I've had this recurring dream for about a year now...

[k1llthelightsnow]

In 2010 I had my heart broken for the first time, and after that I went through a period of mild depression. A few months after the heart break, and into the depression, I had this strange dream, which at first I thought nothing of, but at least once a month I keep having it. This has been going on for about a year now. In the first dream I had, I had essentially a pair of 'broken wings'. I was myself, and I had wings, but I could not fly with them unless I had been running, and 'jumped' into the air, to which they would open and I would be able to fly. When I was flying, it was the most amazing feeling in the world, I felt carefree and happy. In all of the dreams, there would be a large body of water I would be flying by. The peacefulness would only last for so long, however. There were these people, I'm not sure who, but they were out to capture me. I would land after flying, and a group of people would be there, chasing me. Tired, I would run and try to fly, to escape, but every time, there was something in my way. The first time I had this dream, it was a rusty chain linked fence in which my legs got tangled in, torn apart, and bloody and screaming the people ripped me down, and dragged me off to this facility. Another time, it had been a breakwater in the middle of the lake which I hit, sunk into the water, and nearly drowned, only to have the people capture me. In my dream I would lose consciousness, only to re-wake in my dream to find myself chained up in their facility, unable to leave. In most cases, the dream is almost exactly the same, except with small shifts, such as in some cases, my actual friends are there, and promise to help me, but they always let me down, and I get captured. The best example of that was with the breakwater. They were standing on the other side, telling me to run, and it would be okay, nothing would happen, but then I tried to get up over the breakwater, hit it, and fell into the lake, only to get captured. Can you guys help me try to understand what I'm supposed to be learning from this? I could understand the first few months of being depressed, but about a year later, I'm clearly not picking up what I'm supposed to. /:

[Athanor]

Although in order to provide an accurate interpretation, it would usually be best to have general background information about you beyond the brief details in your profile, a few ideas can be tried out to see if they might fit your personal situation in some way.

For example, whether you had a mild clinical depression or just the blues after the break-up, in either case part of the unhappiness which you felt was a symptom that appears in such situations as an opportunity to explore a potential underlying problem as opposed, say, to medicating the feelings out of existence without any dialogue with your inner side.

Also, dreams speak in an “as-if” language, using complex analogies, similes and metaphors to express their meaning.

While some of these symbolic metaphors etc. can have a ballpark meaning assigned to them, it’s always best to have the dreamer’s spontaneous memories, thoughts and feelings which are attached to each image in a dream in order to be much more accurate with a given interpretation.

So for instance, the image of your having wings could generally point to the idea that you may have an overly developed attachment at this time to “mind”, spirit, thought and flights of fancy.

The analogy is based partly on the connections among wings, birds, sky, the color blue of the sky and so on, each linked symbolically to the idea of “airy thought” as opposed to the “earth”.

In this approach to your repeating dream, it’s continuing to reoccur because you apparently haven’t grasped a potential kind of imbalance which may currently exist in yourself that tends to exclude certain down-to-earth realities too much.

This state of affairs is very common in our generally hyper-technical and thought-based society where emotions and instincts for example aren’t really accepted as being equal to the intellect in spite of various declarations of their importance in everyday life.

So it’s likely that your school rewards intellectual activity very highly while like many others, it may be cutting music and arts programs for example to cut rising costs in the face of less money coming in.

Also, a person might understandably retreat into the intellect in order to dull certain painful emotions that exist for whatever reason in their life.

Included in this line of thought is the unfortunately unromantic idea that the person we fall in love with often has a characteristic or trait that isn’t as well developed in ourselves, so Nature causes us to be attracted in part to find out what this side of us is which eventually will need to become more conscious in ourselves.

So maybe by focusing on the memory of your ex love interest and asking for some spontaneous memories might provide a basic clue about at least some of the reason you were attracted.

It appears that the sad outcome of the romance was a reality-blow which the dream depicted as something which “broke your wings” and partly “brought you down to earth”.

However, the continuing repetition of the dreams might be showing that this blow did not have you return to “earth” and “reality” firmly enough.

The other people in the dreams who capture you could represent various aspects of your personality which won’t tend to be very well developed over time if you continue to exist mostly too far “above the earth”.

These inner selves might unfortunately also arrange it therefore that you will fall again at times into some depressing emotions (hit the breakwater and almost drown).

The first dream also appears to suggest the idea of grounding and limits in the image of the chain linked fence.

Seen from one point of view, a fence is a barrier to moving forward, but seen from another direction, it is a protective boundary.

So the image of cutting yourself on the fence might mean that you were tending to hurt yourself by ignoring certain natural limits (the fence), were therefore mostly unconsciously “running into” these normal confines, and this situation was at root causing your depressed feelings overall.

It’s natural for us not to like to be kept within certain restrictions (chained up in a facility) because dealing with various hard realities is a lot more difficult than escaping into flights of thought and fantasy (feeling carefree and happy when flying).

I hope that all of this isn’t too confusing and enough to put you off from mulling over the ideas because if you let yourself relax and let things float to mind, you could probably get some clues about what’s going on underneath which is causing the dream to repeat.

If so, and you then take any appropriate action to help solve the issues which appear, then the dreams should stop reoccurring over time or at least become much less frequent.

Also, since your profile mentions that you like psychology, you would probably at some point like to read some books by analyst Marion Woodman such as “Conscious Femininity”, or perhaps a good introduction to her ideas would be “Body and Soul: Honoring Marion Woodman”. She has helped very many women and men during a 30 year career to keep a balance between the feeling side and the thinking side which is very important for overall emotional help.

Especially if the dreams keep reoccurring even after you try these ideas, it might be helpful to speak with a trusted counselor at school or through your doctor if you feel that things just aren’t feeling right in your day to day life.

Hopefully, it won’t be long before these nagging dreams stop and you can more fully enjoy the rest of your high school years and perhaps a romance or two or three as well.