Despite the abundance of information, we still have a lot of prejudices that can complicate intimate life. Sexologist and psychoanalyst Catherine Blanc analyzes one of these popular opinions every month.
“First, let’s clarify why we dream. Every day events happen in our life — and we are happy, sad, our unconscious receives a variety of information, which often leads to the question of our role in the world around us. Day after day, the same scenarios of our relationships with parents and relatives are repeated — from the inside, it is difficult for us to discern the possibilities of change in them, to imagine a different alignment, to reconsider the everyday situation.
What drives us to change? The work of our unconscious, in particular — dreams. Folded like a puzzle from many components (scraps of words and phrases; images of participants in experienced events; associations with these events …), dreams convey to us the questions of our unconscious and its attempts to find answers to them.
All our dreams in one way or another talk about the fear of death, sexuality, relationships with other people, aggressiveness or passivity — in a word, about our strength or helplessness. Dreams of an erotic nature, including dreams of betrayal, do not mean betrayal of our partner. They signal that our unconscious is looking for answers to the eternal questions of being — us, people, in this world. Such dreams should not be interpreted literally. But we should not lose interest in them either, otherwise we risk missing the essence of the message — an attempt to find out what cheating means not in terms of sexual relations, but within the framework of more general patterns of behavior learned from childhood.
The dream of betrayal speaks of desire in the broad sense of the word — of guilt, fears, prohibitions associated with it. It is worth listening carefully to the feelings that it generates in us. Sleep is not an action, but a question. And whatever topic sounds in it, listening to it, asking ourselves questions related to it, we become the protagonist of our life, and not just an extra.