Dream code 101
“They say dreaming is dead and no-one does it anymore. It’s not dead, it’s just been forgotten, removed from our language. Nobody teaches it so nobody knows it exists, the dreamers banished to obscurity.”
From Waking Life (2001).
It’s about time I write about a part of me that took me ages to understand. I’m talking about dreaming, and not the “having ambitions” kind. I mean the 4K 7.1 surround sound movies that start a few hours (sometimes a few minutes) after I go to sleep. I’ve been a lucid dreamer for as long as I can remember, and I wrote about my first ever recurring dream some time ago. A lot of my creative writing will feature dreams in some shape or form. I’ll try to explain this phenomenon as objectively as possible here.
What my dreams are not:
Strange surreal creatures
I’ve never dreamed of unicorns or monsters or dragons. I’m sure these creatures are inspired by dreams, but they’ve never shown up in mine. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, because I wasn’t truly exposed to Kenyan or African folklore much. Sure, there were stories of three-eyed ogres, or ogres with a mouth at the back of their heads, but those seemed too fantastical to make any lasting impression on me. And when I was introduced to strange creatures, they were in cartoons, and later in books and films. For some reason, they still don’t appear in my dreams.
Flying
I have dreamed of falling and swimming, but never flying. I don’t know why. Maybe people who dream of flying have been on airplanes at an early age? My first plane ride was in 2016. I loved it, of course, but I never dreamed of it since. Maybe there could be a link to birds, too, like you’d dream of flying if you had a pet parrot. I have no idea.
Being underdressed or undressed in public
I don’t know why this is a common dream theme. It could be linked to anxiety, but if that’s the case, how come I’ve never had one of those despite having anxiety all my life? Even in the few dreams in which I’m in public, I’ve never been naked.
What my dreams are:
Bridges of gaps
I’m hypervigilant because of CPTSD, which means I’m constantly seeking safety. I’m picking up things that might escape anyone else, things that might pose a threat, whether real or perceived. My brain has no off switch. But how much of that input that I can process depends on how alert I am during waking. I’m already processing sights and sounds and sensations, plus having endless thoughts simultaneously. I’ll either miss a LOT of the input, or I’ll save that input for later, i.e. I’ll process it when I’m asleep.
That’s why I could cross paths with someone during the day, let’s say a shopkeeper, and our interaction will be brief and perfectly normal. But then the shopkeeper will show up in my dreams and I’ll be able to see something I might have missed, like their sadness or stress for whatever reason. The next time I meet the same shopkeeper, I’ll test my newfound knowledge of them. I’ll choose what I say carefully. Obviously I won’t go like, “You were in my dreams last night.” I know I’m weird, but not that weird. So, if they were sad in my dream, I’d take a little extra time to ask how they’re doing and really pay attention. Maybe they visited because they thought I could help them somehow, and if I can, I will. If not, I’ll be clear about that. No harm done. People generally appreciate being heard.
Warning signs
If my mother ever shows up in my dreams, it’s a clear warning to watch out. The mother symbol has never been a comforting one because of my lived experiences. As it turns out, this particular symbol is used by women who want to take advantage of me: a nosy neighbor, a jealous colleague, etc. They take the form of my mother to mask their intentions, to show me that they mean no harm. But to me, mother figure = absolutely 100 % harm, so I know to avoid them in waking. So far, I’ve been right.
Of course, I know when I dream of my actual mother. The vibe is never friendly. It’s often a distress call at more vulnerable times, like during her birthday or my birthday or the anniversary of my sister’s death. It would make sense because I cut all ties with her. These times of the year must remind her of me.
Juxtapositions
Sometimes, I observe the activities in dreams, like I watch things happening without being involved. These dreams often tell me to keep an eye out during waking. Other times, I become the subject of the dream, I become the protagonist. Many times, these positions switch within the same dream. This one is tough to explain, so I’ll use an example.
Between 2019 and 2023, I had a consistent dream that I was dying in an LPG gas explosion. In one dream I’d try to outrun the explosion. In others, I’d just surrender. I’d get killed not by the fire but by a piece of the gas cylinder, a shrapnel of some kind. The death was never painful, but it was quick. I’d wake up feeling at peace, which was probably the more worrying part.
In waking, I became terrified of cooking gas. These recurring dreams made me extra careful of the cylinders. Even the smell of the gas would scare me. I haven’t used cooking gas in my house since 2019, which is an anomaly for a Kenyan. Almost every household has an LPG gas cylinder.
Last year, when my neighbors moved in, they of course had gas cylinders, a 6kg stove and a 12kg for a four-burner standing cooker. I thought nothing of it, until I had that dream again, that I died in a gas explosion.
One night, my neighbor ordered a 6kg gas cylinder delivered to their house. Next thing I heard, she threw her door open and carried the cylinder outside. Apparently (because I was only hearing the commotion, I didn’t open my door or peek through the window), she had thrown a wet blanket on it as is the safety precaution, and she was calling her mother and the gas delivery guy for help. She was obviously frantic because her newborn was in the house. The whole compound reeked of LPG gas.
I heard her explain that there was something wrong with the gas regulator, and it either broke off in an odd way or she couldn’t get it to turn off. She was just about to start cooking supper when the gas started leaking too much, too fast. It took hours for the smell to go away, and for her own heart to stop racing. And the whole time I was thinking, “This is the death-by-fire dream.” I was the one taking this young woman’s place in the dream, trying to outrun the explosion. If she’d struck a match…
After an incident like that, I have absolutely no desire to use cooking gas in my house. Just because the dream was confirmed doesn’t mean that the danger is gone and I’m okay with LPG gas again. No, it just proves that those things can be dangerous. More importantly, I’ve not had that dream again ever since. It’s not fun to be dying in a dream over and over again.
How do I know I’m dreaming?
I tend to have hyper-realistic lucid dreams. Sometimes they can be totally seamless with my waking environment, except for a few tells. I could be in my house, for example, but my curtains would be a different color, or the latch in the door would be different, or somehow someone would be coming into the house from the back door — my place doesn’t have a back door.
Sometimes I dream of real but modified places, like my former primary school or high school or university, or even my mother’s house. Things would be where I remembered them to be, but not quite. There’d be extra steps to climb to reach the entrance of my uni library, for example, or the route to the classrooms in my high school turned left rather than right. Everything else remains realistic: the sky remains blue, the soil remains red, the trees remain green.
All that said, I don’t interpret anyone else’s dreams.
I really like C. G. Jung, and Man and His Symbols is a great read to get a grasp of dreams. I like that he pointed out that the quality of the dreamer matters. For example, if Obama had a dream about a volcano, it would carry more meaning than if a janitor had the exact same dream, because Obama had the power to move people to avoid the volcano’s eruption and save lives. That said, I have a few issues with the information I find about dream interpretation.
First, almost all info about it is from the East or the West. Asian, European, American cultures have plenty about it, from books to films to experts and tools. There’s very little info about dreams from an African context. We definitely had prophets and seers. Ireri wa Irugi of the Embu tribe dreamed of an iron snake, and so did Kimyole of the Nandi tribe. This became the Kenya-Uganda railroad built in the late 1800s. I’m guessing Christianity became widespread alongside colonialism, so our cultures were quashed under their weight. We don’t value dreams as much anymore.
Secondly, any attempt to google dream interpretation will just lead you to AI-generated websites. Those websites all have similar references and sources, which are all western symbolism, too. There are some sites that cater to the “dream meaning in Islam” keyword, but I don’t know how reliable they are. I wish I had a Muslim friend to ask about it.
Third, and probably the most important part of this entire story, is that dreams are like fingerprints. They are highly personal, highly individualized. My dreams are mine, informed by my experiences. I can’t interpret anyone else’s dreams, and I don’t want anyone interpreting mine. You’d have to be me, lived my entire life exactly as it unfolded, to know how to decode my dreams, and even then they can be cryptic, even to me. I’d have to be you, too, before I could dare interpret your dreams. It’s a line I respect too much to cross.
My dreams have literally saved my life, many, many times.
Sometimes they’re invasive — the last thing I want is to have a super-vivid dream when I’m totally exhausted and just want to sleep. Sometimes they’re difficult to recognize, especially the immersive ones that happen as soon as I close my eyes. In those ones, I don’t realize I fell asleep, so waking up becomes a shock to the system.
A lot of times, they’re a jumble of symbols that don’t have a coherent or recognizable meaning. They can take days or weeks to decode, and even years to come to pass. Recurring dreams are the most critical. They send me a message that I need to watch out for. In each case, I cannot dare to ignore them.
Sometimes I can have a waking dream, too. I can be working and suddenly I’m somewhere else doing something else, or something starts to play out in front of my eyes and I have to snap myself back to work.
Whichever form they take, dismissing them is not an option. Like I said, my dreams can fill gaps, they can help me process what I missed in waking. When the picture becomes complete — the waking + the dream — I have insights. These can be red flags or green lights, hardly ever in-between. They inform my choices. They tell me more than I could ever figure out with my rational mind alone.
But they make life difficult, too.
My dreams can make friendships, and relationships in general, very complicated. How do I explain how I know what I know? Saying “I had a dream about it” is the quickest way to lose credibility. If by some miracle I meet someone who has similar beliefs, who is open to the idea that dreams are more than mental garbage, one of two things happen.
More often, I become “too much”. I dream almost every night, which means I’d be mentioning a dream almost every day. I get excited about meeting someone who would at least give me a chance to talk about these things. But honestly, it can be overwhelming to listen to, especially for a non-dreamer. I learn to just stop talking about it.
Less frequent is the resentment and jealousy. Some people really wish they could have lucid dreams. There’s probably an entire industry based around that. There are gurus who teach about it and make money from it. Somehow lucid dreams became trendy at some point, and certain types of people crave it. It came to me naturally, although maybe that’s not the right word. I started dreaming out of necessity.
When I was little, I was already exposed to threats. The adults around me were toxic, but I was too young to understand why, no communication skills to express my concerns, and no way to escape. They would say one thing but behave entirely differently. My mind and body registered the threat, but without any way to explain it to five-year-old me, my dreams became lucid. They took on symbols that I could understand better. They became a survival mechanism.
Try explaining this to someone who can’t dream but wants to. The survival bit will be ignored. The resentment and jealousy will creep up. The belittling will start. “You’re just making things up.” “You’re just having imaginary conversations.” Essentially, “You’re just full of shit.” So, I stop talking about them.
Today, I can safely say that I have over three decades of experience as a dreamer. I’ve learned how to decipher my dreams the hard way, because there’s no dictionary, there’s no mentor, it’s just me and whatever my brain wants me to see from hidden angles. I know my dreams have made the difference between life and death. I can’t start doubting them now, and I will keep trusting them until the day I can’t dream anymore.
Next: Dream Code 102
