Gender is the Rosetta Stone of Symbol Interpretation

If ever there was a Rosetta Stone to help us to accurately decipher the meaning of many, if not most, of our dreams, I think that the gender component must be it. Somehow this doesn't seem surprising since literally everything that exists in our waking reality consists of polarities which are at least metaphorically related to male and female components. So the fact that the relationship between the two lower levels of our perceptual awareness also display these bipolar characteristics seems to be another confirmation of the age-old truism, as above, so below. And as such it represents another indication to me of the marvelous symmetry which pervades all levels of the creation that we know of as reality.

Of course, it was the work of Carl Jung, with his concept of anima and animus, which first brought this fact to my attention in relation to the working components of the Self. But even knowing that all individuals are composed of potential psychic characteristics attributed to both sexes, it was many years before I was able to connect this to the interpretation of dream symbols. I recall that I began to suspect the phenomena early on in my deliberations but I was not sufficiently aware of the workings of the various levels of the Self, for the first 20 years of my search for answers, to enable me to see the data that was being presented by the dreams themselves...for what they were. I spent many years of this time period, like many others have done and still do, reading dream books that were based on an inadequate understanding of the operational aspects of the Self and thus I was being programmed to believe that dreams are mostly nebulous things which convey information in very general terms only, or are scrambled up memories of our lives that reveal a subconscious so conflicted that it cannot depict things clearly and thus must sort and delete the "garbage" from its data. So, even though there was a nagging suspicion that dream interpretation could reveal more information than previously supposed, I was, like everyone else, led along by the prevailing paradigm about what dreams are and this tended to delay my acceptance of the gender based nature of them.

But in reality I found that the subconscious is pefectly capable of depicting the internal state...with or without conflicts...very succintly, appropriately and even amazingly. It is our conscious inability to interpret properly the vocabulary it uses, and thus what the subconscious is saying that is the true faulty apparatus here. So once I was able to accept the fact that the subconscious mind is able to draw on its internal database of memory for the associations of male and female characteristics and to correlate these with the actual symbols that it uses to formulate its graphic form of speech, all of a sudden a whole new vista relating to the meaning of symbols opened up for me.

This, coupled with my own career experience as an advertising art director, led me to understand another very important fact about the subconscious capabilities. I realized that when it created a dream scenario, it functioned as a highly efficient, extremely well organized, and very creative art director, or movie director, to be more specific. I was able to see that it composed the scenes very tightly, controlling the stage and all of the stageprops like a master director would do for a movie scene or for an advertising photo shoot.

Then it all came together for me. It became apparent that this dream "director" which lives inside of us was actually controlling the "sending" end of a communication process and that it was up to us to use the deductive reasoning powers of our conscious minds to learn its language. By doing this, we are completing the process by connecting the subconscious mind to a "receiver", the conscious mind, which is capable of the task.

Then I began to understand, for the very first time in nearly 25 years, exactly what my dreams had been indicating...often repeatedly, over the years. And I realized that much of the information within many of them was actually an attempt by the subconscious mind to inform my conscious awareness of how to think about its language and how to understand its vocabulary. In other words, as I was digging with my desire, intention and actions from the conscious end of the pipeline, the subconscious was busy digging toward my conscious understanding from the other end. It was trying to help me to understand its language. Eventually they met in the middle and a fascinating Eureka moment was produced for me.

Since then, I have worked with other people's dreams more than my own. And I have found that the phenomena holds true across the spectrum of dreamers. What I found is that the gender metaphors for the conscious mind and all of its related attributes are invariably tied to male oriented symbols. And conversely those for the subconscious mind are tied to female symbols. And I realized that this key information is the basis by which the subconscious communicates both positioning and timing elements.

By positioning, I mean within the vertical structure of the levels of the Self. A male means from the conscious level and a female means from the subconscious. And by timing I mean which came first and which is next. A mother is older than a daughter.

So gender is used by the subconscious as the basic orienting device for the structure of the language of symbols. When you read the interpretations that I've presented in the links below, as examples, and see how this knowledge is applied, I think this will begin to become more clear and you will then possess a key to understanding at least the grammatical part...the structural basis of what I choose to call the native language of the soul. Then, armed with this knowledge, you have only to develop your own dictionary of personal symbols, plus learn what is already known about universal symbols, and you will be able to read your dreams as if they were written in your waking, native language or were spoken directly into your ear.

Explicit Sexual Dreams

Quite simply, the subconscious mind does not "see" the physical sex act for what it is. To the subconscious, the physical reality is a metaphor for the mental/emotional reality. Thus, when we dream of having sexual relations of any sort, it is usually just a metaphor for a connective dialogue, or intercourse, between the two polarized levels of the mind itself...the conscious one and the subconscious one. It simply means that they are connected to each other and interacting with each other. Information is flowing between them.

Dreams of new lovers, ex-lovers, homosexual relations, etc. are for the most part indicators of just what kind of internal interactions are taking place within the dreamer. To illustrate these points I've included below a few interpreted dreams related to sex.

Some Relationship Dreams Interpreted

Another Husband

Glass House Sex

The Seduction

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