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 burned sage before sleeping and I felt reckless before I slept. Then I dreamed I saw a huge black cat and a monkey following me around. I was pursuing them to go away. They would run away once I pursued them but then they would come back again.
Interpretation
Your dream is a perfect example of Carl Jung’s concept of how we are “subliminally absorbing psychic phenomenon” without being conscious that we are doing so. When our subconscious mind wakes up and switches places with our conscious mind in sleep or deep meditation, our subtle reality becomes accessible.
Jung says, “The unconscious aspect of any event is revealed to us in dreams where it appears not as a rational thought but as a symbolic image.” Your dream, in this manner, mirrors back to you the subconscious psychic impression of what took place while you were saging your space.
Burning sage is a well known practice to cleanse and purify a space. Waving the sage around in your space to ward off negative energy is represented in your dream as you actively pursue these animals to make them go away. Being reckless before you sleep is an important note to pull out here. Saging a space should make the space feel calm and clean, yet you felt reckless. In your dream, the animals keep coming back. The sage seemed to not have worked.
These two animals are black, signifying possibly shadow beings or energy beings that are unclear to you in their purpose. When something is unknown or not clear in a dream as a symbol, we often see these things as shadowy or dark in a way that is nondescript. However unclear the beings may be, this dream is showing you that two energy beings are in your space: a big cat and a monkey.
What is interesting here is that these black animals were following you but not attacking. It sounds more as if they were watching or just existing. As well, it is interesting that these animals are not warded off by the sage. This is indicating the importance and permanence of these figures. To dig deeper into this dream memory we need to understand the feelings you had when encountering these beings. Emotional data gives away just as much of the truth to a story as visuals in any dream. We often overlook our emotional charges that happen within dreams just as we do in waking life, but paying attention to the emotion is information. When we rule out our emotions we take away valuable information regarding a situation, conscious or subconscious.
The feeling of recklessness is then what reveals the answer. This feeling that you are not content is coming from the slight separation of you from your shadow self, from not being in harmony with your duality — your yin and yang. In this dream, your shadow self is visually represented in two different animals, once again showing the disharmony. The big cat with a reserved demeanor opposite that of the monkey’s more expressive one. However, the meaning of the cat and monkey remain personal to you and your relationship with these animals. Yet the dream is showing you that there is shadow work to be done here.
In a calm resting position, find your neutral steady energy. Call forward the big cat, feeling into its energy without it becoming you. Keep the animal’s energy at an observational distance. Then return to neutral. Do the same for the monkey and return to neutral. In the neutral state, acknowledge the differences. Find the common ground between them and feel into why the separation has happened. Find the feeling of recklessness between them because this feeling is the teacher that will lead you to the disharmony. Remember that everything that reveals itself to you is another bit of information. Everything is valid. Be careful not to dismiss the process.
Lastly, write down your next couple dreams or past couple if you have not already. What other aspects of your own psychic world are you picking up on? What is your subconscious trying to show you? Your next couple dreams and even your previous couple dreams may be related to this dream. When we are able to read a week or a full month’s dreams, we can pull out full stories. Visual representations of our subtle realities reveal themselves sometimes as chapters with each dream being a new chapter.
It is worthy to remember that we can dream of anything — there are no boundaries. So then, it is valuable to understand the relevance of what your subconscious has brought forward for you. Every dream is a gift of information and new knowledge, and then it becomes our choice to use this information.