Every month, Jungian analyst Stanislav Raevsky deciphers the pictures you saw in your dreams.
Elena’s dream, 42 years old
“I enter the elevator, I press the button for my floor, it rises, passes my floor and moves up with acceleration. I understand that now the elevator will hit the ceiling and begin to fall. It hits, flies down, and I wake up. But sometimes it breaks through the roof and rolls quickly, but already horizontally, over hills and roads. And then I’m not scared, but interesting.
Interpretation
“The elevator ride is a common dream plot. The elevator falls, flies, changes direction, travels to the side and even diagonally, can get out of its shaft. Let me remind you that the symbols of dreams have many meanings even for one person, and therefore a dream means different things for different people. What associations does the elevator cause? Mechanism without a driver, lifting and lowering, closed space, hanging on ropes, may fall; womb, trust, passivity; moves according to the rules, mine, social elevator, children love to ride the elevator … The list goes on. The more we remember the associations, the more fully we will be able to understand what a dream means.
Dreams of falling are often experienced by those going through a mid-life crisis. Perhaps you think you’ve reached the ceiling in your career and are afraid that the social elevator will start to fall when it hits the ceiling. In the first half of life, we try to find our place in society, get a profession, start a family. But now the goals have been achieved, what to do next? It may seem that now we are only waiting for the way down. And here it is important to remember that in the second half of life we may have new goals: unlocking the potential of our personality, spiritual searches. The prospect of falling causes fear, and the dream is interrupted. But, waking up, we continue to be afraid in reality. To get rid of fear and understand what a dream means, it is useful to watch it to the end. You will likely find that falling is not the only possibility. It is possible that it will slow down and turn into a flight, or a parachute will open over the elevator, or, like on a roller coaster, reaching the bottom point, it will soar up again … Try to close your eyes in a safe environment and imagine that the dream continues: what will happen next ? This exercise will help you see unexpected possibilities.
The movement of the elevator is predictable, programmed – this may indicate a lack of freedom of choice. Perhaps you limit yourself, your desires. Then the path is known in advance, it is not interesting to follow it. When an elevator breaks through a roof or moves in an unexpected direction, it breaks out of its prescribed limits. Even if the mechanism seeks to gain freedom, what to say about us humans? Perhaps this is a clue from your unconscious: there are other ways of moving, new ways. Often we play the “Yes, but…” game when someone wants to help us find our way out of the narrow matrix of our delusions. We say, “Yes, that makes sense, but unfortunately I can’t do it.” Then you need to break through the roof of your limitations and understand that our consciousness has no boundaries.