QUESTIONS & ANSWERS:
Dreams Department

Please remember, this column is designed to help the consumer seeking behavioral-health information, and not intended to be any form of psychotherapy or a replacement for professional, individualized services. Opinions expressed in the column are those of the columnist and do not represent the position of other SelfhelpMagazine.com staff.

Question

I read that children have more animal dreams than adults, but I seem to have lots of them and I'm nearly forty. Does this mean I am "childish?"

Answer

While animal dreams are very common among younger children, it is not uncommon for adults to have them as well. While the determination of meaning of animals in your dreams will eventually be your own to discover, there are some useful approaches and ideas on animals in dreams.

The most popular idea is that the animal in the dream is the animal in us. That is, our instincts and animal selves that we are not usually conscious of in waking life emerge at night in dreams as natural animals that may be similar. It is felt that the more problematic or sick the dream animal, the more likely we are at odds with our own instinctual selves. Being able to recall the dream is a positive sign that we are ready to work on this part of ourselves. The type of animal may also indicate a path for finding a creative, positive & responsible way to channel our drives. If I had an animal dream of a sick eagle, for example I would first come up with some metaphors to describe what "eagle" means to me -- attacker of snakes, protector of its nest, far seeing, fights in a non-human manner, beautiful yet I fear being attacked, etc.

I might add to these personal associations some cultural ones, like the American Eagle symbolism of protecting liberty and freedom, or mythological images of the eagle, such as eagle as Father of the Gods, Zeus. If my dream eagle was sick, I might look at how these symbols might manifest more in my life -- how I might protect my own children -- or my own baby projects, or how I might soar above the crowd. With children, this may give us a clue as to what aspects of impulse control they are struggling with. As adults, we are offered a doorway into wider vision of living.

Other dream workers see the animal more like a totem or shaman guide. In this sense, we don't assume that the animal is an image of our unconscious drives, but is here to lead us into an unknown territory that can't be decided upon before we go there. With this approach, we treat the dream animal like bird watchers from behind a duck blind, carefully observing the nuance of the image of the dream animal, how it looks in detail, how it moves, how it reacts. The key here is in how long we can stay with the image and follow its lead.

Animals in dreams, no matter how problematic, offer us an opportunity as guides to contact and explore both the parts of ourselves that we have shut away and parts that we have never known.

2/19/98

Richard Wilkerson is general editor for The Internet Dream E-zine, Electric Dreams, and director of DreamGate, the Internet Communications and Dream Education Center. He writes the Cyberphile column for the Association for the Study of Dreams Newsletter.