Conflict is a part of life, and our dreams reflect this. It is common to find ourselves in conflicting situations in our dreams. We can use our dreams to learn how to handle the conflicts that we experience in our waking lives. This can reduce the amount of anxiety and hostility we feel when we are awake.
Dream researchers have thought that dreams can help us manage the conflict in our lives. Freud thought that dreams reveal the conflicting aspects of our personalities that we repress when we are awake. Adler believed that we use dreams to solve problems. Jung thought that we need to be able to resolve conflict in order to survive, and dreams helped us to do this. Contemporary dream theories based on evolutionary biology have a viewpoint that resembles Jung’s – they say that we evolved to have the ability to dream in order to learn how to handle the conflicts of primitive life.
Attacks in Dreams
If you dream of being attacked, you may be feeling threatened by something in waking life. If you are attacking someone else, you may be feeling defensive, and attacking them to prevent yourself from getting hurt. You may also be attacking an old idea or way of thinking, so that you can replace it with something newer and better. If you kill someone in your dream, you may be destroying bad habits or negative behaviors that have inhibited your personal growth.
Dreams About Fights
A dream of a fight or an argument can reflect hostility between you and another person in waking life that you haven’t consciously recognized. Such a dream can also mean that you are unconsciously fighting an aspect of yourself that you haven’t been able to accept. Your dream may express conflicts between your moral code, your religious beliefs, your sexual desires, your attitude toward finance or your political leanings.
War Dreams
If you have not experienced war yourself, a dream about a war may refer to a battle that you are waging against another person, or a battle within yourself. Think about whether it would be best to surrender and live in peace, or whether it is a fight worth winning. You may need to live with conflict in order to grow as a human being.
As in waking life, a war in a dream may represent a conflict between different groups of people – for example, different factions in the workplace.
Jung thought that dreams about war symbolized a conflict between the instincts that drive our unconscious minds and the rules of civilized society that determine our conscious behavior.
Dreams of Disobedience
A dream that involves an act of disobedience, such as a rebellion, mutiny or strike, or simply refusing to follow your boss’s orders, is a symbol of conflict with authority. This dream may be a message that you need to assert yourself more when communicating with an authority figure in your life. It may also be a way for you to vent your frustrations when you cannot safely express them in the waking world.