In my dream, I am standing in a modern, expensive apartment in what appears to be the aftermath of a wild party. There are tables with platters of devoured food remnants, there are broken wine bottles, used plates and cups, and the door is hovering ajar. I can still hear people talking in the hallway, as though they’ve just left. I know this apartment is my home, though I’m unsure how; I don’t recognize anything. It is soaking wet, as if it has rained indoors. I am barefoot, and narrowly avoid stepping on the broken wine bottles, wine spilling like blood on the green shards. On one of the tables, amidst the food and dishware and pools of water, there is a long, black wig. I pick it up, this raven body limp and wet in my hands. Something about seeing it here, like this, is frightening to me. So frightening that I snap awake.

“When I was younger, intrigued by all things magic, psychic, and divination, I kept a dream decoding book on my nightstand at all times.””

When I was younger, intrigued by all things magic, psychic, and divination, I kept a dream decoding book on my nightstand at all times, and frequently Googled What does dreaming xyz mean? I was certain that — as we’ve all likely heard many times by now — dreaming about teeth usually meant bad things and dreaming about taking a bath meant good things. I searched the dream dictionaries far and wide, hopeful that they’d tell me something about myself, but they never quite could.

If we take my dream, for example, in this method, things never feel quite right. They’re always a bit too generic, a bit too uninquisitive. According to dreamdictionary.org, dreaming of a wig means, “Wigs cover our thoughts or hiding something that might be exposed in our lives.” When you ask it about dreaming of water inside, it says, “To dream of rain in your house represents concerns about your living conditions and comfort level being challenged. This is why so many people report dreaming of rain penetration through the ceiling in their dream — a symbol that represents damage to the metaphorical barriers you have put up.” Of course, you have no idea why those interpretations are so amiss to me, because you don’t know me. This is the key, the thing that I’ve always been missing through the years of dream-searching — it is impossible to analyze the dream without taking into account the dreamer.

“This is the key, the thing that I’ve always been missing through the years of dream-searching — it is impossible to analyze the dream without taking into account the dreamer.”

I find that my early fixation on dreams held the right idea at its core, just like so much of our collective metaphysical dream fascination. I knew that my dreams were telling me something, and that I was in conversation with them. I knew that my dreams had meaning. The question of exploring our dreams is not “Do dreams matter?” but precisely with the understanding that they matter, “Where do they come from? Who holds the answer?” Which leads us to search all kinds of sources for meaning.

But is dreamdictionary.org really capable of seeing into my soul, and your soul, unique as they are? I find that when the source isn’t connected to you, when it isn’t capable of understanding you, it cannot know you. Why should a guidebook or a search engine, or perhaps even a spiritual code, tell you what your dream is communicating to you?

“Why should a guidebook or a search engine, or perhaps even a spiritual code, tell you what your dream is communicating to you?”

In “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of the dream as a wish. While the wish isn’t always the most prevalent or obvious part of the dream, Freud posits that every dream we have is the expression of a wish, even nightmares or dreams that don’t make sense. The wish might be for something small or large — as simple as a craving for a food you like or the desire to see someone you miss. Even nightmares can be expressions of wishes, as a bad dream can fulfill the wish for a sense of punishment or even guilt (though many psychoanalysts theorize that nightmares, especially chronic or recurring ones, can be expressions of things other than wishes, such as fears or anxieties). No matter what, the dream is born out of your own mind — it’s not something bestowed onto you from an unknown source, and it isn’t something for which you can find an answer online or in a book or even in another person outside of yourself. Since you are the creator, your mind holds the meaning.

“The dream is born out of your own mind — it’s not something bestowed onto you from an unknown source.”

When I spoke with psychoanalyst Cornelia Barber about this topic, she told me, “Dreams are like poems, music, paintings…when we look or listen to them we don’t quite know what we’re seeing or why, but as we keep sitting with them they allow us to see ourselves — our wishes, anxieties, fears, aggressions, desires, contradictions — from new angles. And we can keep playing with them, keep producing new language about them.

The first question to ask is always something like, ‘What’s here I’m not paying attention to?’ Often, the most important aspect of a dream is what seems unimportant, mundane, or just slightly out of the intensity of the rest of the scene. Maybe it’s a color, or an unrecognizable face, or the name of a street…once you find that, just associate to it — what else comes to mind? Where does it take you? What does it remind you of? In psychoanalysis, the analyst can listen for this strange piece of a dream so the patient is free to continue letting their mind wander as they speak.”

What Barber is referring to here is the process of free association — from a psychoanalytic perspective, it’s the most effective method of “decoding” a dream, or rather, understanding a dream’s significance to you. Free association is the therapeutic practice of allowing the patient to essentially ramble. To speak freely, connecting random thoughts, stories, feelings, and memories. Particularly when it comes to dreams, free association may even take the patient away from the dream itself in order to explore other thoughts and associations. By going “off-topic” in this way, we are able to explore the content of the dream in even further detail, because by doing so, we are actually examining the entire structure in which the dream takes place: the individual, the self, you. When we freely associate to our dreams, we can unlock the significance of these small details — these faces, street names. Mundane things that hold no broader cultural or spiritual value, but hold personal value to you. Then, we can get closer to the wish, closer to our desires. 

“Free association is the therapeutic practice of allowing the patient to essentially ramble. To speak freely, connecting random thoughts, stories, feelings, and memories.”

It is only when I bring myself into my dream that things begin to make more sense. When I ask myself what association I have with wigs, the first words that come to my mind are marriage and wife, because I hold a very particular association to wigs because of orthodox Judaism. When I think about water inside of the house, an important piece of context might be that this dream occurred during the California wildfires that came within a mile of the homes of multiple family members of my partner’s and mine.

I choose these as particularly illustrative examples, but we all have incredibly discrete relationships to everything of which we possess knowledge. By building the aforementioned associations, I can begin to ask myself other questions — more personalized questions. What does it mean to pick up and hold the wig? What about it frightened me? How do I feel about the water inside the house? I can also begin to associate to the other details within the dream that are slightly less obvious. What do the broken bottles and food scraps remind me of? The door left ajar? The beautiful apartment?

Of course, the process of free association is traditionally done with an analyst or therapist guiding you. But this doesn’t mean we can’t utilize the associative process in exploring our own dreams, like the questions I asked myself above. Evan Chethik, MA and psychoanalyst in training at Pulsion Psychoanalytic Institute, says, “Analysis is a two-person game; the structure demands an ‘other’ to address. But in my opinion, it’s absurd to say that one cannot work with their dreams on their own, and investigate, associate, and perhaps write associations down to dreams.”

“Your dream is a personal artistic creation, of sorts, and one that cannot be explored or analyzed without you at the center. And there is a power in that — a sense of home and direction.”

Cornelia Barber says, “It’s your dream. It came out of you, it’s speaking to you. Don’t rely on dream symbol books and stuff like that. The snake for one dreamer will have very different associations than for someone else. Artists paint, not from a theory of a color wheel (even if they know it) they paint from ghosts and sounds and indecipherable feelings. Dreamers work the same way and dream interpretation is not about putting it all in a box and logging it; it’s not about reducing that creativity. It is about adding to it, giving it more.” Your dream is a personal artistic creation, of sorts, and one that cannot be explored or analyzed without you at the center. And there is a power in that — a sense of home and direction.

Your dreams are created by you because of the wish contained within them — the wish that came from you. When we listen to our dreams, recall them, and allow ourselves to freely associate to them, our dreams can communicate our desires to us. They can reveal to us wishes we hold deeply in the unconscious. I haven’t figured out the specific wish of the dream just yet. I’m circling the drain on it, which is okay, too.

Chethik says that perhaps we should reassess the question we’re asking about our dreams in the first place. “Rather than, ‘What does my dream mean — (or not mean, or fail to mean),’ ask ‘What, by speaking, does it want?’” This concept was first posed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

Chethik continues, “I think it’s very helpful in the interpretation of dreams and their ‘meaning.’ Why a dream appears at all is a question with no clear answer. When we think about the synapses — they decide to speak. This speech indicates some logical structure, some way of flowing or working together that results in sentences. And these sentences condense or work together to create images or hallucinations. Why? What does it want such that these dreams are produced? What is the meaning — not of ‘a’ dream — but of dreams? I think this is the big mystery.”

Jamie Kahn is a writer and yoga teacher based in New York. Her work has been featured in Glamour, Brooklyn Magazine, Epiphany, The Evergreen Review, and others.