I dreamed I was in a crowd, all of us pressed against an iron railing. Some unspecified event was taking place beyond my sight, beyond my knowing. It didn’t seem especially important; it was just noise at the edge of awareness. More immediate was the rain.
It was coming down hard.
I unfurled my umbrella, but it was broken, trampled by the crowd who seemed febrile, unsettled by whatever they were watching or about to witness. The frame protruded like skeletal fingers, the fabric torn and flapping in the wind. Still, it was a large umbrella, and it managed to keep the worst of the rain off.
Beside me stood a woman, cold, shivering. I didn’t know her, but I shifted the umbrella to cover us both. She responded by inching a little closer, until our elbows touched. We did not speak. Just stood there together, strangers in the rain, observing. No longer quite separate.
It would be easy to read this in a Jungian way and speak of the unknown woman as anima figure, the soul-image, an encounter with the inner feminine. But that isn’t really where the dream was heading for me, and not quite what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about dreams and dreaming, not as puzzles to be solved or messages to be decoded, but as something far stranger and more neglected.
It always surprises me how casually dreaming is dismissed in Western culture. Along with so many basic psychical functions, it is treated as marginal, as if it were a kind of internal waste product, a processor of day-residues. Also, I often hear people say, quite sincerely: I don’t dream. Never have.
But this isn’t true. We all dream. Every night. More than that, I suspect we are always present in relation to dreaming, even when we're awake – it's simply that waking consciousness no longer has access to it.
Then comes sleep, and we are invited back into an ongoing inner life: unscripted, ad-libbed, timeless. A dimension without length or mass, yet somehow entirely real in its own mode. And on waking, it slips away again so easily we begin to doubt it was ever there at all.
Our first concern is the day ahead, the demands of the literal world. We rarely pause at that first threshold of waking to ask what has just happened, what we have just been part of. The dream dissolves like mist before our eyes.
My own approach to dreams has changed over the years. I am less inclined now to treat them as encrypted guidance for waking life. Waking life belongs to egoic navigation – necessary, bounded and practical. But the personality is bigger than that. It includes unconscious and imaginal dimensions that modern secular language has lost touch with and is even hostile toward.
We become, by degrees, hollowed out into something merely functional. But we are not only functional beings.
In certain traditions—both Freudian and Jungian—we are encouraged to make associations: what does the umbrella mean, the railings, the rain, the unknown woman? And sometimes something does indeed click into place. But I am less convinced now this is the most important question.
My dream journal is now a quarter-century deep. Meanings proliferate. Patterns recur, fold back on themselves, multiply like kaleidoscopic reflections. One can end up with a forest so dense with interpretation that the original image is lost entirely. The dream becomes merely a commentary on itself.
Perhaps, then, we should begin somewhere else. What if we simply stay with the images as they are given? What if I am simply at some iron railings in a hard rain, holding a broken umbrella, and beside me is a woman I do not know, and there is no further agenda than this shared proximity?
There is something here that is not interpretation but more an experience: a restoration of dignity, a small act of shelter, an almost imperceptible movement toward nearness. The images carry their own intelligence, if we do not rush to extract it from them. Like shy birds, they should not be approached too directly.
It does not necessarily mean they “mean” something in the way waking life demands meaning.
And yet something remains.
A poem comes out of it, not by way of explanation, but as an extension of the dream:
A Broken Umbrella
So here we are, eh?
Pressed up against the rails
waiting for the main feature to start,
though, yes, it might already have begun.
Hard to tell now, isn’t it?
I mean the signal from the noise.
Then that hard rain hammering down
and my umbrella, sadly broken,
trodden into rags by this careless crowd.
Yet still, I raise it, click the button,
and it unfolds bravely, for all its wounds,
still big enough, I’d say
to restore a little faded dignity.
And you there at my elbow,
shivering and unsure,
might you not inch a little closer?
It’s true, what I have lacks perfection,
but what little it is, it pleases me
to share with you.
And still there is the feeling, not explained, but at least explored.
In older times such things might have been carried in printed form. Now they drift through our blogs, social media fragments, transmissions—dispatches from somewhere not entirely located in waking life.
There is such richness in dream imagery that it seems almost a kind of cultural failure to ignore it so completely. At times it feels like hubris: to assume that what arrives in sleep is insignificant simply because it does not serve waking utility.
Other cultures have not always thought this way. In some, dreaming and waking are not cleanly separated. Western modernity once dismissed this as primitive confusion. Yet it may be closer to a more integrated form of perception than we are willing to admit. Perhaps the deepest mistake, though, is not dismissal but appropriation: treating dreams as if they are simply messages for the waking ego.
A better question might be simpler and far stranger:
Where have I been?
Not “I” in the narrow sense, but the wider field of what I truly am.
It may be that dreams are not explanations at all, but temporary residencies in another mode of being. Not symbols to decode, but places we have actually visited, in whatever way “place” can be said to exist there.
We are not outside the dream looking in. We are inside it, implicated, belonging there. And like any journey worth taking, it alters us – not because we understand it, but because we have been there.
Something happens in dreams that no analysis quite reaches. Figures look back at us. Places feel true. Encounters carry weight. And the dream does not explain itself. It simply meets us half way.
And if I trust anything dreams offer, it is this: that life is larger than its explanations. That we are not defined purely by our waking identities. That existence is not confined to function, to transaction, and utility.
And perhaps this is why our dreams sometimes embarrass us. They do not serve us. They do not justify themselves. They refuse productivity. They belong to another economy altogether: one of image, atmosphere, and gesture.
They return us, night after night, to the sense that kindness is not meaningless simply because it is not rewarded; that shelter matters even when it is imperfect; that standing beside a stranger in the rain and offering what protection you can is not nothing.
There is honour in it.
So tonight, when sleep comes and the world withdraws, and you dream... do not begin by asking what it means. Ask, instead, what has just been lived.
And then, perhaps, let it be.