a bus journey, stealing food, evil government officials

[The Exile]

i was chasing after a bus. three of my friends were on the bus but i had missed it. it went out of town and to the next town along but i managed to catch up with it and jump on it, then collapse from exhaustion. it went to a department store where there was an enormous international food bazaar. however, it was so expensive i couldnt afford any of the food. i had an ingenious plan of grabbing the nearest person and pretending to be a government official and repossessing their food. then time sort of froze and i really turned into an government official, and all my friends turned into government officials. i said that because time had frozen we could eat all the food and nobody would notice, but my friend said that government officials can't eat because they're the living dead. then everything sort of turned into weapons, i knew it was evil and i had to unfreeze time. i told time to unfreeze so it did, then all the food went back to normal. i had another plan to sneak back at night and eat the food while everyone was asleep. the others wouldn't, they wanted to go back home, so i stayed behind and sneaked back at night. there was still food on the table. i started eating it when this woman came in and called me a thief and threatened unimaginably terrible punishments. i was still desperately negotiating with her when the dream ended.

[Athanor]

In order to be accurate, it’s usually not a good idea to attempt a dream interpretation without having background information about the dreamer, including what happened in the days leading up to the dream, but here are a few ideas about the possible meaning of your dream as based on some fairly consistent dream motifs.

Generally, a bus often symbolizes the “collective”, that is, a person doesn’t control where the bus goes and can only get on or off. When the image of a bus appears in a dream, the dreamer’s energy is being perhaps controlled by general ideas and attitudes, the analogy also including the idea that the “bus company” calls the shots about what the appropriate “routes” are, the “schedule” etc. as opposed to the individual and where he or she “wants to go” in their life.

So looking at your dream in this way, overall it might be a commentary on your current attitude regarding the nature of your personal growth. The energy expended each day takes a certain direction, perhaps dictated by collective values (the bus), and this may leave you in the end emotionally “exhausted” and unsatisfied (hungry).

Your three friends on the bus might represent parts of yourself that “go along” with this approach to life, perhaps symbolizing how you orientate yourself each day via thinking and using the five senses for example. However, you’d have to examine how you decide things in practical ways in order to see if you’re tending to be controlled by certain “collective opinions” on how to conduct your life.

The theme of the collective appears again in the image of the department store which is an enterprise that supplies the “masses” with material goods. Perhaps the dream is even commenting on the now very strong world-wide pervasiveness of this type of attitude in the image of the international food bazaar.

The dream might be implying that adherence to this overall attitude is “costly” in that one can’t obtain enough “nourishment” or general meaning and contentment in some way on a daily basis, so a sort of global malaise could build up in individuals overall.

Turning into a government official (another collective image) might symbolize the idea of redoubling the attempt to gain sustenance from generally held beliefs that the best way to “make it” is to have lots of money, to be able to exercise power professionally and personally, to be admired by others in general, and to be well known in some way by many people.

But in doing this, “time stands still”, perhaps an image that symbolizes the cessation of real personal development (“the living dead”). The weapons might represent the appearance of rugged aggressiveness in attaining certain goals, but something maybe has told you this would be going too far, so a partial backing off from an overdone attitude is achieved albeit briefly because there’s an attempt to gain “nourishment” surreptitiously at night.

This could possibly symbolize an attempt to find meaning by secretly trying to be loyal to certain beliefs and values that are contrary to the collective view of things. But apparently this could stir up huge doubts and lashing self-recrimination (“unimaginably terrible punishments”), perhaps including strong guilt feelings at not fulfilling some amorphous goal that has somehow been implanted in you by surrounding influences.

The dream’s conclusion as being open ended is generally a common one and usually means something like “OK, now you know what’s going on. What are you going to do about it?”, leaving it up to the ego to examine the situation and to take appropriate action to improve things somehow. But dreams, being a product of nature and expressing themselves as well as they can using metaphors, aren’t readily clear to us in most cases.

However, a reliable method that helps to decipher them is to jot down spontaneous thoughts, memories and feelings that come to mind about each image in the dream. Then with a little care and attention while going through what emerges from doing this, certain interconnected themes and ideas usually become clearer. This can provide a reasonable meaning for the dream which may then be corrected or modified by subsequent dreams.

In this case if the broad meaning outlined above is generally correct, a person, when focusing on the image of chasing the bus, might suddenly remember how there were certain pressures to choose school subjects that the person didn’t really like but which would lead to a “safe” career for example. However, this is just a general illustration to show how the method works. It all depends what comes to the individual dreamer’s mind when looking at the images in the dream, and the meaning of this dream could turn out to be completely different from the one outlined above.

I hope at least some of these ideas will help you in tracking down the true meaning of your dream.

[The Exile]

interesting, i did not know it meant anything if the dream was unresolved... i never actually finish dreams.

the three friends being facets of my personality is interesting as well because i have long suspected i have at least three personalities