Not all dreams are interpretable within the framework of a psychoanalytic session, sometimes, there is not enough material, enough associations; And sometimes the performances can come a long time later. When one asks the patient for associations, one must not believe in everything that comes from that person’s lips, it is a free association. Sometimes these elements can be evidence of resistance that has to do with your ego speech, with your conscious speech that will be logical.
Freud said the dream is the fulfillment of a wish, and not just any wish, but an unconscious wish. He also said that dreams are the royal way to access the unconscious. What we are going to look for in the dream is not the fulfillment of something that the patient can tell us in his waking life (in his conscious speech), but we are going to look for an element that rather contradicts what the patient He has been telling us something that breaks that supposed sense regarding what happens to him and what happens to his life.
That is why in this Psychology-Online article we are going to try to find a point of conflict, something that the patient says “I don’t know why this happens” and specifically to evaluate a particular type of dream: ” which means to dream that you kill someone “.
You may also be interested in: What does it mean to dream that someone dies
Index
- The meaning of dreams
- What does it mean to dream that you kill someone unknown
- What does it mean that you kill someone by accident and run away
- What does it mean to dream that you kill someone you know
The meaning of dreams
It is perhaps a bit disappointing that at the beginning of the article it is stated that dreams do not have a universal meaning , that is, what I dream will not have the same meaning for a friend or for an Eskimo in the cold lands of the Arctic. Dreams can present very similar scenes, times, characteristics and sensations, but there is no point in interpreting them like a dictionary, since they contain a lot of information about the waking state and the unconscious of each person in particular, information that will undoubtedly vary hugely because Juan’s life experiences will not be the same as Pedro’s, even though they have been brought up by the same culture and the same family, it will present a great variation.
Many of us would like to have an idea quite close to the truth of the meaning of dreams, for example: if I dream that my teeth are falling out it is an omen of the death of someone close, if I dream that I kill someone it means that I have something pending or I have a lot of hatred for that person. And this can undoubtedly generate a lot of anguish in dreamers, but it is more related to the idea managed by the culture than in reality that mystical possibility that dreams work as an omen comes to pass because they are based on verified and measured facts.
However, Sigmund Freud (1899) said that his experience confirmed his assertion that the most frequent content of dreams is constituted by those objects on which our most ardent passions fall , but he also said that to a greater or lesser degree, the The content of dreams will always be determined by the individual’s personality , age, sex, position, degree of culture, and the usual lifestyle of the subject, and by the events of his individual past.
Considering Freud’s approach, the dream that someone is killed will be more associated with all the points referred to above and not as a linear fact (for example, dreaming that I cannot speak means that there are things that I do not dare to say or that there are events that I have kept quiet for many years due to shame or emotional pain that they produce me, dreaming that at most it has a meaning in oral fixations and, therefore, reflects a nutritional problem). No, dreams do not obey a one-to-one nexus like any other associative articulation of the subject’s discourse.
It would be much more interesting if the interpretation of this type of dreams were thought of as a network (interwoven) and not as Sigmund Freud proposed with his term “Associative Chain” because this in turn implies a problem: the links of each chain present simple associative links (for example, the chain is composed of 4 links (1, 2, 3 and 4), 1 will be associated with 2 and 2 with the next one, which is 3 and the latter with 4, but the 3 will not be associated with 1 or 2 with 4. If we think of it as a network or as a type of family tree, the interpretation of this type of dream will be much more effective and beneficial for the dreamer, since the links will be branched. As a result of each new experience of the dreamer (in addition to his age, culture and personality), two or more dream elements will come into force.
What does it mean to dream that you kill someone unknown
Following the previous line where it is expressed that dreams do not have a universal meaning, we will try to facilitate a reading for interpretation.
Dreaming of killing someone unknown does not mean that from one moment to another we are going to take a weapon and murder someone without any premeditation, since as explained above dreams can follow a network of signifiers that in the end will offer us the origin of our genealogical tree of signifiers.
Here are some points that you can consider when understanding these types of dreams:
Meaning of the elements of your dreams
Ask yourself: what does death mean to you? or what do you think about the murder? These questions will expand on the related points that will determine the meaning of your dream. For example, some people may refer that death is something tragic, painful and sad, others may express that it is the loss of something or the absence of something and add “that it is the loss of someone important”, others in the opposite sense They can show that death is something inevitable and that this is part of life itself, that from the moment we are born we begin to die.
Questions of the meanings of words significantly broaden the associative material of the dreamer, even though this results in some form of conscious content. since the subject is rationalizing the meanings. For this reason, it is important to ask us or ask the dreamer to say the first thing that comes to mind when asking these types of questions.
Dreams: our most ardent passions
To dream that we kill despite the fact that it is someone unknown and, above all, although this operates in our waking life as something distressing, shameful and deplorable, it is a very latent but repressed desire.
Shame, anguish and disapproval of this type of behavior will be something that will arise as an ego response to impulsive behavior. This ego response is what causes us discomfort due to the dream content, but underlying it is a latent but unconscious desire for that meaning of death or murder: desire for the absence of someone important.
Characteristics of the stranger
Despite the fact that it is an unknown person whom we kill in our dreams, this may in some way offer us some important characteristics for the associative process, for example, they could be some of the following:
- Was he a man or was he a woman?
- How was she dressed?
- What was she doing while you were murdering her?
- Did she resist while you murdered her?
What does it mean that you kill someone by accident and run away
To dream that someone is killed and even so in the dream there is some kind of consciousness regarding the idea that the act was an accident, it is another rational and not unconscious intervention because, how do you know it was an accident? Did you slip and Accidentally stabbed him with a knife? Did he turn and suddenly someone was behind him and hurt him with the knife?
The dreamer may refer that he simply knows it was an accident because he felt it in the dream, for example, he could say “it was an accident because when I killed him quickly I knelt to help him or I took him by the hand and I started crying, I wanted to run away” . Some of the following questions can be asked if the particular case allows:
- How do you know it was an accident?
- Did you know that most of our dreams are unconscious latent wishes?
- How do you feel for this person you accidentally killed?
- Even though at this moment it seems like an irrelevant or silly event, has some kind of disagreement arisen with the person you killed by accident?
- How do you consider your relationship with the person you killed by accident?
- Has the person you killed by accident prevented you from doing or saying something? For example that you express an idea.
What does it mean to dream that you kill someone you know
Dreaming that you kill someone you know can make you believe that the interpretation of the dream elements is further facilitated, since the nexus of the signifier is limited, but let’s remember the interpretation in a network and not in a chain. If the dream is reported during a therapeutic process, generally, experiences or events with the person who was killed in the dream will have been referred to (for example, the relationship with the father, conflicts with a sibling or an excellent relationship with a friend or loving partner but who was killed in the dream). All this information that arose or may arise during the speech will add points in the entire interweaving of the network of signifiers.
This incorporation of signifiers should encourage us to find the latent meaning among all. Next, we offer you some points that you can take into account when making an interpretation of these dreams:
- Evaluate the quality of relationship with the person you dreamed of.
- Keep in mind that many times unresolved events tend to manifest in our dreams even though the current circumstances in waking state are different from those of the dream.
- Evaluate any anger or frustration that you have silenced or that you silenced at some point that was directed towards the person you dreamed of murdering or that may represent some link between all the meanings.
- Events that may seem irrelevant to others could have been very significant for us, therefore, they can represent an essential element in the unconscious that operates daily in our life.
