Natalia Snider is a certified dream practitioner living in Carbondale. She works with people’s dreams and imaginations to facilitate self-healing. Every month, she will analyze someone’s dream in The Sopris Sun. Anyone can submit a dream for personal analysis or inclusion in this column by visiting: www.dreamhealings.com 

Dream 

I had a dream I was on an excursion with at least 50 other people on a beach. Nobody got naked but me. I just didn’t care. It felt like I was there for hours. They would take selfies and turn away, so I wasn’t in the background. I would get irritated about putting my clothes back on. I didn’t know what that meant. Just a weird dream?

Interpretation 

I love this dream! It’s about you being your authentic self, showing the world all of you and dropping the cares and worries of other people’s thoughts. Seems like this is something you are working on. Perhaps you’ve just had a breakthrough in waking life where you experienced a moment like this. Let me be clear, not that you have experienced a moment in the nude on a crowded beach, but a moment where you were able to express your authenticity freely. 

A lot of times we use our dream space to practice things we want to do in waking life. The triggers that create these types of practice spaces in dreams are either an intense want or need for a feeling or a short experienced moment of that feeling that we want to explore more. Our subconscious is taking note of our needs, wants and desires. It is always listening and it is always answering in our dreams. 

This dream is telling me that you have asked your subconscious for this practice space to be fully and unapologetically yourself. Showing up nude in your dreams when others are not is one of the clearest ways your subconscious can visually convey authenticity. The nude body symbolizes you and nothing else. It symbolizes you and all of you — the real you and nothing more, no masks of clothing.

Let’s also cover a distorted interpretation of this visual symbol. In our uncomfortable dreams, our own public nudity often gets distorted and confused with vulnerability. Dreams of being nude in public can create an extreme feeling of being seen. This may be uncomfortable for the dreamer and then is internalized as vulnerability. It may come from our feeling that the body has no protection. Yet, vulnerability stemming from our own nudity is a societally-learned feeling we were not born with. 

More often than not, the subconscious is trying to tell us to look at our authentic self in these dreams of vulnerability. We don’t need other things to make us who we are. These dreams are often our subconscious giving us a chance to defy this feeling of vulnerability and replace it with our innate power of authenticity. Our bodies don’t want to harbor uncomfortable feelings even when we choose to hold onto them. 

You may have had a vulnerable-feeling nude dream in your past, which would make this dream even more of the test that it is for you now. You conjured up this very public, very highly-lit place (a public beach) to practice being authentic, and you didn’t shy away. Your dream characters started taking selfies and turning away, which was to test if you would get infected by shame. You pass easily by not caring. Then you became irritated thinking of having to put clothes back on. This was another test to see if you would comply with a societal norm of masking, which in this dream is symbolized by clothing. The feeling of annoyance was your defiance toward masking. 

So, this is not just some weird dream! This is a dream of empowerment. Congratulations! You passed. Now, it is time to practice in waking life. Using the symbolism given by the dream, think about what you are masking your authentic self with in public. Let your feelings point out your mask, and let your feelings show you your true north. Then, practice in waking life remembering that you now know what it feels like to succeed.