Any dream that involves physical trauma, like being shot, being stabbed to death, burning alive, and so forth boils down to emotional trauma.
Last night I dreamt that I was spotting 4 individuals in a densely-knit crowd of people. I grabbed the hands of two of them, a woman and a man, and they held the hands of the other two. I knew them, they seemed familiar, and I thought we were on friendly terms. We were trying to descend on a moving staircase, which was extremely packed with people – we hardly got through. This progression must have represented the progression in life, in a relationship. When I thought we were just about to reach the end of the staircase, the ground – a pivotal moment in our relationship, that one when we are finally going to be entirely open and true with the other – the one woman let go of my hand, suddenly turned around, faced me head-on with a manic stare in her eyes, pointed a gun right at me – and shot me. The impact felt quite realistic, my vision got blurry, and my last thought was “This can’t be how I die”. I lost my consciousness. A moment later, we were in the back of a taxi-ambulance cross-over, driving at high speed through the pitch-black night. The woman was sitting in front of me with the guy at her side. She was staring intently into my eyes again, saying “Give me a chance!” In a way, I felt like this statement meant me not dying this way and somehow pulling through, and not what it sounded like: her wanting me to give her another chance as a friend. She looked like she wanted me dead, so her words seemed to be quite a contrast to her vibe and facial expressions. As if she was lying and keeping up a facade. But I said to her “I will”, with genuine kindness and compassion in my voice. Then I told them “I can see into the future”, and I got a vision of the exact same scenario that had played out, just this time the guy whose hand I had held was shooting at me instead, though the bullet didn’t get through. I figured, the bullet didn’t fly towards me because this vision wouldn’t occur – it was more of an alternative end to the story. So I came to the conclusion that even if I had survived this woman’s bullet, or she hadn’t shot me that particular time, the other guy would have. Apparently they hadn’t truly been on good terms with me, but had actually been out to kill me for some unknown reason. This shocked me.
I woke up, feeling the emotional pressure of mortality and physical weakness – that it could be so easy to take my life away from me, that I was essentially without omnipotent power or didn’t have the ability to dodge bullets like Neo in The Matrix. A very humbling experience, but also one that made it unable for me to go back to sleep for an hour or so. I felt the need to communicate with someone about what had happened to me in this dream.
This particular dream confronted me with my past emotional trauma of losing two close friends in a short amount of time, unexpectedly. (Note: The people in my dream weren’t those people, they were merely representations of them.) The former friend ended our friendship all of a sudden, and never talked to me again. We were both in the same classes at the same school, so every time I was near her, she wouldn’t look nor talk to me. The other friend moved away. At our last slumber party for two a few weeks later, she admitted that she was going to move away. She had never discussed this with me nor her parents had ever mentioned the desire to move away before, so it was entirely unexpected for me that she would move. It seemed like the world how I knew it fell apart – that what I had deemed as the way it worked had been a false assumption of mine.
I’m a person who is Social instinct first and cares deeply about social connections with friends and similar, so I am extra vulnerable to losing close friends. And also, my first function is Introverted Intuition, so when I cannot foresee something, it is extra traumatic, because generally I do not have an issue with this.
Anyhow, as you could see, being shot or physically harmed in a dream is closely connected with emotional trauma. In those cases where the individual has actually experienced significant physical trauma or was close to doing so in his “real life”, like a soldier who lost his leg or almost got hit by a bullet, that kind of dream might imply the literal fear of physical trauma. But even then, the physical trauma is linked to an emotional trauma. Our dreams are rarely founded on something truly physical, for our bodies do not move in the way it does in the waking life. Our dreams are usually based on emotions and psychological affinities of any kind.
The closer the physical trauma in a dream is connected with death, the more severe the emotional trauma is. Try to analyze your dream with this in the back of your mind. Take note of the people who were involved in the dream, and on which terms you are with them (primarily in the context of the dream world, unless you know the people outside of it well). This will give you a clue as to who or what caused the trauma, and what kind of emotional trauma you’ve been suffering from.
Depending on the severity of the emotional trauma, your mental health could be quite negatively impacted by it. You may not even be consciously aware of your emotional trauma in your waking life. However, if you have experienced this kind of dream on a regular basis, it is quite likely your unconscious mind is still dealing with a certain emotional trauma. It would be advised to ponder about your dreams and their likely implication, and perhaps seek out a professional, like a therapist, to resolve your emotional trauma – if you’ve noticed that the quality and enjoyment of your life has significantly decreased and/or you have developed some kind of addiction since a certain emotionally scarring event or similar.
In my case, it was the emotional trauma of both losing friends, but also being so vulnerable to that loss and their effect on me, partly because it was entirely unexpected.
If you’d liked to have your dream personally analyzed by me, send me an email at [email protected] Alternatively you can post your dreams in the comments, this way other people could also give you their thoughts on them. At last, if you like those dream interpretations and/or would like to read more of my dreams, say so in the comments and give this post a “like”.
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