point to themes that others experience too, but the nuances are yours alone. What are the very specific fears and contemplations about the future, unique only to you, that arise when you look in your hand and see a handful of teeth? What do those feelings remind you of from your waking life?

Have you had a dream like this? Leave a comment and share!

Satya Doyle Byock is a Jungian psychotherapist, the Director of The Salome Institute, and the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood (Random House, 2022).