Dreams From Imi, Vol. 3

Socrates said, “A life unexamined is not worth living.”

To make sense of life is not only to examine what happens in daylight.

While we search for the meaning of life, should we look only to the hours we spend awake, or also to the nights when the unconscious reveals what we are not yet ready to say aloud?

Dreams rarely explain themselves.

They arrive in fragments, images, and feelings that resist waking logic. Yet over time patterns emerge, repeating symbols circling something we are not yet ready to say directly.

Welcome to my dream column where readers send me their dreams, and I explore the images they carry and what they might be asking of us, listening more closely to the stories our unconscious tells when we fall asleep.

My approach is shaped by my background in psychology and my MSc in Clinical Psychology, where I also explored Jungian approaches to dream analysis.

Thanks Jason Brooker for being my next dream donor.

I am on an aeroplane that has just landed. I have a lot of luggage and I am trying to figure out how to carry it.

As I stand there, I realise I am completely alone. There are no seats on the plane, only an empty shell.

I leave the aircraft, weighed down by my luggage, just about managing to carry it.

In the terminal, I start looking for somewhere to buy a train ticket for my onward journey. I find a touch screen machine and approach it, but no matter what I do, I cannot get it to work. There are endless pages, yet none of them allow me to buy a ticket.

Jason Brooker: “In the distance, I spot what looks like a ticket office. I walk towards it, but when I arrive, it is just an office with a man in a suit sitting behind a desk. He does not look like someone I can buy a ticket from.

Then I realise I have left my luggage behind. I return to the machine, but it is gone. I panic.

A man approaches me and says he has seen some bags in a side room. I go to look, but they are not mine. At that point, I become annoyed with myself and realise this is a dream.

“I am fed up with this,” I say. I wake up.

What this dream is expressing:

A dream that begins with landing often signals psychic arrival. It marks a transition from one state of being into another, where expectation and anticipation are already present. With expectation comes a subtle undercurrent of anxiety, as anxiety is always oriented toward what has not yet unfolded.

The presence of excessive luggage suggests more than pressure. In Jungian terms, it reflects the psychic material one carries, past experiences, internalised roles, unresolved complexes, and aspects of the self that have not yet been integrated. The fact that it is barely manageable points to an over-identification with these contents, where the ego is attempting to hold more than it can meaningfully contain.

What follows introduces a striking shift.