ghost

Universal Landscape: The memory or imprint of a former idea, concept, or person.

Dreaming Lens: Did you see a ghost in your dream? Were you the ghost? Were you in fear? Were you in danger? Was it the ghost of someone you knew? If so, was this someone who has passed or is currently living? What form or shape did the ghost take? Did you face it or run away? Did the ghost have a message for you?

Personal Focus: Most people consider ghosts through the context of whether they believe in them or not. The argument around their existence is irrelevant in the world of symbols. A ghost is defined as a remnant of a person’s energy that remains connected to the physical world after he or she has died. Some metaphysicians theorize that a spirit can be stuck here due to unfinished business or an untimely death. There are scientists who explore the possibility of ghosts as bumps in the electromagnetic field of energy that can sometimes be perceived by people who are living. No matter what camp you fall into, a ghost is symbolic of something from your past that continues to have a presence in your consciousness long after the event or person that inspired it has passed. This can include memories, habitual patterns, and even obsessions.

The three things to examine when ghosts appear in a dream is their identity, energetic quality, and their intention, if you know it. Who they are will lead you to the part of your personality that is being highlighted by your unconscious. How they appear reveals the power this experience is having on you. What they want will give you clues about the shift your unconscious mind is guiding you to consider.

If the ghost is someone you know who is not actually dead, use the Character Aspect technique to discover what qualities are traits that you have let go of, but that still arise in your behavior or thought patterns from time to time. Someone who has actually passed away can be considered in the same fashion, but might represent the impact they had on you in life, whether positive or negative.

The influence the ghost in your dream may have can be seen by the form and structure they take. An ethereal and insubstantial energy might point to less of a hold on you than something more grounded and solid. If the dream offers you any clues to the ghost’s intention or desire, add that in a literal fashion to expand your interpretation.

In many indigenous cultures, good fortune comes to a dreamer who faces a ghost and doesn’t flee. This image in a dream could point to a need to face the ghosts of your past in the form of old choices and behaviors that still haunt you with regret. Accepting the mistakes made earlier in life is crucial to emotional growth, and the ghosts of your youth will let you alone when you take on self-forgiveness.

Running from a ghost in fear may represent unwillingness to face certain inevitabilities. The notion that ghosts are souls who cannot transition to the next level of existence connects with resistance. Consider areas in your life where you are not letting go of something that no longer serves you, or where you are holding on to something or someone that truly may no longer exist in your life in a real way.

If ghosts appear in your dreams, they often symbolize unfinished business, just as ghosts—or the unsettled dead—are supposed to have unfinished business on earth, not having found their place in the afterlife. Because of a ghost’s ephemeral nature, being only partially visible to some and invisible to others, they can also represent uncertainty or a lack of clarity in your thinking. Another interpretation is that seeing ghosts in dreams is a way of facing your own mortality; for this reason they can be quite disturbing, but because they may offer evidence of life after death, they could be seen as offering some comfort. You can also look at a ghost as a shadow of yourself, your own dark nature personified; the side of yourself that you’d rather not face up to.

If you want to understand the significance of dreaming about ghosts, you need to look at how they behaved in your dream. Whilst most ghosts are invisible and silent, some ghosts are noisy and throw things around; these could represent your lack of control regarding things that are happening around you in waking life. Ghosts may interact with you in dreams, but often they will not do it directly. You may feel comforted by their appearance in your dream; you may feel stressed or afraid. They may be strangers, friends, relatives or famous people that have died—your relationship to them or how you feel about them will affect what they mean in your dream—for instance the ghost may be a nagging relative who is still very much alive, but casts a shadow over your life and is always trying to push you one way or another.

At times, ghosts represent those things that are unattainable or fleeting. If, however, the ghost feels solid, you may be touching aspects of your own mind or awareness that exist beyond your own preconceived ideas and beliefs. Ghosts of living people in your dream have nothing to do with the possibility of their death in the near future; such dreams suggest, rather, a sense of their thoughts or presence haunting you. Or perhaps you are haunted by desire for them or have unexpressed feelings about them. Alternatively, and particularly if you shrank from the ghost in your dream, could the specter have represented someone whom you once wronged, a ghost from the past that is still haunting your conscience despite your conscious efforts to push it to the back of your mind?

Memories, feelings, guilt, which haunt us, parts of the wider awareness of the unconscious which attempt to communicate; the husks or influences from past traumas or events, which have been emptied of hurt and real influence, but still affect us; fantasies, hopes, longings we have given time to, and so filled with our life and sexual energy, and which now influence us. Ghost of living person: a sense of their thoughts or presence influencing one; haunted by desire for them, or a resentment or feeling about them.

A ghost which feels solid: the dreamer is ‘touching’ aspects of their own mind or awareness existing beyond preconceived ideas and beliefs.

Example: ‘So frequently do I dream of the house and the town I lived in as a child, I wonder if I do indeed haunt the house by dreaming of it. I must tell you I believe that a trau­matic incident, which happened when I was 20, is involved. I was playing the piano downstairs when I heard a gun fired. On searching I found my father lying dead upstairs in an attic. He had shot his brains out. I took the scene in, never to be forgotten, in one horrified moment’ (Barbara T). Some people believe that, because of such incidents as described, in their dreams the living haunt a place. Seeing a ghost while awake can still be considered as connected with the dream process.

See third example under husband.

See also hallucination.