Celebrating Pride With A Self-Discovery Dream
Happy Pride Month to all of our LGBTQ+ dreamers and creatives! As you may already know, your dreams can play an integral role in understanding who you are, revealing how you feel about aspects of your life and identifying your subconscious desires. When interpreting dreams, we first analyze the dream’s symbols to draw conclusions about the overarching theme and meanings. Self discovery often comes from dreams with certain symbols. This month, we are so excited to be celebrating Pride with dream about self discovery, sexuality and embracing all aspects of ourselves. Check out the dream submission below before reading about its meaning!
The Power of Fresh Air
“At one point in my life, I was supposed to get married to a serious boyfriend I had. I made the decision not to and was feeling a lot of feelings about it, even long after the fact... especially being single and approaching my 30s. People still give women a lot of judgment about that. I feel it all the time.
“One night, I had a dream that I was in a huge beautiful, but complicated mountain lodge. I was wandering around the house into different rooms and didn't understand where I was. Eventually, I started to see people frantically running around, they were my closest friends and family and they were organizing some event. I didn't get what was going on until some of them started congratulating me for finally getting married.
“I got lots of pats on the back and talks about how beautiful my future could now be. Close friends made my cake and my wedding dress. Everyone was whispering to each other in different rooms, which I could hear but couldn't see. They were talking about how hard they worked on this wedding and how I should be grateful. They kept coming in and out of rooms to give me their opinions. They came quickly and left quickly. I still didn't understand where I was. I knew who I was supposed to marry but couldn't find him anywhere either. I kept searching to try to find my little sister because she is the person I trust the most.
“Finally, I ran outside of the house and felt so much better in the outside air. I found my sister smoking a cigarette (she doesn't smoke) and I grabbed her and shook her and screamed, “I don't want to get married! I really don't want to get married!” She asked me what I was going to do about it and I wasn't sure. I had no answers. I was just upset.
“I woke up in bed after the dream feeling very different, I felt relief honestly. I had finally found some clarity. I don't know if it was a few days or a few weeks later but, I came to a realization that everyone on this planet doesn't have to be on the same clock. We all have our own journeys, I could do whatever I needed to do in my own damn time. I was empowered. I also came out as Fluid (to myself first) and I truly believe this dream was an important part of my happy discoveries.”
submitted by Alie S.
Dream Symbols
MOUNTAIN
According to Freud, a mountain’s significance lies in its similar shape to womxn’s breasts. A dreamer that looks at a daunting summit may be expressing anxiety about confronting their sexuality. Mountains also represent striving to raise ourselves up toward knowledge of the self and the soul. Mountains allow us to see things differently, to attain a unifying vision + understand the world better.
What do cabins mean in your dreams?
CABIN OR LODGE
Generally, dreaming of a log cabin or lodge suggests that a partnership, union or marriage will not bring you the happiness you expected. Lodges + cabins can symbolize fear, uncertainty or feeling “trapped” in a partnership. According to Sigmund Freud, lodges are always a female symbol.
UNFAMILIAR OR UNKNOWN PLACE
According to Miller’s Dream Book, dreaming of an unfamiliar place can reveal that you will experience a change in your life soon. In our dreams, anything unknown is a sign of hesitance, insecurity or instability in waking life. Dreaming about an unknown place can indicate that something or someone is missing in your life.
WEDDING
While wedding dreams can reflect anxieties about recent life changes, the future or relationships, this symbol can also reveal increased levels of self-acceptance. Wedding dreams at their purest may represent the marriage of opposing forces within us—the masculine + feminine, the light + dark, the conscious + subconscious. These dreams can help you understand how to balance and bring those different pa rts together to create unity inside yourself. Dreams such as these are rare and magnificent, a sign that you are becoming a truly integrated and unified human being.
FRESH AIR
Dreaming about the outside air can signify freedom + intelligence or it can reveal that you are connected to someone spiritually. Air can symbolize your thoughts too—meaning that fresh air can represent that you will gain fresh ideas, insights + clarity. This symbol is a clear message to balance certain aspects of your life to make sure you have the force to get through difficult times.
CIGARETTE
Cigarettes can represent that you’re struggling to give up something that you know is not in your best interest long-term or that you’re concealing something. Some dream books consider images of cigarettes in a dream as a sign of being tired and dependent, while others say it is a sign of pride. If the person smoking in the dream is not a smoker in real life, it can mean that the dreamer is afraid of a specific situation in their life. This dream can reveal discontentment with yourself or the world you live in.
SISTERHOOD
A sister in your dream can show you that it’s time to evaluate your self-awareness and how you respond to your feelings + emotions. Younger sisters are a sign that renewal and regeneration are entering your life. In Western tradition, dreaming about a beloved sibling can mean that one of your best relationships will come to an end. A sister who acts unlike herself in a dream can reveal that her response to something in waking life will not be like you anticipated.
Dream Theme: Self Discovery
While these dreams can mean that you may come into an inheritance or be given the opportunity to travel soon, discovery dreams are often a symbol of realizing new aspects of your identity, sexuality or personality. Often times, we may feel as though we know ourselves entirely, but our dreams can reveal that there is far more to us than we originally thought.
Whether positive or negative, dreams with the theme of discovery typically indicate that you are embarking on a new journey or entering a new stage of life. Dreams with this theme show us things about ourselves that we had yet to acknowledge in waking life and can help us understand ourselves better. When you’re searching for something or someone in your dream, it can show that you have repressed certain feelings or that you’re unsure of where life is taking you.
The theme of discovery can reveal the undeveloped parts of your personality or identity that should be embraced for personal growth and unity. These dreams provide us with opportunities to step out of our comfort zones, examine our emotions and expand our minds to step into our fullest selves. It could be beneficial to ask yourself whether there are aspects of your identity that you’ve held back from expressing to yourself or others.
Dream Meaning
This dream shows us that the dreamer was struggling to identify an aspect of herself and was experiencing anxiety because of it. In the dream, she is shown that in order to move forward, she will have to close a chapter of her life that was prohibiting her from embracing her full self. The setting makes it clear that the dreamer’s subconscious was questioning her lifestyle, sexuality and current relationship. Perhaps she was doubting the relationship after experiencing the life changes brought on by her engagement.
Her dream reveals that more changes will come when she searches for what she has yet to embrace in her life. The wedding symbol is particularly interesting, as it relates directly to her reality, while it also shows that the dreamer is willing to accept herself and the changes needed in her life. As the dream progresses, the dreamer gains clarity on her situation, which can be translated into her waking life.
For this dream, we interpreted the fresh air, cigarette and sisterhood symbols as marking the moment the dreamer first recognized her fear of marrying her current partner. In this scene, the dreamer’s subconscious also shows her that she can rely on her sister throughout her self-discovery process and that she will be unified and renewed by ending the relationship, which would not benefit her long term. This dream is rare and special, as it played an important part in leading the dreamer to realize and embrace her timing, whole identity and sexual fluidity.