Another workshop

I attended another dream analysis workshop with Gabi. I’ve learned so much about the way my mind works and how different events are still affecting me. What I find of particular interest is the symbolism that dreams take on – the people, places, and things in dreams aren’t really what they seem to be on the surface. I knew that dreams often present messages in subtext, but the extent that our minds go to represent other things is truly astounding.

Something we’ve been working on is understanding the setting and timeline of our dreams. She’s taught us how to examine the things in our dreams and label them. For example, the dream Gabi interpreted for me last night took place in an abandoned warehouse. She asked me what an “abandoned warehouse” is. My immediate, unthinking response was that it’s a place you can go to be yourself, because nobody is expected to be there. For me, an abandoned warehouse symbolized, in that dream, a place where there were no expectations of me, where I could just be myself and do the things I wanted to do.

I never would have come up with this on my own. I’ve always interpreted by own dreams, and those of my friends, but so much of it has been intuitive leaps based in part on what I know of the individual dreaming. She pulled all sorts of things out of my dream that she has no way of knowing because she doesn’t know me or my life.

I feel elated that I can finally start picking apart some of the issues that I have thought I’d dealt with years ago that still keep creeping up on me.

The workshop with Gabi is like a therapy session. My mom and I have been going together, and it’s been very nice to spend the time with her doing something we both have lot of interest in.

My mom's dreams are pretty telling too. I think we're both getting a lot of therapy out of this.