Unfulfilled instinctual desires provide the energy for manv of our dreams, and the fact that an instinctive desire remains unfulfilled may be connected with a traumatic experience in childhood. That experience has probably been repressed because it was traumatic - causing guilt, anxiety, fear of punishment. (For repression) Your dreams may, therefore, be helping you to uncover the source of these blockages which inhibit the free flow of the natural forces within you.
(2) Recurring dreams may represent some psychic disturbance or problem that originated in childhood. Here are some examples:
Dreams of being naked may sometimes represent recollections of, and perhaps longing for, the paradise of childhood when one w alked
around unclothed without embarrassment. (Sometimes these dreams, as Freud said, express a desire for someone of the opposite sex to present himself / herself in the nude, and stem from sexual frustration.)
Dreams of flying or falling may derive from childhood enjoyment of swings and see-saws. They may express straightforward yearnings for the remembered joy of childhood, but they may also reflect one’s present state of unhappiness and a futile desire to retreat from one’s problematic adult life. A problem is not a thing; rather, it is a relationship - for example, a relationship of conflict either between your external circumstances and your inner wishes (in which case the solution consists in either remov ing yourself from the circumstances or modifying your wishes) or between one part of your psyche and another (in which case the solution is to integrate the part that has been neglected).
Dreams of failure stem from childhood fears of disapproval from parents. However, die fact that your dreams contain these recollections suggests that you have programmed yourself for anxiety.
If so, begin by loving the child that is still within you: reassure it, tell it that everything is all right and that there is no such thing as failure where there is love.
See also: Failure.
(3) Dreams which contain recollections of yourself as a free and happy child may indicate a desire to find your true self. The child is then a symbol of the complete and permanent inner freedom and joy which are enjoyed only when you have become acquainted with all the forces within you - both conscious and unconscious - and have established harmonious relationships among them.
See also: Child, sections(2)-(4).
(4) The child may represent the primitive psyche with which your conscious ego needs to get acquainted if wholeness is to be achieved. This primitive psvche is the mind of humankind in its infancy, before the development of self-consciousness and reasoning. This original awareness is still with us, but buried in unconsciousness. [1]