Strange dream

[bosston]

I work at a technical college in IT and I work kind of closely with this instructor-I'll call her J. We're kind of close and she's very attractive and intelligent and always calls when she needs help. I'm not sure what this dream means and it really scared me because I have no idea what it means.

Here's the dream:
I’m sitting in the living room reading the newspaper. J is sitting across from me in a chair next just outside the kitchen. The TV is turned on. I’m reading the paper a song comes on. Bruce Springsteen’s Stolen Car (The River 1980). The first song lyric is I met a little girl and I settled down. In a little house out on the edge of town. I look at the tv and the movie that comes on is Sylvester Stallone’s Copland with the credits showing “Sylvester Stallone, Robert DeNiro, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta etc”. J disappears and we shift to a new person. A DMX gangsta/rapper whoever walks into the room and says “Hey man… here’s the acid use it carefully”. I take the acid and throw it on the kitchen floor and the kitchen disintegrates and the oven and the table and the refrigerator disappear into the floor.

The scene shifts again and I see J on the steps to basement from the kitchen. She has her face covered on top of both of her hands and arms and is tired and is down face forward. I gently massage her neck to wake her up and she says “I’m going home. I made you dinner.” As I help her up she has a beautiful diamond ring on her left hand. End of dream.

[Athanor]

Just to start off by saying that one view of dreams is that they try to reveal parts of the dreamer’s personality that might be left out of day to day consciousness too often.

In your dream, it seems that possibly some aspects of feeling and relationships could be taking a back seat at times. However, without knowing much about you, this can only be a general idea that might not fit your actual circumstances very well if at all.

In this approach, dreams are seen as expressing themselves via analogies and therefore use things from the outer environment to illustrate their message. For example, the subsequent lyrics in Stolen Car describe how the relationship then fell apart. Also, the girl speaks of long ago love letters, suggesting that the expression of love stopped too soon. The man drives in fear through the dark in the stolen car, perhaps suggesting feelings of being depressed.

In the dream, you’re not paying much attention to J and are reading a newspaper which generally contains current collective events as opposed to personal issues unless the latter are luridly sensationalized and used for the material ends of boosting circulation. This “state of affairs” is followed by the song, possibly suggesting therefore the cause for the “split” of the couple in the song, that is, “not paying enough attention to J”.

Next, Cop Land credits appear. This movie involves corrupt off duty cops that have taken over the area that’s overseen by Freddy the sheriff as played by Stallone, perhaps suggesting that some aspect of your personality is sometimes taken over by certain non-personal impulses.

Freddy is deaf in one ear, possibly hinting that you may be partly deaf to certain feeling aspects of your personality. For example, you don’t try to have a conversation with J and to listen to her, but only listen to non-personal inputs (TV etc.).

Also, as one review says, “There's a scene where he's asked, by the woman he secretly loves, why he didn't marry, "All the best girls were taken," he replies, and you can practically see the big guy's heart breaking in two!”

So perhaps the essential story of the film is really about love and emotion as opposed to “gangsters”.

A gangster does then appear in your dream when “J disappears”. In this approach to your dream, J would tend to represent your feeling personality. Perhaps it tends to be shoved aside sometimes by a certain “acidic” outlook or feeling about life in general, but this can only be a general speculation that might not fit your actual situation.

A kitchen usually symbolizes a place of transformation, that is, on the analogy that food is cooked, transformed, and made edible/nourishing, so too certain feelings, insights and emotions can be “digested” to provide “nourishment” and understanding. But here, the “acid” totally destroys the kitchen and thereby stops any chance of absorbing the nourishing emotions etc. made available there.

At that point, J is found on the steps leading to the basement, that is, to the unconscious where certain aspects of a person’s outlook tend to be less developed. She is depressed and forlorn but the positive image appears where you try to soothe her.

Apparently, the meal she cooked for you has also been destroyed along with the kitchen. But perhaps the diamond ring suggests that there is still a very good chance that you can “unite” with and become closer to this inner part of yourself which may be partially projected onto the outer J. Unfortunately, it’s not really possible to conjecture too much on whether the image is commenting on a potential related to the outer relationship as well.

However as mentioned, without knowing much about you, this interpretation may not fit your personal circumstances very well, but if you’d like to read more about who J and the gangster might represent from one school of psychology’s point of view, you could try looking up “Anima” and “Shadow” respectively on the following website:

CG Jung Page - Jung Lexicon

I hope that at least some of these ideas will help in uncovering the personal meaning of your dream.

[bosston]

Thanks Athanor. Pretty heavy.