After 50 years of working with thousands of dreamers, I still think dreams about animals are the easiest to understand. Each animal, insect, or fish in your dream represents something important in your life-a stinging situation, a threatening person or habit of your own, unmet needs, responsibilities not met, tender, loving or any other aspect of your own life or personality or someone else’s behavior that is impacting your life.
We use the images of animals in our dreams to highlight a situation in our lives that could use our attention. Because people, including children, are usually very good at describing the personality of an animal, the parallels to someone in our lives or to some part of ourselves is usually easy to see.
Imagine that you are someone who responds to the dog in the photo above. Let’s say you would describe him as full of love, trust, and most of all, a sense of exuberant play. Now, imagine that in your dream, this dog was in a tiny cage and had not been fed for days! If you were to ask yourself, “Is there anyone in my life, or any part of myself that is “full of love, trust, and most of all, a sense of exuberant play” that has been malnourished, and cooped up in a cage for days? You would probably understand your dream.
And you thought dreams were mysterious! Once understood, you can appreciate that dreams are apt, timely, motivating, and beautiful creations.
Your dreams about penguins, dragonfish, or spiders may delight or terrify you.
In any case, SEIZE them. Write them down with all the feelings they trigger in you. Then interview yourself. Write out your interview or ask a friend to use the CUE CARD questions. Remind her to resist “helping” you by intruding her own descriptions, or worse yet, her intuitions and interpretations. Ask her to feed back to you (Recapitulate or Restate) your exact words.
In my book, In Your Dreams, you can look up specific, common dream images of animals, people, objects, places, and themes. In each section, the steps of the Interview and the Questions to execute those steps are provided. Most of my books include my brief CUE CARD which lists the basic questions you can ask yourself or another dreamer that will elicit rich, personal, and unique Descriptions that you can then Recapitulate, and that will allow the dreamer to Bridge the Descriptions of the dream images to her waking life situation, thus interpreting the dream.