Dream dictionaries do very little good, because dreams don't convey meanings through things. Sometimes a good dream interpreter can give you great insight: but the problem is that it's very easy to bluff your way through a carreer in dream interpretation. (So if you want to run a 900 line, practice cold reading.)

Dreams express meanings through analogies in situations, feelings, behaviors, and relationships. The meanings they express are usually very personal representations of desires, fears, realizations, and obligations.

For example:

Lost in a Building

I was with a bunch of friends looking for my boyfriend. The friends (nobody I know in real life) were mad at me. We couldn't find him. Then I got separated from them and wandered around a big dark building...

[adapted from a real report]

The industry standard process to handle a dream report like this is to look up the elements in a dream dictionary: friends; lover; strangers; friends angry at dreamer; searching; separation; building.

If you were to look up "building" in an online dream dictionary, you'd get something like this:

Building
To see a building in your dream, represents the self and the body. How high you are in the building indicates a rising level of understanding or awareness. If you are in the lower levels of the building, then it refers to more primal attitudes and/or sexuality.

To see a building in ruins or damaged, indicates that your approach toward a situation or relationship is all wrong. You need to change. Your own self-image may have suffered and taken some blow.

To dream that you or someone fall off a building, suggests that you are descending into the realm of unconscious. You are learning about and acknowledging aspects of your unconscious. Alternatively, it symbolizes your fear of not being able to complete or succeeding in a task.

- See also Falling in our Common Dream Themes section

[from an online dream dictionary]

The dictonary meaning is all well and good, and it can be comforting to find something that speaks with such authority; but applying it the dream report is a little problematic.

The worst thing that can happen next is a clever dream interpreter takes this cue and starts asking questions of the dream reporter: "How high up in this building were you? Were you on the ground floor, maybe? Are you having sexual anxieties about your boyfriend--? Do you feel other people are maybe interfering--?"

A dream interpreter who is un-clever enough to ask stupid questions will wonder how these different definitions relate to one another: if a building represents the self and the body, how does falling off of it represet descending into the realm of the unconscious? Why doesn't it represent a descent into sexuality? Why doesn't a ruined building represent a ruined self? --and so on.











#