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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

In another, the woman found herself surrounded by workers, including a milkman, a gasman, a newsagent, and a plumber. She felt calm, until she spied among them a chimney sweep. (In her family, the German word for “chimney sweep” was code for the S.S., a nod to the trade’s blackened clothing.)

Terrific example of how dreams are an idiolect (a dialect of one person).

(Edit) In case it's not clear:

The point I am trying to make is that you wouldn't know why a chimney sweep would be an upsetting image without the part in parentheses clarifying what that meant to her. Dream imagery is a symbolic language drawn from our life experiences and much of it will not be obviously meaningful to an outsider who doesn't know the backstory.

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The various tradesman here remind me of the Germans seen in Don't Be a Sucker (1945), a piece of war propaganda produced by the US Army: https://youtu.be/vGAqYNFQdZ4

Interesting, I’ve never noticed such symbolism in my dreams (that I remember), neither enough reasoning abilities to relate something symbolic to a real phenomenon.

One of my recent dreams was about me in a room full of indifferent people and one with a knife looking at me. I took a knife away from him, pushed him onto a window sill and carved crosses on his knees.

I have no idea what this means.

It's not enough info to interpret it. You would need to start by breaking down some of the symbols.

Crosses are a Christian symbol. Are you Christian or not?

Crosses were used by the Roman Empire to punish people and were so painful they had to invent a new word for it: Excruciating.

Crosses get used in popular fiction as protective symbols against monsters, like vampires and werewolves.

But what does a cross mean to you?

Knees can be a symbol of humbleness, a la "get down on your knees." They can also be a symbol of a point of vulnerability.

But what do knees mean to you?

A window might be a "window of opportunity" -- ie a time frame in which something could occur. Pushing a person onto a window sill could be putting something in place for a particular time frame.

But what does a window sill mean to you?

Dreaming of individuals you actually know rarely is about that person. Instead, that person symbolizes something to you or sometimes your description of them in the dream is a play on words. When I had a corporate job, dreams of my ex husband were really dreams about my job. I was "working for The Man" and "married to my job," so my job was "The Man in my life."

Feels like something about the bystander effect, about feeling attacked or threatened while everyone around you is indifferent. And how in such a situation, you want more than just defence or neutralizing the threat, but some sorta vengeance? Ensuring that it won't become a problem again? Taking power/agency to do so, in a situation where noone else will?

This is just what kinda popped into my mind. Nightcap guru (from the other top post) suggested this:

> This dream likely symbolizes a feeling of helplessness and vulnerability in your current life.

> The indifferent people in the dream could represent a lack of support or understanding from those around you. The figure with the knife symbolizes someone or something that is causing you fear and anxiety. By taking the knife away from them and carving crosses onto their knees, you are asserting your power over the source of your fear and taking control of the situation. This dream could be interpreted as a sign that you have the strength and courage to overcome whatever is causing you fear and anxiety.

I tend to just write it off as a hallucination driven by too-wandering associations.

But there is a recent knowledge I could add to this. From my therapy sessions I learned that direct interpretations, even when they come from your own mind, may be very far from your issues or thoughts that may have produced a dream (in case it really is a subconscious experience at least partially). I have found very unusual multi-tier connections between events and my panic attacks, that I could never interpret myself into in a straightforward way. If you're familiar with chess, it feels like your mind looks several moves forward and wide, but a conscious interpretation is just a take on direct attacks.

Trying to interpret dreams logically is unlikely to generate explanations that are helpful: there are so many possibilities, and even when one finds an explanation that makes sense, one is left wonderingwhat to do with it. A much more potent approach seems to be to re-explore the dream as image, being mindful of the resonances you can feel in the body, and letting it develop the way it wants, without focusing too much on "understanding" or any specific goal. This might sound a bit abstract, but here is a two part blog post which I think explains this pretty well (I am not the author):

https://inthewilderless.substack.com/p/against-dream-interpr...

https://inthewilderless.substack.com/p/towards-dream-intuiti...

(Note: I was quite familiar with "imaginal meditation" when I first found this post, so to me this made a lot of sense and was immediately applicable. But I hope and think that it is even if one is not familiar with those practices)

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