DREAMS--DOORWAY TO EMOTIONAL HEALTH

-DREAMS-

OVER COMING GRIEF

Dream analysis is a necessary component to grief therapy. This is true because in the grieving process, the conscience mind frequently is unwilling to accept reality. Denial persists because the grieving individual does not want to admit the loved one is really dead. As long as this denial continues in the subconscious mind, normal recovery cannot be experienced. Dream analysis can gauge the extent of emotional acceptance. When full acceptance of reality has occurred, the dreams of the grieving person will reveal that fact.

“Caskets in every room?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “In the kitchen, the living room, bedroom, even in the bathroom! Everywhere there were caskets.” The client, describing her dream, was seated across the desk from me in my office. Betty was a woman approximately forty-five years of age. I had conducted her husband’s funeral three months earlier. Although his sudden death from a heart attack had been a terrible shock, Betty had survived the wake and the funeral as a normal grieving widow. She appeared at the time to accept her husband’s death with stoic resolve and religious acceptance.

Now, three months later, she had come to my office in emotional exhaustion. The cause of her turmoil was a reoccurring dream that had brought her to the edge of a nervous breakdown.  Betty said she had not slept for three days and nights. Her face substantiated that fact. This terrifying dream kept repeating itself each time she fell asleep. It was always the same dream with the same dreadful stage props.

She dreamt she was in her home and there were open caskets in every room. When she looked into the caskets, they were all empty. Disregarding the fact that they were empty, the dream was so terrifying she would wake up screaming in a hot sweat.The fear of experiencing it again forced her to stay awake but the loss of sleep had brought her to the brink of nervous collapse. I realized if I was to help this woman, I had to interpret her dream and resolve the fear that was disrupting her sleep pattern.

I began by explaining to her that dreams are symbolic expressions of emotional struggles taking place deep in one’s subconscious mind. During sleep, these churning feelings come up out of the depths of the subconscious and express themselves in pantomimes on the screen of the mind. Because these feelings have no visual structure in and of themselves, the mind chooses symbolic forms which can be displayed in a short pictorial drama performed on the mental stage. Having explained how a dream is orchestrated, I then began my interpretation by asking Betty a leading question, “What does a casket represent?” She pleaded ignorance to my inquiry but I knew she was hedging the question.

“Oh, Betty, you know what a casket represents,” I said with a bantering reply.

She felt the jab of my remark and responded sarcastically: “I suppose you want me to say death?”

“Exactly,” I retorted. “A casket represents death. Now we can start to unravel the symbolism of your dream by agreeing that the caskets in your dream represent death.” With this insight, the first layer of her terrifying nightmare had been laid open to understanding.

I then proceeded to the next phase. “You told me, Betty, that these caskets were in every room of your house.” 

“Yes,” she replied.

“That would mean, would it not,” I continued, “that according to the dream, something symbolizing death is in every room of your house?”

“I guess that is what it is saying,” she commented. “But that doesn’t make any sense.”

Having led her this far in her thinking regarding the meaning of the dream, I moved on to another insight in interpreting her nightmare.

“Did you not tell me you looked into those caskets and they were all empty?” I asked.

“Yes,” she responded. “They were all empty but the fact that they were there terrified me and I would wake up screaming.”

I settled back a little in my chair and gave a nonchalant shrug so as to relax her before continuing the probing. I pursued our mental quest by stating, “Let’s sum up what we have deduced regarding your dream thus far. In the dream, there are caskets in every room in your house. According to symbolic language, caskets represent death. Therefore we must assume the dream is announcing there is something representing death all through your house. Yet, you have