Every month, Jungian analyst Stanislav Raevsky deciphers the pictures you saw in your dreams.
Dream of Galina, 35 years old
“I’m in an apartment where there are a lot of guests. These are friends and relatives. Mom scolds me for taking someone else’s cup. I’m trying to explain that I didn’t take it. Everyone condemns me. I’m ashamed even though it’s not my fault. And it’s a shame that my mother does not believe me. I understand that it is useless to ask her for protection. I woke up in terrible confusion and in tears. I had this dream a month ago, but I still remember it, and every time I feel uneasy. In reality, my mother and I live very friendly.”
Interpretation In the center of the dream is the relationship with the mother. You write that you have a 5 year old son and he lives with you and your mother. In such a family system (grandmother – mother – child), the mother remains a daughter, which means she becomes an older sister to her child. Therefore, in a dream, you feel like a child who is shamed by his mother. In order to feel like an adult, a parent to your son, you need to separate from your mother. This is not easy, because the mother is the main object of identification for any daughter. Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytic psychotherapy, drew attention to the fact that the same complexes are more common in mother and daughter than in any other relatives.
To help this separation, your unconscious creates a conflict in a dream with your mother, which is not in a waking relationship. It is difficult to find yourself, remaining merged with the parent, his values, being in his space. This does not mean that it is necessary to leave and live far away from mother, more important is the psychological separation, that is, the inner ability to exist without relying on mother’s support and her opinion.
Relatives are present in your dream, they are on the side of your mother. That is, your dream also speaks of how fate can be repeated from generation to generation. Many of our problems today arise from events that happened sometime (often before we were born) with our loved ones.
Someone else’s cup is a significant object in a dream. A cup can really be personal, even in a large family. Remember the question in the fairy tale “Three Bears”: “Who drank from my cup?”. We are also talking about an overflowing cup – when patience ends. We are talking about a cup of adversity, drunk to the bottom, and a full cup of life. The begging bowl is the only property of the poor monk. And Sigmund Freud believed that the bowl in a dream is a symbol of the female womb. In a dream, mom doesn’t like that you seem to have taken someone else’s “cup”, which does not belong to you or her – but to one of the relatives. To whom? Maybe father? The dream prompts you to think about where is your own cup, your destiny. The cup recalls the plot of another fairy tale, or rather, a whole myth – the Grail. His hero Percifal, like your son, lives with his mother, without a father. His mother, who lost her husband, is doing everything so that her son does not become a knight and does not leave her – does not take his cup. She does not allow him to find his destiny. But “accidentally” he meets knights, leaves his mother and acquires the Holy Grail, becoming the most famous knight of the Middle Ages. Your dream invites you to seek your destiny, perhaps even coming into conflict with your mother.