Who are these people?

Dream characters all represent parts of the dreaming person's mind. This is the most difficult lesson to accept; but it is the only possibility.

Perhaps you have had conversations in your mind with people who aren't physically with you. Most of us have done this. When you do that, you do not consciously set out to create things for the other person to say; the things they say just come to you.

But the things they say come from somewhere. It isn't the real person -- as we usually find out, the real person usually does not follow our script when we try to have that conversation in reality. Besides, the real person has no way of getting those thoughts into our mind: they cannot telepathically beam their half of the conversation to us.

(Even those who are inclined to believe in telepathy will understand that we have these imaginary conversations far too often, and anticipate wrongly the other person's speech far too frequently, to accept that it is real communication.)

So, the imagined person's half of the conversation must come from us: it reflects our expectations and our inward understanding of them. But, it is automatic. It is not intellectual; we do not work it out in the way we would a math or logic problem.

The imagined person's half of the conversation comes from our own unconscious mind. It is unconscious in that it reflects a thought process which is not available to our conscous mind. But it is still our thought process; it must be; whose else could it be?

The more we come to know someone, the more we have adapted some part of our unconscious mind to think as they do, and the more likely we are to get it right. But it is still part of our mind doing the thinking to generate their imagined action or response.

In that case, we can say that our inner image of the other person corresponds more closely to the other person themselves. It is like being able to summon up in our mind's eye another person's face; but rather we are summoning up their emotional nature.

Dreaming is much like this. When we dream, part of ourself wants to say something to us; and we listen with a part of our mind that understands not with logic and abstraction, but with a part that understands with the senses.

So, this listening part of our mind forms the speaking parts into people; and it picks the people who are the best-understood analogy for how it takes the speaking part.

Thus, if the part of ourself which wants to tell us something is a part we like, and are on good terms with, we encouter a friend. If it's a part of ourself we have long known about, it is an old friend; if it is a part of ourself we have not thought of for a long time, it finds an old friend we haven't spoken to in years, and dresses up the speaking part as that old friend.

So, usually, when we dream about our mother, it is not about our mother, but about a part of ourself which we understand to be concerned for our well-being; a nurturing part of our inner minds, perhaps. Now, this does not mean we never can dream of our real mother -- we can and will, especially when there is some emotionally powerful event.

Usually, when we dream about our mother-as-a-person, the dream will have a simple, straightforward analogy to our personal story; when we dream about an inner-process-manifesting-as-our-mother, the logic will be weirder, she will do and say more -- because she is trying to communicate a message -- and we will find the situation incongruous with our daily lives.




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