Dreams About Others

How to Recognize Them

Meredith Sabini

Saturday September 20   10am-1pm
Public $40 / 3 CEs Therapists $65

People familiar to us appear in dreams rather frequently. How are we to know if the dream content pertains to them, or to ourselves? Recent studies suggest that perhaps 10% of our dreams are about others and that introverts may be more likely to have such dreams than extroverts. The instructor has been collecting dreams about others and found they have a “just so” quality, with the dreamer typically observing a scene that resembles waking life. Six specific features of these outward-facing dreams will be presented. Jung originally distinguished between subjective or personal dreams and objective or outward-facing dreams in 1917, showing how to distinguish between them based on the current status of the relationship. Using his examples and those from the instructor’s collection, we will look at three kinds of dreams; those in which a dream figure symbolizes an aspect of the dreamer; those in which a dream brings to light something about our relationship with the person shown; and those which provide information actually about the person. Participants are welcome to bring in dreams about others for discussion. The goal of this program is to correct the overly personalistic (narcissistic) bias of modern dream theories and to broaden our understanding of the dreaming mind, which is quite capable of distinguishing between self and other and helping us tend our human relations.