A black and white furball bounced on my bed at 5:30 this morning. After tumbling over my head, she hopped onto the night table and managed to knock over a glass, empty, thank goodness, and turn on the alarm. I reached one arm out from under the blankets and tried to turn off the alarm without waking myself up completely, hoping that I could fall back asleep for another hour. Except that there was no alarm, and there was no kitten. That tiny, adorable terrorist, whose name was Boris, would be fifty if she was still alive today.
My 5:30 awakening was, of course, from a dream. It was a humorous and charming way to wake up, even if I wasn’t quite ready to get up. For a few minutes I lay in bed thinking about the dream. I wondered what it might mean and if dreams at this point of my life are substantially different from the ones I had when I was younger. I had gone to bed worried about my husband’s health and also about my son, who has just had a health scare of his own. But what did a bouncing kitten have to do with either of those anxieties?
When I got up, I googled dreams as we age and found that there is very limited research on the subject. One study suggests that we might have more vivid dreams because we wake more often, so that we are in REM sleep, the stage of sleep in which we are aware of dreaming, more often.
On the other hand, although I often wake aware of a dream, I don’t remember them for long anymore. When I was in analytic training, I learned to pay close attention to my dreams, which meant that I often remembered several from each night. I no longer feel the need to do that, so a dream has to be pretty powerful to stay with me once I’m awake. But I think that shift is because I’m no longer in analytic training, not because I’m getting older.
What has stayed with me from my training is the understanding that any dream can have several interpretations, and that the most important one is the one that has meaning to the dreamer. That’s a shift from the old school idea that a psychoanalyst’s job is to interpret a client’s dream. Contemporary psychotherapists have a lot more respect for our clients’ ability to interpret their own dreams, which is a very useful attitude for those of us in the “Troisieme Age.”
How often do you pay attention to your dreams? And how often do you ask yourself to try to understand what those nighttime wanderings might mean? Contemporary psychoanalysts also believe that dreams are often attempts to problem-solve situations from real life, but in a non-linear, symbolic way. In other words, as we age our dreams are often attempts to manage feelings related to some of our difficulties in our here and now world.
A client who I’ll call Regina, for example, told me about a dream in which her teeth were falling out. This is an extremely common dream which has been explained as representing anxiety, stress, a fear of saying the wrong thing, worries about health, sexuality, childbirth, and a variety of other things. Regina, who had just celebrated both her sixty-fifth birthday and her fortieth wedding anniversary thought her dream was about her sense that she was deteriorating physically. “I’m not the woman I once was,” she says. “I’m no longer pretty, no longer even attractive. That ship sailed years ago. Now I’m just worried about not being able to keep my body in decent shape and my marriage healthy.”
When I asked if she had an idea about why she translated these worries into a dream about her teeth, she said, “I’m not sure, but I think of my teeth as strong. They can chew meat and break sewing thread when I don’t have scissors. But my teeth are also part of my mouth, and my mouth is one of my strengths.” Suddenly she was silent for a minute. “Oh,” she said. “I just realized. I’ve been worrying that as I get older, I might need to keep my mouth shut more often. I don’t want to be seen as a pushy old woman. Wow. I’ve been thinking about giving up my power.”
For Regina, this was not a new struggle. A successful businesswoman, she had often struggled with concerns that she could be feminine or powerful, but not both. This dream captured a new version of that old struggle. I asked if she could put her conflict into words from the perspective of a newly sixty-five-year-old woman. She said, “I guess I’m still trying to figure out if it’s possible to be gentle, caring, and soft and strong at the same time. I’m worried, as I’ve always been worried, that I’ll be rejected for not being society’s version of womanly. Hunh. Don’t you ever outgrow that anxiety?”
I’ve decided to start paying attention to my dreams again, at least for a little while, to see what they might have to tell me. If you’d like to join me in this adventure, all you have to do is put a pen and a pad of paper, a notebook, or even just a single sheet of typing paper, on your nightstand. When you wake up with a dream, write down a few words or sentences to remind you about it in the morning. Then go back to sleep. You might not remember it the next day, even with what you’ve written down. That’s okay. When you wake up, write down any thoughts you have about the words and phrases on the paper. Over time and with practice, you’ll most likely start remembering your dreams.
Once you do, start to look for patterns in your dream symbols and your associations to the dreams. You might be tempted to look up the meanings online, but remember, what’s important is what you make of the images. Even your choice of the possible online interpretations can tell you something about yourself, though. Some of our dreams as we get older do represent lifelong emotional and psychological conflicts. Others may simply be the result of eating too much pasta the night before. Some can represent our anxieties and worries in real life.
But some can also represent new worries and new growth. I like to think that my dream of Boris bouncing on my head was one of the “new growth” kinds of dreams. Waking with a chuckle after a night of worry is a nice way to start the day, and the kitten brought back a happy time in the past and a reminder that even gloomy days often have a moment or two of joy. The dreambooks probably have plenty of other ways of explaining what it means to be dreaming about a black and white kitten. But I like the idea that my psyche was simply offering me one of those brief moments of pleasure.
Photo credit: 123RF stock image #182088319 creator: popmarleo
I've my own Boris: Delight with Rosetta Stone: For deciphering.