January | In Your Dreams
A DREAM COLUMN
The year 2025. It sure sounds like the future, doesn’t it? If you’re the type to do New Year, New Me, we salute you, we envy you, we respect you. Meanwhile, we’re over here still writing the date as 2023. January is naturally a fallow period, is what we keep telling ourselves. But, like in this month’s dream, sometimes you have to look back from whence you came…
I’m often riding trains in my dreams, but the plot changes. In a recent one, I’m enjoying a snowy pastoral ride when I notice there’s a hole in the floor under my feet. It’s small, but I have a clear view of the tracks speeding by underneath. I drop a couple pebbles into the hole to watch them bounce, and then somehow my shoes slip off my feet and away they go, through the train floor. An attendant stops the train for me, and I get out and trudge back the way we came in the snow looking for my shoes. I walk so far I can’t even see the train anymore. I wake up before I can find them or make it back to the train. What’s your take on this?
The nature of this column usually requires us to hedge a bit. Symbolism is messy and subjective even when used by our most brilliant wordsmiths. Combine that with the scientific obscurity of dreams, and the gray area gets even hazier. We’ve said it before: it would take real, actual therapy to deliver a prescriptive analysis of what your dream means in the context of your life, and we don’t know you like that. Respectfully.
But that’s never really stopped us from taking a swing, has it?
BOTH YOUR METAPHORS—THE TRAIN AND YOUR SHOES—REPRESENT ESSENTIALLY THE SAME THING: THE JOURNEY OF LIFE.
We feel pretty good about this one, because both your metaphors—the train and your shoes—represent essentially the same thing: the journey of life. But in this particular dream, they’re at odds with one another. The train is chugging along its simple and direct path, and all you need to do is enjoy the ride, safe and warm in your seat. But your shoes, seeing their chance, make a play for independence. That’s concerning, assuming you’ll need those wherever you’re headed. But lucky for you, this dreamworld is a generous one, and the train stops and allows for you to go back and retrieve them.
In your waking life, have you left one path for another lately? Or have you been diverted by something outside your control? An unexpected change or loss might throw you off course for a bit. Or maybe there was something moving full speed ahead that you’ve put on pause, a la Dorinda Medley (iykyk). Today’s world tells us we should always be moving forward, forward, forward. There’s nothing wrong with a little retreading of one’s steps. Sometimes a girl needs to go back for her shoes! (We’re picturing you as Carrie Bradshaw now, barefoot in the show, fretting over lost Manolos.) In the dream, you don’t find them, which, one might argue, means you should've accepted the shoes were lost. But we don’t see it that way. Failing at something doesn’t mean it wasn’t worthwhile to try. And the freaking train is waiting for you. It’s not that serious. You’re gonna make it to your destination, just a little later than you intended and probably down a pair of shoes.
We’re constantly measuring life against a straight line, but it only looks that way in retrospect, and only with major edits. In the middle of things, it’s messy, and incredibly challenging to have perspective. But these recurring trains might be little windows of insight, opportunities for semi-regular check-ins re: your life. It never hurts to ask yourself once in a while: how’s the ride?
If you’ve ever woken up from a dream like, what the hell was that, and would like to be featured in the next In Your Dreams, contact us at dreams@lunya.co with a detailed description of the inner workings of your unconscious mind. We're dreaming of hearing from you.
