Death May Hold Clues for Life Situation

Dear Cynthia: I had a very disturbing dream recently. I was either in a plane or looking from some tower. The sky was blue and we were in the middle of the ocean. A young girl was rock climbing on a rock in the middle of the ocean. She was doing pretty well, and then she slipped, fell into the ocean and died. It scared me so badly it was very hard to go back to sleep. How does this dream relate to me?

--JANET, Costa Mesa

Dear Janet: Some dreams are personal messages relating to our life. These can often help us to recognize stress, pressure, anxiety, depression and other feelings we may not be fully aware of in our waking state. The messages come from our subconscious or in some cases from our spiritual source. Some dreams are symbolic or metaphorical in nature, some predict the future and are more literal. Other dreams connect us with departed loved ones.

American psychiatrist Fritz Perls (1893-1970) is the father of gestalt therapy, and was the first to make popular the style of dream interpretation wherein every character and even the objects in our dreams are projections of ourselves. While I don’t believe this applies to every dream, it is a helpful style to try on for size when interpreting a dream.

If the girl in your dream is you, then we could say that from a high perspective, you can see that you have been progressing upward in life but it has been challenging. Perhaps you miscalculated a step to take in life or the hold you had on something because you fell from where you were. When this happened, a part of you ceased to exist. It was frightening to give up a part of yourself, but the part that observed the entire process still exists.

Perhaps you simply let go and gave up doing something the hard way! Our own deaths in dreams often signify that we are evolving, transforming or graduating to a new self. Rising above a situation to look at it objectively is a good technique for assessing where we are in any life circumstance.

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Cynthia Richmond is the author of “Dream Power, How to Use Your Night Dreams to Change Your Life” (Simon & Schuster, 2000). Fax your dreams to Cynthia Richmond at (818) 783-3267 or e-mail them to in.your.dreams@worldnet.att.net. Please include your hometown and a daytime phone number. “In Your Dreams” appears every Tuesday and should be read for entertainment purposes only.