What Do Your Dreams Mean?

Lakeland Associate Professor Anthony Palermo explains the what buildings usually stand for in our dreams.

Anthony Palermo and Jim Dailey, associate professors at Lakeland Community College, visited Mentor Public Library's Main Branch to talk about dreams Monday night.

They answered questions almost everyone has: What our dreams? Why do we have them and what do they mean?

While I can't recapitulate all the insight Palermo and Dailey provided, I do want to offer some of the highlights.

For example, Palermo explained what common symbols in dreams mean.

Flying in a dream represents freedom and creativity.

A house or building represents the person who's dreaming; the rooms, different aspects of the person; and the basement, his or her subconscious.

Both falling and being chased are classic personifications of anxieties. (When you wake abruptly from a falling dream, that's called a hypnic jerk.)

The shadow represents our double which does, in dreams, the things we would never do while awake.

It's not uncommon to dream of yourself as the other sex. An anima is the female aspect of the male self, and the animus if the male aspect of the female self.

Recurring dreams represent unresolved problems, and premonitory dreams are things "the unconscious can see" that the conscious won't acknowledge, Palermo said.

Speaking of which, several famous scientists, authors and politicians had dreams that helped guide their work. Friedrich Kekule had difficulty constructing a benzene molecule until he dreamed of it as an ouroboros ring. That structure turned out to be accurate.

The same thing happened to Niels Bohr who dreamed of electrons rotating around the nucleus. He won a Nobel Prize for following (and verifying) his dream.

Albert Einstein dreamed of seeing the extended spectrum of colors while traveling at the speed of light. He later said, "My entire scientific career has been a meditation on that dream."

The list continues: Harriet Tubman trusted her dreams to select routes along the Underground Railroad; Abraham Lincoln predicted his death in a dream two days before he was assassinated; and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Shelley dreamed of Kubla Khan and Frankenstein, respectively, before they wrote them.

Finally, Palermo said that there are three levels to dreaming.

Level one are dreams that depict the day's events. Level-two dreams contain personal symbolism. And dreams of the third level contain what Carl Jung referred to as archetypes.

Jung, a student of Sigmund Freud, believed that there are certain characters and motifs that appeared in every culture's imaginations: the hero, mother, child, trickster, flood, dragon and so on.

Furthermore, Jung believed that archetypical dreams tapped into something he called the collective unconscious.

If Jung's correct, not only do all people share the act of dreaming, but our dreams connect us all at a basic level.

In other words, dreams show us that we all may have more in common than we thought.

Thanks to Palermo, Dailey and everyone who came to their talk Monday. For more information on programs and events at Mentor Public Library, visit our web site or call 440-255-8811.

Lakeland professors talk about importance, symbolism of dreams

Tony Palermo has been fascinated with dreams since he was a child.

“I remember being amazed at how real some of my dreams were and how my emotions were affected by them,” Palermo said.

During graduate school, Palermo researched symbolism which led him to the study of dreams.

Palermo is now an associate professor of humanities at Lakeland Community College, and he’ll be sharing his knowledge of dreams and dream interpretations at 6:30 p.m. Monday, March 10, at Mentor Public Library’s Main Branch.

The talk will be part of the library’s Monday University series.

“It’s been my experience that the majority of people love to talk about their dreams,” Palermo said. “More than anything else, they are ‘personal mysteries,’ which individuals love to solve. Once given the proper tools, most people can do their own interpretations; and it is phenomenal how much you can learn about yourself through interpretations.”

Palermo will be joined at the library by Jim Dailey, another associate professor at Lakeland. He specializes in the science of sleep, which has a big impact on the study of dreams.

Those who come to the Monday University program will learn the significance of dreaming, the importance of dreams in several religious traditions, and some methods and techniques with which people can interpret and understand their own dreams.

The talk at Mentor Public Library is free and open to the public. However, people are asked to register for it beforehand.

They can also sign up to hear Palermo and Dailey by calling (440) 255-8811 ext. 215.