My Oprah Dreams: Repetition In Dreams
Here is a dream I had end of May 2011, the week that Oprah Winfrey’s last show was airing. During that period of my life I was having plenty of what I started to refer to as my Oprah Dreams. That’s why this one was titled Another Oprah Dream. This dream illustrates how we use repetition in our dreams.
One of the ways our sophisticated unconscious mind succeeds in getting its message to our conscious is by repeating. You might remember in school, teachers would say, “Read it. Write it. Recite it.” That’s how we learn. The repeating in this dream was one aspect that caught my attention. This function happens during the same dream, or in dreams that span the night, and can happen over a period of days as well.
As you will see, it is especially when you discover repeating images it can help you click on what the waking life incident is that you were discussing with yourself when you had the dream. In my dream it was because, after realizing my repeat, I knew the question to ask myself was, “What am I doing in a round-about, unconventional way?”
Here’s a simple example of this repetition function that I use in lectures. If I am trying to tell myself I am scared about something, in one dream of an evening I might dream about a ghost. What does that mean for me? It means I’m scared. Later in the same night I’ll dream I am standing on the abyss of a cliff. What does that mean? It means I’m scared. Finally closer to the morning I’ll dream about my Grade 5 teacher. What does that mean? It means I’m scared! So all these completely different images are all me saying to myself that I am scared. To help me uncover what current issue the dream is addressing, all I need to do is ask myself, “What am I feeling afraid of?”
Another one of my Oprah Dreams
In this dream I am coming out of someone’s home on a family, residential street. It’s a crescent and Oprah’s house is in that crescent. I can also say that it’s a “dead end street”… and Oprah’s house is at the dead end….except I have to add that the homes are in a crescent.
I’m out on the street walking to a place where I am going to speak. Oprah’s door opens and she comes out. I walk up her stairs to greet her. Since Oprah had, at the time, frequented my dreams, it was like we are friends, but not close enough that I felt completely relaxed and comfortable. There was a small tension there.
We came down the stairs together. Next, we were in the room where I was giving the presentation. There is a room in the center of another big room. There’s a table that covers the complete room, and you can walk all around as well, but you can’t walk from one side to the other if you are in the middle of the room. It’s all table.
The table that covers the circumference of the room has a white tablecloth. People are sitting all around and there is plenty of room for me to walk all around though I am thinking it is going to be a challenge for everyone to hear me. Oprah is sitting on the left side of the room right in the middle.
A few people are up and getting coffee still, but I begin. At first, I’m standing on Oprah’s side of the room, but in the far-left corner, and as I begin to talk I realize I should walk around to each of the corners of the room to make sure everyone hears me.
I’m not giving my usual lecture. Instead, I go right into examples of dreams. For example, I remember saying to one woman, “Did you know one of my clients had a one-picture dream of a piglet stuck to her breast?” And then I told why she had the dream.
I walked over to Oprah and asked her if she remembered her dream last night, to which she said she did. I asked her if she’d share it and she said no! Okay… I’m standing there… But I recovered very quickly, almost without a hitch and looked up at the long table she was sitting at, asking, “Does anyone have a dream from last night they’d like to share?”
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Sure enough, hands went up all over the place. I chose a woman who was in the far right-hand corner of the room. She stood up to speak as I am walking towards her, and she said her dream in French. Not only in French, which most of the people in the room don’t understand, but also, she has no mic. I had to repeat what she was saying, and I also now had to translate.
This was the part of the dream where I took the reins and felt very comfortable and at ease with myself. I took to walking the room. I never crossed completely over to the right side to walk that length probably because the dreamer was on the left side and I was talking with her, but I did make it to all corners projecting myself very well so that everyone heard what I was saying.
She would talk and I would repeat what she said in English and then respond to her in French asking her questions, and then repeat in English so everyone understood what I asked and what she was responding.
It was a challenge, but I did very well. I was managing “as if” I was completely comfortable but inside I have to admit there was a certain tension definitely different than speaking with a mike at the front of a room in a traditional way.
Repetition in Dreams – The Analysis:
The night before the dream I watched my TIVO of Oprah’s last show where, at the time, I had been trying to land a guest spot. If I was shutting my chances down of such a hope, that’s the dead end. Yet in the dream her house sits on a crescent. It’s not your typical dead-end street where there are houses on both sides and nothingness down the center. This metaphor symbolizes how there are other ways more “round about” in which a person can still be approaching Oprah even though her show is over. For example, she was still running her magazine and of course, her network.
The dream reflects how I was being heard in a more “round about” way than I would have been if I had landed a guest spot on Oprah’s show. It provides the roundabout in a repeat. One created by the crescent and then the idea repeats itself in the room I am speaking in, by me having to walk around in order to reach the participants.
The “different than traditional way” that appears in the dream repeats itself as well. One is in how I walk around the room to present as opposed to speaking to a room full of people with me standing at the front. A second repeat of the concept of “different than” happens in how typically my lecture begins by me teaching the how-to of decoding the dream and then using the dreams of people in the room to further illustrate my method. In this dream, though, I go straight to a participant’s dream. Dream first. Theory later.
Finally, when Oprah doesn’t share her dream with me, it reflects how I didn’t (yet anyways) get all I would have liked. In the dream I carry on very well regardless….which is exactly what I was doing at the time….in my own “round about” way.
The Lessons and The Point!
During that final Oprah Show, one of the points she brought across, (which I have known all along, yet that time it hit me a certain way), is that each of us has a passion. We are all here to give something special to the world. She said that when you find your passion, do it!
You may not be able to do your passion for a living but make time to do it anyway. What Oprah said rang true for me. Even after 47 years I am still just as passionate, excited, and in awe about how much information we can gather from our unconscious mind every morning as we wake. I had wished for the opportunity to get the news out to a wide audience as a guest on Oprah’s show, but it never came to pass.
While I hadn’t reached a huge mass of people to tell them the news about the value of dream analysis, I had published my first book and people were hearing me when I did guest spots on radio and TV shows. I was also invited to speak at schools and spas and was getting myself known on social media, etc. Even this is reflected in the dream. I seem to manage.
To the heart of Oprah’s point, I internalized that I don’t have to reach the size of audience I would have liked to. The truth is I love dream analysis. Nothing gives me the big charge I get watching (or hearing) a dreamer catch the meaning of the dream.
A day or two after this dream, I was on the telephone with an acquaintance, who, I hadn’t spoken to in a long time. Somehow during the course of the conversation, he was saying it’s amazing how many people he comes across in his business who are so wealthy and yet so unhappy. He said, “If you’re doing something you love to do, you’re happy.”
Here was Oprah’s message again, coming at me from the universe a second time in two days. And the dream? It’s the third time! Yes. I think I got it.
I had that dream in 2011. I released a two-book set called Have A Great Dream, Book 1; The Overview, Decoding Your Dreams To Discover Your Full Potential, together with the work I did back in 2002, now a second edition, this time titled Have A Great Dream, Book 2; A Deeper Discussion. I am back into promotion-mode, and have done over 200 radio shows and podcasts, and some workshops in New York and Boca Raton, Florida. Most recently Mexico!
Will I finally reach a wide audience to tell everyone about propelling your problem solving and other incredible benefits of dream analysis? We shall see… but we know for sure I am having a terrific time while I wait and see. UPDATE: I am now the official Dream Catcher for Oprah Daily! Read my articles on oprahdaily.com
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The repetition dimension refers in the first instance to those aspects of dream content repeated over and over, but it also concerns the repetition of whole dreams as well. We have seen some of the more subtle manifestations of this dimension in earlier chapters, but here we want to connect the routine repetitions of dream content to the more dramatic evidence for a repetition dimension. In so doing we draw on a wider range of dream research than quantitative content analysis: clinical, questionnaire and thematic studies. The repetition dimension manifests itself most obviously in traumatic dreams that reproduce overwhelmingly negative experiences again and again, to the great discomfort of the dreamers. It then moves to the recurrent dreams that puzzle or frighten many people at one time or another in their lives. It next turns to “common” or “typical” dreams, meaning the unusual dreams like flying or appearing inappropriately dressed in public that many people report they have experienced at least once. From recurrent and typical dreams it is only a small jump to repetitive themes within long dream series, examples of which will be given in the main body of the chapter. The continuum ends with the characters, interactions, activities, and objects that appear in ordinary dreams consistently over decades in long dream series, or appear more frequently in an individual or group’s dreams than might be expected on the basis of our norms for dream content.
Hi Clara! How in the world did I miss this educated comment?? I did! But I DO see it now, and want to thank you so much for your depth of understanding. Thank you so much for sharing!
Thanks I needed this. I just had a dream where everyone kept saying the word baseball over and over