W hen my husband brought me a cup of tea in bed the other morning, I could barely muster a “thank you”. I was furious that he’d spent the night blatantly cavorting with another woman (a friend of ours, no less). Never mind that it only happened in a dream.
The emotions – betrayal, outrage, rejection – felt real. My next words – “I had a dream last night” – echoed what Oscar Wilde is said to have deemed the most frightening sentence in the English language. My husband would probably agree.
He rolled his eyes as I told him what he’d been up to. It’s not my mind’s first screening of this particular dream, though the exact cast and plot vary. Do such dreams reveal anything? A generalised anxiety? A deep-seated mistrust? A premonition? Or, as some researchers have posited, is dreaming meaningless “noise” – a byproduct of the frantic neuronal activity that occurs during the phase of sleep known as “rapid eye movement” or REM sleep? Jane Haynes is a London-based psychotherapist.
She originally trained as a Jungian psychoanalyst and still believes there is great value in working with dreams and the unconscious. “Dreams carry a message of some kind,” says Haynes. “They communicate in a nocturnal language.
” It’s not, however, a language that lends itself to universal translation. Despite pop psychology claims to the contrary, dreams about teeth, or flying, or being naked in public do not each have their own one-size-fits-all meaning that can .
