One way of working out the meaning of a weird dream symbol is to hunt the rest of the dream for individual words that play on a theme. It’s simple to do and hard to explain, so the easiest way to understand this is to follow the example.
Weird dream symbol: Red shark
Marc’s dream
“A red shark is swimming in a pool. A child is who is wearing a ‘Save the Whales’ t-shirt has taken an interest in the creature. He seems to think the shark is a whale. He wades out into the pool until he is up to his neck in water. I am terrified the shark will hurt him. A man in a vest offers the boy a loan of his fishing net to catch the shark. He throws it to him from his rowing boat, but doesn’t take account of the currents and loses his balance.”
Did you spot the theme? It’s finances. Let’s start with the obvious finance words. These are save, interest, offers, loan, net, account, and balance. Once you’ve seen the obvious words, look for less obvious ones. In this example these are shark (loan shark), pool (pool your money or resources), ‘up to his neck’ (like ‘up to his neck in debt’), in a vest (invest), currents (currency, current account), loses his balance.
You’ve worked out that the shark symbolises a loan shark, so why is it red? Red is the colour of debt – ‘in the red’. So the red shark dream symbol emerges as a loan shark that will get you into debt, or a threat of debt. Marc’s dream is about his feelings about his financial situation.
When you see an example like this, it looks ridiculous, but when you look at the dreams you’ve recorded in your journal, you will be amazed at how many are crowded with words playing on the same theme. Why is this?
In the example, many of the words are visual symbols from the dream (such as shark, save, net), but most are words Marc has unconsciously chosen to use to describe his dream when writing it out (such as interest, loan, currents, and balance). Marc might just as well have written, “is attracted to” instead of “has taken an interest in”, or he might have put, “loses his footing” or “topples over” instead of “loses his balance”.
When you write out a dream, your unconscious mind often scatters clues into your write-up, so wake up to taking a second look at the words you use to express a dream. It’s a profitable exercise.
[Extract from 101 Dream Interpretation Tips, Jane Teresa Anderson]
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