Losing a suitcase – why does this dream scare us so much? Obviously, it’s not just about domestic inconveniences and parting with your favorite things. Baggage – as a symbol of our experience and knowledge – means much more than just a means of transporting everything we have acquired.
Dream
Veronica, 47 years old
“I am returning from a long trip with a group of friends. We are at the airport, waiting for luggage, but my suitcase is still missing. I remember that I didn’t put a label on it, and I think that now I probably won’t be able to get it. And I have there both personal things and gifts for relatives. All I have left is my handbag. The dream left a feeling of a riddle that I want to solve. Like a word that rolls around on your tongue but you can’t remember it.”
Interpretation
Stanislav Raevsky, Jungian analyst
“At the center of your dream is loss: you are losing your suitcase. What could you lose in your life? You write that you have no children. Sigmund Freud believed that various receptacles, especially in women’s dreams, are associated with the vagina. Perhaps the suitcase is a symbol of the lost opportunity to have a large receptacle, a womb. Left with only a small container – a handbag that allows you to have sex, but not have children.
The suitcase also means the luggage of our life. Often we continue to carry with us something that we could already give up and go light. What do you carry with you from the past? Perhaps this is a previous marriage, some kind of social or role obligations.
If, following Freud, we understand dreams as the fulfillment of desires, it turns out that you want to lose your suitcase, to get rid of unnecessary baggage. And Jung understood sleep as compensation for a conscious attitude: then, perhaps, a dream of loss balances your attachment to “personal things and gifts to loved ones.”
A dream can warn of an impending loss. In the second half of life, more and more losses await us
We lose friends, loved ones, external beauty, youth and many opportunities. We cannot avoid these losses, but we can change our attitude towards them. Some losses need to be mourned, but they also bring us release. Often we try to explain them by our mistakes.
So you explain the loss of luggage by not sticking a label. Behind these attempts lies a desire to control losses, which are actually beyond our control. This desire only makes us feel guilty and moves us away from accepting this world with its beauty and inevitable losses.
On the eve of the New Year, in many countries it is customary to throw away old things in order to allow something new to enter our lives. You said that in your free time you paint a little with gouache and watercolor. Maybe your dream allows you to let go of material worries, about labeling, and frees up space for creativity.
Early psychoanalysis was like a detective leading a patient to clean water. The modern analyst offers many ideas and associations as a game where everyone can find something useful for themselves. Do not take these interpretations as a sentence, look for your personal associations and meanings, enjoying the beautiful game of the unconscious.