What Dream Interpretation Taught Me About My Fear of Ghosts
“The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” — Sigmund Freud
I was always scared of ghosts. I was afraid of what I could not see from the moment I found out what fear was. Fear and ghosts were peas in a pod: they were best friends and hung out together at every party I hosted — they showed up uninvited and took pleasure in crashing them.
If someone asked me what the ghosts looked like, I wouldn’t have been able to describe them. Ghosts, as they appear archetypally — opaque and transparent, menacing, mysterious and tormented — do not frighten me; it is the concept of a ghost that does. To me, ghosts represent an idea that I still struggle with today: the idea being that there are greater forces at play; forces — and perhaps energies — that are autonomous and that I cannot see nor comprehend. Reality isn’t merely objective. Reality twists and turns in ways we cannot understand (I recognise now, as an adult, that what we humans cannot see or understand usually sparks an emotional trigger of sorts…
