Friday, November 6, 2009

A dream about a wedding


"In my dream, I was getting ready to marry my boyfriend of two years. The day of our wedding I kept wondering if my boyfriend was as excited as I was to marry or if he just did it to please me. I specifically remember wondering if he'd even remember the first time we made love as a married couple.
I remember that on the day of my wedding I was in a place that looked like a basement, then got on an elevator in which my boyfriend's roommate was in. We took the elevator up and it took us to a shopping mall. I walked around the mall and I found my mom crying. She was really hurt because we're marrying so young (we're nineteen) and wasn't ready to let me go. I held her and cried with her.
That's all I remember. I didn't dream the actual wedding but the reason why I asked for my dream to be decoded is because my family always says that if you dream of a wedding, it means a death in the family is coming. I don't know how true that is, but still..."

Thank you so much for sending this dream in for a dream reading. Before I get to it, let me remind all my readers that they can feel free to send me their dreams at dream.reader@hotmail.com; I will read the most unique and fascinating dreams on the blog.

I think it's fascinating that you've been told that dreaming of a wedding is an omen of death. People have a lot of ideas about the meanings of their dreams, none of which I will say are absolutely untrue, but I firmly believe that dreams are not prophecy. There are very rare instances in which a person may dream of something in their future, but typically these dreams are quite literal.

The trouble with omens is that one can take nearly anything for an omen! I once knew a very intelligent young woman who would look up the symbolic meaning of every animal that she came across, intent on the idea that every squirrel she saw was an omen of a wild fun weekend, every type of bird that flew in front of her car was telling her to get away from it all... you get the idea.

Rather than seeing anything as an omen, I think it is more logical to see the symbols in your dreams as visions your mind has generated to tell you about your true thoughts and feelings. As strange as it may sound, the way that you describe your dream means as much or more than the individual symbols in it.

So, your dream is very interesting to me.

Weddings, marriage proposals and the promises of such in our dreams are not harbingers of death. Well, in a sense they are- but not in the literal sense. The implications of getting married are a sort of death, as marriage is the death of the single life. This is particularly true in today's society, where there are virtually no rite of passage ceremonies for adolescents as they come of age.

In your case, I firmly believe that your dream is about transition- the years in which you are living (18, 19, and just down the road, age 20) are times in which we learn much about ourselves. The person that you are becoming now is the person you'll be for the rest of your life. The relationships you're having now are your first adult relationships, you're likely embarking on some sort of career, or perhaps simply studying something in hopes of a brighter future.

During this pivotal time in your life, dreaming about becoming engaged to your boyfriend can have quite a lot of implications. As a 19 year old who has been in a relationship for the last two years, getting married may seem like a favorable and rather likely outcome to you, however, you'd have to extremely secure both in yourself and in your relationship to make a choice like that at such an early age. There are some aspects of your dream which express some concerns you seem to have about growing up, but I'll address those a little further down.

I think that it's important to mention once again that you do not actually dream of the wedding part of getting married in this dream, you merely dream about the promise that you will be getting married. There are definite implications there. First of all, it suggests that you are living on the promise of a big change, rather than living in the midst of the actual change. Additionally, you're dreaming about the emotional reaction of your mother to the news.

As I've written here before time and again, one of the points made by Sigmoid Freud about dream interpretation which I almost uniformly agree with is that we are everyone in our dreams. For this reason, I firmly believe that the portion of your dream in which you cry with your mother is one that reflects your mixed emotions about growing up, and about leaving the nest. Sure, being an adult is fantastic, nobody tells you what to have for dinner, or what time to go to bed. But, you're also stuck doing your own laundry, paying your own bills, and tying your own shoes. The conflict between the good parts of leaving the nest, as well as the scary parts, are likely generating the waterworks in your dreaming life.

The fact that a significant portion of the dream takes place in a shopping mall is also significant. For young Americans, the local mall is a lot more than a place to pick up a new pair of jeans. The suburban mall is a cultural mecca, a place where the material meets the societal. It's the place where you're seen, talked about, and appraised by the public, and not only by your peers, but also by people who are outside of your age group or social circles. Dreaming about coming up from a quiet, underground basement (a symbol which to me reads as an isolated frame of mind) into a noisy, crowded shopping mall is an expression of concern over the public perception of your engagement. You were safe in the basement, where the only thoughts were your own, but once you get out into the mall (or the larger world) you realize that things are not as simple as they may have seemed.

I hope this assuages your fears about dreaming of a wedding as a bad omen. Instead, I think it's safe to say that the dream is about the changes which are coming in your life, as you transition from your teen years into your adulthood. Thank you so much for sending your dream into me for a reading, and I sincerely hope that it helps!