The Russian doll effect

“It’s only a very short dream, but it was so vivid, it stayed with me all day, should we interpret that one or will we get more out of a longer dream?”

This is a question I’m often asked by clients, students, or podcast guests, and I’m sure, when you think about your own dreams, you’ll see the dilemma.

Long dreams seem be packed with more drama, more symbols, and plenty of material to interpret, yet when you take a second look you may notice that long dreams frequently repeat a theme. In a long dream, for example, you might find yourself trying to get to the airport to catch a plane but experiencing a range of obstacles and delays. The obstacles and delays are a repeating theme, and you usually deal with these in similar ways in the dream, until, occasionally, towards the end of such a dream, you may (or may not) come up with a solution that results in catching the plane.

Shorter dreams may be of the humdrum variety, but some short dreams are outstandingly vivid, emotional, and haunting. In the absence of a repeating theme, they’re often not only short, but sweetly to the point. The vivid, emotional punch heralds the availability of potential emotional healing and positive change if the dream is explored deeply at a therapeutic level.

There’s value in working with both long and short dreams, but it’s worth prioritising those short, vivid, emotional ones, as long as you can remember some detail.

“I didn’t expect such a short dream to reveal so much. All that from one short dream!” is a common response when I walk with people through such dreams.

The image that comes to me is of a tiny box – the short dream – that unpacks to reveal so much insight into your life that you wonder how it could ever have fitted into such a small space. Of course you have to know how to unpack a small dream, what questions to ask, how to examine the details, how to crack the meaning of its symbols, how to lay it out and examine it in a way that suddenly gives you sensible yet magical insight into your life.

I remember Julia, one of the members of our online dream forum in an earlier incarnation of my website (in the late 1990s) saying that my website looked quite small, yet the more you followed the links the more it proved to be like a set of infinitely nesting Russian dolls (matryoshka or babushka dolls), more and more information to unpack and learn about dreams. The old forum is long gone, and the website updated in every way, but it still offers the Russian doll effect if you explore.

Here are two Russian doll effects for you today:

This week we launched The Dream Academy, and since it includes a new blogging space, I needed to write three new blogs to sit in that space, ready for the launch. So here are the three blogs for you to read now – three blogs nesting within the one you’re reading – and I think you’ll enjoy them:

A life in dreams

The train

From little things

So that’s Russian doll effect number one. Here’s the second:

You’ll see that The Dream Academy seems to be quite a small box, but when you sign up to do the first online course (How to interpret your dreams, step-by-step), you’ll gain access to all that we’ve packed in there for you. Come on over, and enjoy unpacking, both the site, and your dreams.

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