Using Dream Interpretation to Overcome the Fear of Rejection

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – Carl Jung

It didn’t seem very important at the time . . . but my mind thought otherwise. It was early evening on a Friday night. The night was significant for me as my Jiu Jitsu grading was only hours away. I couldn’t fight against the adrenaline; no matter how hard I tried to read or stay present, my mind—and body—were somewhere in the distant future.

I received a text from my friend whom I’d messaged the day before. I’d mixed my days up as I thought we supposed to catch up for a coffee the following day, on Saturday (we’d scheduled for the following weekend). He responded to my message: “I can’t tomorrow mate, but I’ll see you tomorrow night?” My first thought was, “Shit! What had I forgotten about?” My second thought a little darker: “What had I not been invited to?” I asked him what he was talking about, and he said that he must have had his days wrong. I didn’t think much of it at the time as I was involuntarily focused on the grading; but a small, yet loud part of me felt like he’d tried to make me feel better in that moment by lying, as opposed to asking whether I’d been invited to an event he was clearly attending.

Who knows whether an actual event was taking place at all. The point is, we are all sensitive to negative emotion and my negative feelings were constructing a very isolating and justifiable story that appeared difficult to contest: “Tom, you weren’t invited.”

As fate would have it, my dreaming mind, that night, got to work, doing its best to process the uncomfortable emotions. The dream played out that exact scenario. It said, “What if you happened to be at the party you weren’t invited to? What if we constructed a reality that would have you turn up, accidentally, to process the pain missing out?”

I dreamt I was walking with my friend in an old neighbourhood similar to the one I worked in when I first became a CrossFit coach (long before embarking on a career in therapy). We were talking about seemingly insignificant topics and ideas before we stopped to sit down in a nearby park just next to the BBQ area. Suddenly, distant high school friends—friends of distant friends—appeared from where we’d come from. I was surprised but my friend wasn’t. He knew they were coming; and although I didn’t feel set up in any way, I now found myself justifying my presence to a whole bunch of people I hadn’t seen in years. I was confident and assertive, yet to be honest, insecure. I felt like I wasn’t meant to be there. It wasn’t that I felt—or appeared (hopefully!)—socially anxious; rather, I didn’t see the point in any of it. Why justify? Why talk to these people? Why feel isolated when the party itself proved to be a giant drainer? I had no interest in conversing with any one of them, and I’d probably never see them again after this.

When I awoke from my dream the following morning, I smiled. The fear and sense of isolation I experienced the night before was nothing more than old, antiquated technology. If I were alive millions of years ago, not being invited to a party might have meant death. Nowadays, in 2023, it means growth and change. Sure, loneliness doesn’t feel great; but a worse feeling, I’d argue, is not being who you are, not having the courage to let your light shine in all its glory. Standing out in the open, exposing the many facets of one’s diamond-like nature is the test of our time. In line with this thinking, many philosophers, and psychologists before us have come to believe that life is a zero-sum game. By becoming who we are, we remain vulnerable and open to ridicule; but we won’t fear death because we’d have lived. Alternatively, by remaining a part of the crowd, we merge with others and stay safe from such ridicule. But our fear of death lurks in the background, catalysed by an overwhelming sense of not having lived for something beyond safety and comfort. There is no win-win. There is only win-loss. We must each decide whether to fear death or fear life.

Our Truth Isn’t “The” Truth

I’ve been fascinated by dreams ever since I can remember. I’ve been analysing my own as well as reading dream theory for years now. After a while, you start to gain an intrinsic sense of their meaning—and not in any esoteric way; more so in a sense that you gain a better idea of what the dream was attempting to process. Dreams string a whole series of ideas, opinions, perceptions, emotions and thoughts together. They pose questions to the dreamer so that the dreamer can update their map of the world.

We all have a map of the world, our own subjective representation of the way the world is. When new stimuli are presented to us—when we continue to live, in other words—dreams help us process this new information to re-align, re-calibrate, and add chapters to the stories of our lives. The stories we live by aren’t necessarily true, but that’s not the point. The question we must ask ourselves is whether those stories serve us or not.

Simulations and Contingency Plans

When clients tell me that they’ve been having “What if?” thoughts, I view them, among other things, as ideas that need to be explored with compassionate and courageous curiosity so that they can be laid to rest. You see, the mind is constantly running simulations in an effort to ensure survival. When we live in our minds, we live in many different realities showing us what could be “if” we acted like this or like that; if we said this or that. This is a fantastic mechanism for survival because it means that we don’t have to drink that potentially thirst-quenching or pathogen-rich water on the ground, for example. Rather, we can simply let the future run its course, mentally, prior to acting it out, blindly, in our own self-interest. The trouble for modernity is that we have become far too enamoured of rationality and thinking, such that ideas, as opposed to being itself, are favoured. But if evolutionary psychology has taught us anything, it’s that ideas are our servants for survival, not the masters of our fate. We should use them to assist our behaviour and attitudes, not allow them to sit behind the steering wheel.

Ultimately, the mind, like the body, appears to be a self-regulating system such that dreams will do what they need to do irrespective of our conscious awareness. But if we are to come to greater self-understanding—peering into our souls and seeing our dreams through the lens of what has been discussed here—we may gain deeper insights into how we react to our worlds that we each inhabit. I react to things differently to you and vice-versa. Knowing how I respond to the world, and how I respond to certain ideas and people is a fantastic starting point when I begin to ponder who I really want to be in the world, and how I want to show up. I guarantee that is the same for you as well.

My final point is this: Every self-reflective and therapeutic insight is designed to identify a deeper truth within yourself. The way you use that is by integrating it into a plan that is designed to get you to where you want to be—your goals, visions and mission in life.