Myths And Patterns

Myths and Patterns

My uncle was telling me about a dream that he had; he was sleeping and someone broke into the house and started to kill everyone in the house (He said there were a lot of people in the house for some reason). He woke up to confront this problem and grabbed a gun to shoot these intruders with, but when he started to shoot the gun turned into a snake. A dream like this has two very important ideas hidden within it. First it has what has been called an archetypical pattern, this means that there was a stage in which the dream takes place. This house would symbolize him as a whole, and the people in it would be his different emotions served for this certain even that the dream pertains to.

In my junior analysis I could say that this even could pertain to the shooting that my uncle was in when he was in the police for back in California. To me this is showing the anxiety that this shooting has caused him. I think that his mind is telling him that had he not shot the guy others would have died, this is where the mythological symbolism of the snake comes into play "Snakes often seem to represent simply instinctual energy." (Hall 87) His instincts led him into his actions, and thus saved many lives.

This dream had been bugging him for a while, and had I not known about the mythological ideas behind a dream I would never have been able to decipher it (of course it may be wrong, but this was just an example). These patterns within our dreams give little hints and tips; but they also vary from culture to culture and even person to person. What a snake could symbolize to one mind does not mean; however, that it will symbolize that very same thing to another's; nonetheless, these symbols and patterns hold a very particular and powerful meaning in our dreams.

These important meanings come in many different faces so to speak, but there are a few that most have had at least once in their life. One of them of course is a snake; the three authors can almost agree on one meaning that these creatures can have, and this is the phallic symbol. The snake of course would symbolize the penis. But Jung goes on to say "snake could at times represent the autonomic nervous system, an interest core of the human brain stem as the "reptilian brain" (in contrast to the more elaborated mammalian brain and the uniquely human expansion of the cerebral cortex)."(Hall 86) Snakes can define the inner instincts of the human mind. Holloway goes on to say that snakes could represent times or areas of anxiety, or the strength of a person (depending on the culture).

The next that can be affiliated with most is the dream of death, "these dreams include murder and the loss of relationshipsÐ'--must be carefully considered in context, for the death of dream figures seldom refers to actual death; rather it points to the profound archetypal process of transformation". (Hall 86) Death in a dream should rarely be taken literally