The Plane Crash Dream: Final Post

Review

In yesterday’s post about the plane crash dream, the dreamer had redefined his symbols in a way that they could be understood as metaphors. Remember that, in his dream, he witnessed a plane crash while on a lunch date with his wife. Later, while rummaging through the wreckage, he found the remains of a rather doll-like human baby. (Scroll down to see the earlier posts.)

The dream restated as metaphor

What follows is his dream retold with the symbols (like “wife” and “plane” and “crash”) replaced by the dreamer’s own metaphoric definitions. Remember that all symbols in a dream are facets of the dreamer, so we have also inserted comments into the narrative as reminders of that.

There is a part of me that is engaged in a social time with myself—with the part of me that is my partner. It’s enjoyable. There’s food, and I’m catching up with myself. I see a vehicle inside myself that is designed for going long distances. I use it to fly high and to go very fast to my destination. But something goes wrong with this part of me and it doesn’t fly correctly. It is destroyed. I am looking throughout myself to see if there are any clues as to what went wrong. I see the remains of an infant part of myself—something in me that I would have used to further myself to the next generation. It’s my creation, now dead. I want to share this with the partner in me. It’s a way for me to process the tragedy.

What can we make of this dream?

After reading the retold dream in the paragraph above, there are two thoughts to take away.

First, this is not a dream to be taken literally. In my experience one of the primary ways that dreamers are misled, is when they worry that their frightening dreams will come true. Dreams work hard to stay in the awareness of the dreamer as s/he moves from sleep to being awake. One of the best techniques dreams use for this is to provide the dreamer with shocking, “over the top” imagery. Certainly the images will be remembered. But then the dreamer has to work to distance himself from their emotional impact.

The second thing to understand about this dream is that it is a clear message of a different kind of crisis transpiring within the dreamer himself. It’s all about an internal “crash” in which the dreamer, in his effort to “fly high and fast” brings himself down. And there is also the part about the dreamer “trying to further myself to the next generation”—the baby, which is more doll-like than real.

The dreamer strongly identified will all of this, admitting his tendency to cut corners to achieve goals more easily. He confessed that this was not the first time he had experienced a “crash,” but the dream certainly made him more thoughtful about it than ever before. He vowed to make amends.

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