I was supposedly in the hallways at university. I went to press a button to wait for the elevator. The button was replaced with a rotating book, some classic story like Jane Austen.
I entered the elevator and it started to speed up really fast. The faster it went, the brighter the lift became. The entire lift started to shake and was filled with an extremely bright light that hurt my eyes to look at. And when I looked to my right, there was an old lady and the light was also streaming from her face and I could not see her face. It was very scary. As I was still dreaming I started screaming to try and wake myself up.
The dreams I had prior to and following this particular scene were equally emotionally exhausting, including fear, embarrassment, anger, hurt, loneliness and feeling unloved. I woke up crying from having a heated argument with a very close friend.
And these negative feelings don't logically reflect my current emotional state. I've been stressed the past week over assignments, however I just finished everything yesterday and went to sleep in a very good mood.
So, the ‘bright side’ was too hard to take after all that stress, hey? Just joking – half.
As you say, the week leading up to this dream was very stressed with assignments. When you’re under stress, working to deadlines, you devote little time, if any, to dealing with everyday personal issues. If your assignments required you to evaluate emotional situations and conflicts, these may resonate in your unconscious mind with any similar personal issues and require dream processing in the usual way. I wonder, as your dream featured a Jane Austen book, whether you’re studying literature. If so, any dilemmas experienced by the characters in these novels that resonate with your own issues will stir up your experiences and stimulate new insight – all excellent dream material.
My guess is that the fear, embarrassment, anger, hurt, loneliness and feelings of being unloved that featured in your dream were all feelings ignited by your week of stress and by the topics of your study. Your dreams would also have been addressing stress itself: questions such as why do you submit yourself to stress, are you a perfectionist, do you leave things to the last moment and so on.
You were surprised to dream of these emotions after going to bed in a very good mood, but you had only just finished “everything” before sleeping. Dreams tend to process the last 24-48 hours, and when there’s a lot to process, this can spread out over several more nights.
Why did you find the light frightening in your dream? What did the white light threaten?
The white light part of your dream started at university and you took a lift up to a higher level. This suggests your dream may have been about higher learning, or where you’re heading with your studies. Going higher in a dream can reflect your higher potential. Going higher in a building can reflect accessing the higher levels of your mind: intellectual or spiritual, perhaps.
A lift may also be a dream pun on an emotional lift – something to give you a lift. Throughout the stress you were probably looking forward to the highs of the relief.
The lift button was a rotating book. It reminded you of a classic story like Jane Austin. Which book is springing to mind as you read this? Name it. Now ask yourself which issues the book presents and how these relate to your own issues. Your fear in the lift is likely to be related to these. Is there an old woman in the book, or could she represent ancient wisdom?
My feeling is that your dream concerns your fears of going higher, of success. The speed suggests the speed of the changes around you (faster than the speed of light?) and the shakiness of the lift suggests your fear of losing touch with the ground. Can I really go this high? Will I be safe?
We need light to see clearly, but bright light can be blinding. Bright may be a dream pun on intelligence. Are you afraid of being seen to be too bright?
Bright, blinding lights in dreams usually relate to a sudden insight about oneself (a sudden enlightenment) where the insight is too hard to take. Sometimes we prefer to learn the truth in stages, in dimly lit glimpses first then in increasing light until we have built up enough strength to take the full blow.
Plenty of food for thought for you here. Higher thought.
Consult me confidentially about your dream.
Writing Exercise
Imagine you are entering that lift again, only this time you are wearing sunglasses and you have 100% ability to slow the lift to a comfortable speed. Now, set a timer for 15 minutes and start writing or typing as fast as you can – with no room for thought – a story starting with you putting on the sunglasses and entering that lift. Just let the words flow – a kind of stream of consciousness. Stop when the timer sounds. Read over your story at leisure. You will be surprised how much you learn from this.
How does this work?
By working with dream elements and symbols in writing form you are communicating with your unconscious mind in its own language to create change, to explore your feelings and to resolve and heal past issues.
More details on various writing exercises as Dream Alchemy Practices in: “Dream Alchemy” by Jane Teresa Anderson, pages 337-338.
Jane Teresa Anderson
