Blind Spots in the Dream

dreamimages (11)

Like driving on the roads and no matter how careful we are and alert to other drivers, sometimes that driver or pedestrian sneaks up on our left or right hand side or behind. This always gives me a start when it happens to me. A blind side –

We have blind spots with regard to an interpretation of our dream. We want to put a positive spin on that strange, sometimes bloody dream. 

This also happens in trying to tease the out the meaning of a dream. I heard of a woman who couldn’t figure out why, for a long while, she kept on dreaming of trying on different coloured jerseys – in a changing room. Her relationship was cause for concern but she chose to ignore warning signals as she was very invested in making the relationship work. But, she had a blind spot with regard to it. When it was pointed out to her that the wool was being pulled over her eyes in her dream, the penny dropped. 

And since the dreamer didn’t get the message first time round, it kept on re-occurring. The dream couldn’t have been clearer obscure though it seemed. She awakened to the message with regard to her relationship.

So, we have our blind spots in interpreting our dreams. Also, especially when faced with a blockage in our lives, we are not that keen to face it, preferring blindness.

The dream helps to bring about a corrective attitude to our conscious attitude and behaviour. It serves as a balance to our lives bringing to our attention an unvarnished truth.

The dream is your friend, not foe – it waits in the wings, wanting your attention to bring about balance –

 thank you to Google images for the image

74 Comments on Blind Spots in the Dream

  1. Thank you. After my husband’s death in 2008 and sometimes still, I drive with blindfolds, with my eyes shut, without lights. You get it… Grateful for my Jungian dream therapist to try to avoid blindspots, but they are there anyway. As Marian Woodman loved to say with a laugh, “The Unconscious is always unconscious.”

    • I’m laughing too Elaine thank you! And to Marion Woodman, bull’s eye!

      Those blind spots are difficult – it helps so much to have an other to point things out!

    • I remember a time in my life when every night I thought i was entered a great adventure. Dreams were sagas, with beginnings middles and ends. Their root was in a blind spot I had nurtured for a long time, an addictive pattern. When I began to deeply analyze the dreams, that behavior changed. Thank God! And thank you, Susan! Great post.

      • Thank you dear Mira! I guess when it comes to an addiction of ANY kind, we have a blind spot about it. This is where dreams can reveal … and we’re changed.

  2. I too used to keep a dream journal. When I read entries now, years (decades) later, I still remember most of them quite vividly. I’ve not used it to get perspective by letting some time pass and review them… now that’s an idea. Thanks!

  3. Dreams are important, looking at their meaning and making this a part of our lives. I think the Soul speaks to us when the noise of the day is quiet! A lovely post, Susan, thank you 🙂

  4. Hi Susan

    I think I must be a little weird, but I usually go looking for the negatives, blindspots & things that may otherwise get overlooked in an effort to make everything appear ‘pretty’. Not because I’m invested in the world being dark or bad, but because I think that there is so much we can learn from those negatives, sometimes more so than the positives(which oddly is the premise behind my posts for the A to Z challenge)

    Flip

    • Hi Flip, thanks for your comment. Perhaps your name is synonymous with the way in which you look at your dreams i.e. looking at the flip side of things? It’s important to look at all sides and not veer from ‘the negative’ … thank you for bringing this up.

  5. The example explained the concept of blind spots so beautifully! It must need a lot of awareness and consciousness to interpret what the dreams are telling us!

  6. Interesting thought here. The analogy is good. Sometimes when I tell my wife a dream she’ll come up with a perfectly good explanation that I’m sure is right and one that I hadn’t though of–my blind spot.

    I’ll have to keep this blind spot idea in mind in the future when a dream really stumps me.

    Arlee Bird
    A to Z Challenge Co-host
    Tossing It Out

    • Thanks Arlee, it usually helps to have someone to share the dream with; they’re the ones who point out the blind spot!

  7. Susan – I shared this on Facebook with this comment: My beautiful friend Susan Scott posted this on her blog…I share it with you all because it was my dreams at one point in my life — intense, vivid, story-like sagas at times — that guided me forward. Keeping a dream journal is a wonderful thing to do. As humans, we have three basic states of consciousness: waking, sleep and dream — and all of them are important in our investigation of who we truly are beyond body-mind-emotion-and personal history. Dream on…

    • Thank you so much dear Mira for sharing your own experience of the value of dreams as well as highlighting the importance of keeping a dream journal and dreams having a guiding function …

  8. Reoccurring dreams were common in my younger years. And since I am more at peace now, it explains why I no longer have them. When I do dream, it’s rare now I remember them in vivid detail. When I do, I do try to listen. Interesting post!

  9. You have inspired me to sleep without blinders. Beautifully expressed of course. I related to this piece. Thank you dear Susan.

  10. It must be I didn’t get a certain message sent to me, because there is a dream about a huge dog that keeps recurring. Interesting, the blind spot idea, Susan. And so true, dreams have to be our friends not foes.

    • Thanks for coming by Silvia. Huge dog reminds me of Cerebrus, the dog who guarded the entrance to the underworld. I also think of Churchill and his ‘black dog’: he called his depression this. In Greek Mythology, the dog is one of the attributes of Asclepios, the Roman Aesculapius, the hero and god of healing. Dog as symbol of animal instinct and much much more; of course it is a domesticated animal.

  11. This follows more deeply into the “Aye, that’s the rub” part of your “Attentive” post yesterday. The blind spot — the settings are my second choice as are the people I am with — recurring. But, fortunately my dreams are sprinkled with first choices in between.

    Thanks. This is a fascinating subject, Susan. Love the blue image, too.

    • Thank you Samantha. Our blind spots are very real. Interesting that you say about first choices in your dreams. This sounds like ‘lucid dreaming’ of which I know almost nothing. I have very little control if any in my dreams ..

  12. Joseph we have 4 or 5 stages of REM dreaming sleep in between other stages of sleep during our sleep cycle. The last REM stage is usually before we wake up in the morning and is the one in which we may remember our dreams. Though dreams can wake us up literally at 3.00 am or 2.45 a.m. Whatever dream presents itself is important. If you have many dreams that you recall (many say that they don’t dream; we all do but many don’t remember them) you are fortunate indeed!A task to write them ALL down – this would be extremely time consuming and lack of sleep! Sometimes, not often, I have two dreams in a night at different times – that I write down. And I don’t remember my dreams always … I miss them when I don’t recall them ..

    I hope this is a bit re-assuring!

    Thank you for your comments!

  13. My math may be CLOUDY today. 3 vivid dreams every hour = 6 x 3 every day = 18 dreams per day. 30 dreams each month would be 18 x 30 = 530 per month. If my assumptions are right, where does one find the time to introspect?

  14. I mostly wish to be ENLIGHTENED about THE VALUE OF DREAMS IN OUR LIVES.

    I ALSO FEAR OF BEING BLIND about some of the costs involved. 25% of every day is spent sleeping, let us say 6 hours. Rapid Eye Movement (REM) in most situations when dreams are most vivid follows a cycle of 2 hours. Therefore, 3 vivid dreams every 24 hours. One 30 day month would result in 90 dreams.

    Who can afford time to record and self-analyze 90, 30, 15 dreams regularly each month. Is this a fair thing to be apprehensive about?

    • Thanks for coming by – yes, recurring dreams especially if unpleasant or disturbing point to unresolved issues. The work is worth it .. not easy, but necessary.

  16. Blind spots, indeed. Or ones we choose to ignore because we feel we have no alternative. For years, mine was climbing ladder steps that curved at the top (as if going up and over) but I could never get past the curve to the downside.

    It was all about my struggles in my profession and how stressed I was that the pressure was relentless. Of course the dream stopped when I retired. I’m sure this particular dream scenario related to work is very very common.

    • Thanks for coming by Sammy D and saying about your recurring dreams. The link with real-life was very strong. Yes that theme of going up ladders and being stuck or no-where else to go is not uncommon. I’ve had dreams with that sort of theme. Glad that that one stopped and made room for new ones!

  17. Dreams are so interesting–and sometimes amusing, too. I love that “wool over the eyes,” but that wasn’t obvious to me reading your description. I’ve had dreams where someone in the dream has to actually say a phrase like that before I get it. Sometimes I’ve awakened with a phrase in my head. I think dreams sometimes deliver cautionary messages like that, but at other times, they’re more commentaries on one’s life or daily routine. Not necessarily saying things are good or bad, but more like when someone asks you about your day and you start going through it.

    • That’s the value of someone else pointing it out Merril. We can’t actually see it. If and when I say something to someone about a mystifying dream of mine, they see things in it that I may never have considered and which rings true and needs further exploration by me. Also, the dream commentary on one’s daily life is very often the necessary hook banal it may seem. And yes when responding to someone’s question about your day, we may well recover something that had been glossed over …

      Thank you for coming by!

  18. Hi my deario! How nice to go to see how you’re doing and find out you’re doing the A to Zed – this is my fourth year (maybe fifth?) and I love it – I don’t do it on my sojourner site though – it is on my jan morrison crazy writing life site.
    Love anything on dreams and that wool over the eyes is perfect. I dreamed for years that I was delivering other people’s babies until I finally went ‘duh! time to create my own!’.

    • Jan, thanks so much for coming by! I was able to finally find your site and commented on your A which I enjoyed but battled like mad, unsuccessfully, to leave a comment on your Boys in the Basement. Is that ‘leave a comment’ function working as well as it could?..When I tried to make a link I got gobbledeegook and some strange link to my own blogger site which is out of date and peculiar. I ask because in a post before I mentioned it to someone else whose ‘leave a comment’ button wasn’t working and she rectified it .

      I also looked for a link to follow by email – I don’t do twitter all that much.

      Thanks for saying about your dreams of delivering others’babies, and then, your own!

      Later: managed to leave message on your B post.

    • Thanks for coming by Lisa. Our UNconscious is a very deep layer, containing the collective unconscious as well … I write about this is one of the A-Z posts ..

  20. Interesting. I haven’t had dreams in so long, but I used to dream all the time. I often had reoccurring dreams of a painful breakup, and all of those relationships I was so devastated to lose in the dream did end in real life as well.

    • Thank you for sharing this J.H. Maybe the painful dream was pointing the way in some way … not that that lessened the devastation in real life ..

    • Thanks Kris – I wonder when some are on purpose? I’ll have to think about that … maybe we need to discover them in order to ‘see’ them?

      • I feel like when it is on purpose it is similar to turning a blind eye to something. We may know it is there but refuse to acknowledge or analyze it.

  23. I once had a recurring dream about my teeth either falling out or crumbling. It eventually stopped, but I never did figure out what it meant. =/

    • Thank you for coming by Ria, I’ll pop over in a minute to see if you’re part of the A-Z. I so enjoyed your posts from before!

      It’s a fairly common theme in a dream, teeth crumbling or falling out, one I’ve had in the past. Symbolically we get our teeth into something (or not), or someone makes a biting remark .. and more besides ..

    • Thanks for coming by Ria, lovely to see you here. I’ll pop over in a minute to see if you’re part of the A-Z. I so enjoyed your posts from before!

      Teeth crumbling or falling out is a not uncommon theme in dreams. I’ve had them a few times. We get our teeth into something (or not); someone makes a biting remark … we chew things over – something’s a grind and so on – much could be explored.

  25. I sure wish my dreams would give me a road-map BEFORE I make my mistakes. Dreams are interesting… especially what we learn from them, when we listen. This is a lovely post Susan.

  26. This is a really intriguing post that encourages me to pay deeper attention to my dreams. I used to keep a dream journal a long time ago, maybe I should give it another try.

  27. A very insightful post. We sometimes do not want to acknowledge the real problem until it becomes big and causes much more damage. It is always better to introspect, identify what’s bothering us and nip it from the bud.

      • AND, should anyone read this comment of mine, do pop over to Deborah’s post .. this month she’s writing about The Fool XX1 of the major arcana in the Tarot. Today’s post is Bummel …

  29. Very poignant. I like to record my usually vivid and remarkable dreams.

    As for blind spots, I just learned that car manufacturing engineers meant for side view mirrors to be directed outward to the point they show absolutely none of your own vehicle. So simple and surprising, I couldn’t resist sharing this safety tip.

    I wish you well. And thank you again for the lovely post.

    • Thanks for coming by Darla! And thanks for the tip re the side view mirrors! I hope others read this too!

      I LOVE the title of your blog post … and your B one I’ve just read, thank you.

  30. Susan, I have a reoccurring place in my dreams, a home I have. I used to go there regularly, could describe it well to you at that time. I enjoyed my time at that place, and always was excited, even while dreaming, when I realized I was back There!
    Beth
    bethlapinsatozblog.wordpress.com

    • How lovely Beth! A sense of coming and being at home. The fact that it recurs must be saying something …can you draw or sketch ‘There’ maybe? Just a thought …

  31. Your illustrative example is a wonderful illustration of both the economy and literal-ness of metaphoric imagery. Pulling the wool is so witty! That is one thing dreams often have- greatly economical wit. We often impose too much ‘message’ upon them

    • Thanks Philippa for the reminder of the humour and economy within the metaphor of the dream! There is always the danger of inflation and imposing too much on the message.

  33. Hi,
    I can so identify with this. I believe we all tend to ignore something that we consider stressful or painful until it hits us on our blind side. Then we can no longer ignore it. I believe our dreams try to prepare us for things ahead, and many of the situations that make us weak and powerless would not hit us so hard when we give the dream attention. We don’t have to understand it. Write it down and let it mature and the explanation will reveal itself at the appropriate time.
    Thanks for your exploring the dream world. This is an excellent post.

    Shalom,
    Patricia at Everything Must Change

    • Your comment puts it in a nutshell Patricia thank you so much! By tuning in within we are strengthened in a way that prepares us for outer events and situations. Writing it down and giving it some shape or form lessens it sometimes frightening aspect. Alternatively, if there is a positive element to the dream this too allows for further exploration. Thank you again!

  34. Very well illustrated in the story. I guess we are all blind at times to what dreams are trying to convey. I do wish though that the Universe would communicate their message in simple forms rather than cryptic messages! Nice one

    • Sometimes the Universe does let us know not necessarily in a simple way or forms and then we’re mightily shocked! Thanks Suzy..

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