What Do Our Earliest Dreams Mean?

What do our earliest dreams mean? As a dreamweaver and dream teacher, I am very, very curious about the first dream a person remembers, for woven into that first dream is nothing short of a person’s destiny.

When we’re children, we are closer to Spirit and are far purer channels for the energies knocking on our dream doors. We’re more sensitive to the whisperings from the soul that come each night in the form of dreams.

As the great Carl Jung said,  “The dreams of children ought to be monitored early in their lives… Often the dreams and visions of early childhood remain for the entirety of a person’s life and are felt profoundly deeply as possessing an important meaning and eternal truth.” (1) 

Those earliest dreams often hint at the prima materia we will be working through, wrestling with, healing and incarnating in a given life stream. They suggest our original medicine and our role in the Dream of the Earth. 

My first dream was a recurring dream - an annual event. Each time it came, there was a momentary burst of lucidity within the dream where I would think, “Oh! We are here again, it must have been one year!” 

The annual dream took place in my childhood home, though it was a deeper layer of reality behind the home. You know what I mean, those dreams that we describe as, “it was like my elementary school, but it was not my elementary school, but it was my elementary school.”  I’ve come to think of these dream places as inner dimensions of the weave that comprises a given place.

The dream was an annual competition that occurred in one such inner dimension of the house where I grew up. In it, I was always teamed up with a trio of gorillas. The competition involved other contestants and I navigating our way through the many rooms in the house, like a maze we had to find our way out of. The competition was overseen by the one and only Willy Wonka, from the film Charlie and The Chocolate Factory.  The dream always felt a bit eerie and spooky, but at the same time there was this subtle flavor of excitement, a flavor that grew as the years went by.  There was also like clockwork each year, a moment of lucidity in the dream where I would come to realize, “Oh, it’s this dream again - it must have been another year.” Then I would settle in for the night’s competition. 

That’s it, that’s what the dream was. 

Even when my dreaming left at age 8 for fifteen years, I always retained the remembrance of this one.  Though it took decades before I acquired any clue as to what the weird eerie scene was about. Some dreams are like that, the meaning making happens in its own time.  The recurring dream finally decided to reveal itself when I was in a weekend workshop and was grouped up with two other experienced dreamers. All three of us re-entered the scene together asking for information.

When I re-entered, I immediately was taken to the three gorillas who said to me simply, “we do not belong in captivity.” 

I nearly wept at the revelation of this truth. Seeing, truly seeing for the first time, these beautiful, wise, noble animals treated as soul-less, non-feeling automatons made me sick to the stomach.  

Gorillas are powerful, strong, brilliant, village-minded animals who are not meant to be captured, isolated and enslaved. They are too beautiful and sentient, they belong free and wild.

We do not belong in captivity. 

Nor do I. Nor do you. Nor do any of us. We are all stuck in this repeating cycle of competition (symbolized by the repeating annual nature of my dream) that we shouldn’t be on in the first place. But over time and with repetition it becomes strangely exciting because of its familiarity - yet the thread of haunting eeriness remains.

I was also able to understand WHY in the world Willy Wonka was here. I saw and understood with wave upon wave of Aha! and goosebumps, that Willy Wonka represented the eerie overlord authority who I didn’t trust and didn’t feel safe with. He clearly had no business being in charge, but for some reason held absolute authority over the scene. Everything was a competition when it didn’t need to be - but Willy Wonka had made it a competition simply because he could. 

Willy Wonka represented the machine, the overculture, the patriarchy, the colonized mind, the matrix, whatever you want to call it, you know in your bones what I mean. The eerie, twisted spell of modernity we are caught in, under the rule of a false authority who has no business being in charge.

I was then able to understand the reason I would become lucid in the dream. This was me waking myself up from the spell, trying to hack my way out of Willy Wonka’s dream. 

This dream, my first dream, was about waking up to and out of the overculture’s spell, and reclaiming wild power from the false authority.

Just. Wake. Up.

Sound familiar? 

One of my re-entry companions brought back a powerful piece of medicine for me from her journey.  She shared during our debrief, “I kept thinking about guerilla warfare while I was in the dream.” 

Defined as “a type of unconventional military activity where small, independent groups use irregular tactics to fight against a larger, established force” - my life has indeed been a sort of guerilla warfare. After successfully hacking myself out of the overculture’s spell and reclaiming the wild and sacred - I have used irregular tactics in small independent groups to push back against the onslaught of the twisted false authority.  

My classes, my teachings, my writing, my devotion to the plants, the dreams, the Earth and the sacred are all facets of my battle tactic.  

Being the first dream in my life stream, it is very much still dreaming me and the weaving is still underway.  Yet the original contents have held true as to the enduring threads of my life, its medicine, and my role to play in the Great Dream. 

Perhaps my dream has something in it for you, too. Dreams often do, they are never meant just for the dreamer alone. They long to be shared.

Perhaps, too, my dream will inspire you to reconsider your first dream, and to draw any parallels from the threads that have woven your life. If you take the time to explore this consideration, my guess is the Earth will be quite pleased you’ve further remembered your role in her Good Dream.

What’s more - since my understanding of the scene has unfolded into an inner-standing, I can feel myself on deeper layers actually weaving the dream and sending it back to myself as a child. Dreaming, too, wakes us up to the truth of time travel. But that’s another topic for another time.

May beauty surround your dream doors!

REFERENCES

Jung, C.G. Children’s Dreams: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1940 (Jung Seminars). Princeton University Press, Sept 2010.