Interpreting Dreams about Spiritual Transition and Growth

Awakening to the Significance of my Dreams

Recently, I had a vivid dream:

I’m on the top floor of a beautiful, tall house with lots of natural lighting doing self-care like journaling and yoga. I pull out a dish in the kitchen and notice a tiny fish swimming in it. I look away, and when I look again, the fish has grown rapidly and is now lying flat without water. I’m surprised and bewildered. What am I going to do with this fish? I don’t want anyone else to see it, but I want to keep it alive. I go out to the balcony and look for a pond. I see grass and puddles below. Maybe I should place the fish in a puddle, but this might not be enough water. 

The phone rings. It is a relative and their ministering companion from church. They want me to share what’s going on in my life. Their intention seems to be to restore me to old, inherited worldviews. I don’t want to tell them anything. I look at the clock and realize I’m late for work and say I have to leave.

I might have forgotten all about this dream were it not for my sister telling me about Jungian analyst James Hollis’s argument that dreams play an important role in mid-life spiritual transition. She shared examples of dreams discussed in his books in which beautiful experiences and efforts to tend to important things are disrupted by someone else’s demands that reminded me of my own dream.

I got curious about how paying more attention to my dreams might help me in my spiritual life. James Hollis writes:

“Several times each night, whether or not we pay attention, the psyche creates a dramatic, narrative reaction to what is happening in our lives and how it is viewed from a perspective larger than that of the ego. If we track these dramatized narratives over time and learn their language, we gain a vital source of wisdom not available to ordinary consciousness” (Living Between Worlds 25-26).

Hollis refers to the source of dream content as the “Self,” the soul, the unconscious, or the psyche. He suggests we can treat dream messages as coming from the natural world we are part of, the result of millions of years of evolution. What comes to the surface through dreams can show us what is awry in our lives. It can help us discern how to move forward during transition or crisis.

Based on decades of experience as a therapist, Hollis argues that dreams are especially valuable to pay attention to in the “second half” of life. During this time, many people go through periods of intense internal discomfort, experiencing strong desires for change and new paths that can be hard to know what to do with. This might hit you in your forties or any decade past then. 

Looking at our dreams can help us understand and process these experiences. It can help us recover from harmful, soul-confining conditioning we received growing up, including from the Church. As Hollis explains, when we are disconnected from “the Self,” or our deeper wisdom and desires, “we serve our complexes, wounds, and received cultural and familial messages instead of serving the intent of our soul.” He explains that “working with our dreams allows all of us to look within, to see the center of gravity shift from our many adaptations to the outer world to begin to trust that something within each of us knows what is right for us. Learning to trust that sorting process, to value that dialogue, and to risk relying on an internalized sense of authority is what restores our journey to us, bringing us back to our own souls” (Living Between Worlds pg. 26).

Tips for Remembering and Interpreting Dreams

I’m starting to use my dreams to help me in my spiritual sorting and growth process. I want to connect more with my internal sense of authority, learn to trust it more, and let it guide my life more.

After reading Hollis’s Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life and Living Between Worlds and some other resources about dreams, I’ve come to the conclusion that because dreams are so personal, there is no guidebook out there that can tell you what they mean. The meaning-making is work only you can do. New age religions might claim to have cracked the code on dream interpretation, but I’m leery of their confidence. Dream dictionaries can be helpful, but should be taken with a grain of salt because we internalize symbols and archetypes in unique ways. 

Here are a few principles some people use to remember and make sense of dreams I’ve personally found useful:

Dreams are usually about you and your internal life– your unconscious thoughts, spiritual desires, unacknowledged emotions, etc. People and things in the dream often symbolize aspects of you, the dreamer.Fostering an intention to remember your dreams can help you recall them, and writing them down in detail or recording your voice shortly after can be invaluable for interpreting them later.Dreams are often symbolic, whether through animals, colors, numbers, places/ spaces, or people from your life that may represent something else. Interpretation of the symbolism is up to you.Dreams have a restorative, healing function. As Hollis says, “nature does not waste energy” (Living Between Worlds pg. 25). Even if you’re not paying attention to them, dreams are likely benefitting your emotional and spiritual well-being (or at least that is their purpose), much like sleep restores the body.Dreams can help us see issues that are difficult to acknowledge in our waking lives. As Carl Jung theorized, they can provide insights about our spiritual journeys and how to move forward.When women meet male guides or other male figures in dreams, these can be understood as animus figures, or representations of a woman’s masculine side/traits. The animus is associated with exploration, assertiveness, intellectual pursuits, and activities women may not have had space or resources in their lives to reach their potential for. In men’s dreams, the anima (female guides or figures) can represent the unconscious female side. Anima symbolism is usually focused on emotional connection, sensitivity, empathy, and other qualities men may not have tended sufficiently to. This anima/ animus dream framework comes from Jung.Questions Dreams Might Help Us Address

In addition to these tips, here are a few questions for cultivating meaning and fulfillment in mid-life or the second half of life that dreams can help us grapple with and find clarity concerning. These come from James Hollis’s book Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life:

Where are you blocked by fear, stuck, rigid, or resistant to change?Where do you avoid conflict, especially conflicts concerning values, and therefore avoid living in fidelity with who you are?What ideas, habits, behavioral patterns are holding you back from taking a larger journey of the soul?Where do you avoid conflict, the necessary conflict of value, and therefore avoid living in fidelity with who you are?Where were your parents emotionally stuck, and how is this “stuckness” showing up in your life?What are you doing with the gifts life has given you that your soul longs to use and develop?Where are you still looking for permission to live your life?Where/ how do you need to grow up?What have you aways felt called toward, but feared to do?Dream Interpretation Examples from my life

Interpreting my Growing Fish/ Disruptive Phone Call Dream

This dream is about my spiritual growth and how others’ expectations are serving as an obstacle to it. The fact I’m up high up in a beautiful, sunny space doing self care suggests I have “ascended” to a greater level of spiritual awareness than I had in the past. The fish is another symbol of my spiritual growth, specifically how I’ve grown by expanding beyond old frameworks. This includes ways I have differentiated from others at Church and their expectations for me. In real life, I’ve been surprised by this growth and how rapidly I’ve outgrown beliefs I never thought would change for me. The dream suggests I feel unsafe letting others see or know about this growth and that I have some ambivalence about how my spirituality has changed. The fact I don’t have a proper place to maintain the fish or rather my growth and even kind of want to just get rid of it is a problem in my life. My newly expanded spirituality won’t thrive in a puddle. The dream encourages me to keep learning, expanding and taking risks in my spiritual life, and to not be ashamed of how I am changing. Water is often a symbol of the spiritual or mysterious side of life in dreams. I metaphorically need to build my fish a pond by deliberately strengthening the differentiated dimensions of my spiritual life, and the areas in which I am actually growing, however unexpected these may be.

Then there is a disruptive phone call that comes while I’m still trying to figure out what is best to do with the fish. The fact I don’t share anything suggests I might be more private about what is really going on for me spiritually than I’ve acknowledged even to myself. Being fearful of what others in the Church think could thwart my growth. The dream suggests I need to stop engaging such fears and “get to work” expanding and tending to my spirituality. Being late to work might represent a sense of how I’m behind where I’d like to be.

Animus-focused Dreams

I have dreams that seem to involve my animus, or the “male” side of me that is trying to grow, develop, and serve a more empowering role in my life. Like many women, I grew up conditioned to be pretty passive, submissive, and quiet about my thoughts and feelings. I spent a lot of time feeling controlled by others. Now I’m in a stage of life when my unconscious seems to be screaming it’s time to break out of this and become more assertive, autonomous, and more of a leader. Here are two examples of recent animus dreams:

Old Crush/ Healed Baby Boy/ RhoGAM Shot Dream

I’m in a church building. I run into the mom of a guy I had a crush on in high school. She tells me that Cameron and his wife are sitting in the chapel and that I should go say hi to him and catch up. I think to myself, yeah that could be okay, but he’s probably old and out of shape now and I’m not sure if Cameron would care to see me anyway. I enter the chapel. Cameron and his wife are looking good! They haven’t aged much and are dressed up nice. I walk right by them to the front of the chapel and then to the bathroom. I realize a medical service center is located just off the bathroom. A nurse asks me what I need and I tell her the name of a certain treatment. She shows me a newborn baby boy. His life was in danger but he has been receiving a treatment. At first it looks like his legs are deformed and almost non-existent, but suddenly, I see he has grown normal, healthy, kicking legs. He is making a full recovery. She says it’s time for my treatment. I tell her I think I need a RhoGAM shot.

I used to wonder why this particular old crush showed up in my dreams after so many years (always with me struggling to connect with him). I think it is because his personality and interests reminded me of my own growing up and my unconscious picked up on the idea of treating him as a projection of the masculine of me. The fact my crush hasn’t really aged in the dream seems to indicate my masculine side has vitality. (His wife being present could represent feminine strengths I’m working on). The fact I don’t connect with him suggests I’m still avoiding breaking out of old habits of passivity and avoidance. The baby in the medical center could also represent my animus. Starting at a very young age, my more assertive and adventurous side was threatened by others’ dominance over me and and I developed various maladaptive coping mechanisms to live with this. But I’m experiencing growth and improvements in my waking life to correct this as symbolized by the treatments the baby and I receive in the dream. The RhoGAM is an uncanny symbol. I received a RhoGAM shot 14 years ago in order to safely carry my son during pregnancy, so the shot represents something that literally allows me to carry and develop maleness inside of me. The shot seems to represents a process I am seeking to go through to heal emotionally from past suppression and to become a more balanced and whole person. This “treatment” in waking like likely has to do with my growing emotional and spiritual autonomy, and detaching from wanting or needing others’ approval, making decisions for myself, and not letting fears stop me from doing things I want to pursue.

Roasting a Goose Dream

My husband has given me an unusually large, dead goose to roast. I pluck its white feathers off. I am ambivalent about this task. I think preparing the goose will take so long it will go bad before it gets cooked. I remember I don’t even like gamey meat so I don’t know why I’m going along with this.

Suddenly, in place of the goose in the (large) roasting pan, it is one of my brothers-in-law! A very vocal, assertive, adventurous man about my age. Instead of plucking feathers, I am now absurdly plucking off his facial hair and preparing him to be roasted in the oven. He has purchased some kind of “roast yourself as a goose” kit that we’re using, and he is enthusiastically on board with this project. The kit comes with a metal latch that attaches to both sides of his mouth and seals it. He seems to think doing all of this means having a good meal himself rather than becoming food for others. 

Geese “flock together” and can be symbols of community and connection. I’m interpreting the goose as a symbol of patriarchal roles and relationships because roasting the goose is a project assigned to me by my dream husband as if he’s presiding over me like a boss. The brother-in-law can be seen as a symbol of the masculine part of myself, or my needs to become more assertive, spontaneous, and self-determining. Relationships, including those with male Church leaders and male relatives, are meant to be sustaining and life-bringing (like food), but when they are set up such that others call the shots for me, there isn’t much of anything in it for me. The goose transforming into my bro-in-law, a representation of my own masculine side, takes this point further: when men boss me around and consume my time and talents, I become food for others. My strengths are wasted and exploited, leaving me depleted and conned, or a “silly goose” (a phrase used frequently during my childhood).

At times I have tried to act happy about the workings of patriarchy, like the bro-in-law I’m roasting in the dream. I have even “bought” into the idea its best for me to let myself be subordinate to others (like how the person being roasted buys the kit himself). Absurdly, I have tried to believe I still get to eat the feast despite the reality that I feel used up and malnourished by the patriarchal systems I’ve been part of. 

We can see in the dream that these problems are enabled and worsened by the silence and passivity encouraged in patriarchy represented by the latch sealing my bro-in-law’s mouth closed. The dream invites me to speak up and resist. It also suggests that by going along with patriarchy, I have been emasculating myself, or stripping myself of my more assertive and bolder qualities in how I remove my bro-in-law’s beard. It reveals a truth I suppressed for many years: relationships with men in which I’m not respected as a true equal are simply not at all enticing to me. Such things are like a disgusting, oversized, dead goose that I shouldn’t be cooking for others anymore. The dream pleads with me to stop going along with such dynamics.

One Last Dream about Paths of Spiritual Differentiation

A Resort Dream

My family has gone on vacation to a lush tropical place and we’re staying in a nice resort. The interior is beautiful and we’re enjoying being there. I want to send some photos to extended family and friends, so I take some of my immediate family sitting in some of the spaces. But when I look at the photos, all the decor, plants and furnishings at the resort won’t show up. All I see is a black background, and my family gathered together on our couch at home in the center.

The fact my resort photos show up as an image of us connecting at home as if during a family home evening discussion seems to signal that the dream is really about my approach to teaching my kids about spirituality at home. My family being at the resort seems symbolic of the rest and beauty I’ve found through changing my approach with my kids. In recent years, I’ve switched to greater openness, flexibility, and respect for exploration and agency. I love the conversations I’m having with my kids. I love how I feel closer to them now than I did when I was anxious about them getting on board with Church.

The dream acknowledges that those outside my immediate family whom I might want to understand my experience might not be able to really see or appreciate it. This is why the resort won’t show up in photos I want to share with others; it’s just a mundane image with a black background. But this doesn’t ultimately matter very much or invalidate my experience, the goodness of which I’ve experienced for myself. To me, this dream suggests the need to recognize and accept that some other people won’t be able to give me validation or approval with how I’m raising my kids, or share my joy. The dream left me feeling encouraged to trust my own discernment and experience.

For another dream about spiritual transition from me, see “A Whale Dream,” a mini essay I published in ALSSI’s Say More.

I hope this post will encourage and help some readers to seek to notice, remember, and interpret their dreams and discover interesting insights about your spiritual growth and journeys! I’d love to hear about others’ impactful dreams or dream interpretations tips.