Interpreting Ego-based Dreams
by Ask a Healer
Featured dreamtime program:
Develop Dream Recall Skill
Suggested Reading:
Dreamtime Interruption
This is part of my series on interpreting dreams. In this series, I am sharing my own approach to finding meaning in dreams, meaning of a spiritual nature. To me, the dreamtime is a powerful place of self-clarification and healing and learning how to find meaning in dreams is part of embracing the gift of the dreamtime. This page deals with the level of dreaming I call personality, or ego-based, dreaming.
Personality Self Dreaming:
What I call ego clean-up dreams are dreams that mostly involve fears, anxieties, worries, unresolved issues, etc. that are present and pressing in my life at the moment. An ego clean-up dream is often a precurser to a Medicine Dream for me. My personality struggles, resists and finally surrenders the ego-based fear or need to control and then a Medicine Dream follows.
Ego clean-up dreams are very often tedious, frustrating dreams in which I am irritated or annoyed. Examples include dreams where I'm trying to get somewhere and can't or I am trying to do something and can't, etc. Ego-based dreams may involve petty theft, such as someone stealing my purse or a situation where I feel mildly violated by another. These types of dreams are rarely every hugely traumatic but more like the energy of being constantly annoyed by a fly or a mosquito in the room.
One of the more common locations for an ego-based dream to occur is in a bathroom. The dream might involve trying to go to the bathroom and being unable to go, finding the toilets overflowing or walking into a bathroom and finding some other type of chaos or mess. It could also be more literal; the bathroom might be a mess and it might be my job to clean it up. In other words, I might be a janitor somewhere and walk into a mess that I really don't even think is mine and still, I'm responsible for it.
Ego clean-up dreams may also be disturbing, with disturbing imagery (oh, some of the bathrooms I've seen in my dreams!) because they are the outpicturing of whatever I find disturbing in life at the moment. I see them as a clever way the mind has of bringing a personality-self issue to the attention of the conscious mind; a sort of relief valve for life's pressures. An ego-based dream shows me areas where I am attempting to shift my reality through the devices of the ego, through the mind, rather than lifting the situation up and spiritually surrendering in the flow of a situation. I'm resisting or arguing with what is, or wanting something to be different instead of noticing, allowing and taking responsibility for the reality I'm co-creating with the universe at the time.
Additional Dreamtime Information:
medicine dreams
