Meeting Myself in a Dream

There are moments when I wonder if our dreams know who we are becoming before our conscious minds fully recognize it.

Not because I believe every dream is prophetic or that every symbol has a universal meaning waiting to be decoded. Studying the psychology of dreams has actually made me less interested in asking, What does this symbol mean? and more interested in asking, What is my psyche showing me about myself?

Recently, I volunteered one of my dreams in my Psychology of Dreams class in my Consciousness program for an experiential dreamwork exercise.

The dream took place somewhere that felt almost like a circus. There was also the energy of my son’s birthday somewhere in the background—not necessarily something happening directly in front of me, but something I knew was there.

I was walking beside a man who looked like he could have been a movie star or actor. I didn’t recognize him, but there was something about his presence that stood out to me.

He was grounded.

Comfortable.

Steady.

We were having a friendly conversation as we walked together. I couldn’t remember what we talked about when I woke up, but I remembered how it felt.

There was an ease between us.

Eventually, we arrived at an elevator.

I knew the elevator was going up.

And then I woke up before it moved.

Stepping Back Into the Dream

During class, instead of simply analyzing the dream intellectually, I had to enter back into it.

I retold the dream in the present tense, as though it were happening right then. Then I chose people in the class to play different figures from the dream. My classmates asked questions about what I noticed, what I felt, and what stood out to me before acting out their parts.

It was fascinating how much more emerged when I stopped trying to interpret the dream from the outside and stepped back inside the experience.

By the end of the exercise, I began to understand the man differently.

He seemed to represent a healthy masculine figure.

For much of my life, I had looked outside of myself for many of the qualities I experienced in him—groundedness, steadiness, confidence, protection, safety, strength without force.

But there was something important about how we interacted in the dream.

He wasn’t rescuing me.

I wasn’t chasing him.

He wasn’t leading me.

We were simply walking beside one another.

And when we reached the elevator, I looked into his eyes.

There was an attraction there all of a sudden, but as I explored that feeling more deeply, I realized I wasn’t simply attracted to him.

I was attracted to the qualities he represented.

And suddenly, it felt like I was looking into a mirror.

What We Search for Outside of Ourselves

That realization stayed with me.

What if the qualities I had spent so much of my life looking for in another person were becoming qualities I could finally recognize within myself?

I knew what groundedness felt like because I had become more grounded.

I recognized strength because I had discovered my own.

I was drawn to steadiness because I had spent years learning how to create safety within myself.

Perhaps this figure wasn’t showing me what I was missing.

Perhaps he was reflecting back what I had integrated.

This immediately made me think about individuation, a concept I’ve encountered repeatedly through Jungian psychology.

Individuation isn’t about becoming perfect. It is the ongoing process of bringing more of ourselves into consciousness—integrating aspects of the psyche that may have previously been unconscious, rejected, projected onto others, or experienced as separate from who we believe ourselves to be.

And that made the final image of the dream even more meaningful to me.

The elevator.

Elevation Through Integration

I have my own personal association with elevators moving upward.

For me, they have come to represent an elevation in consciousness.

Not an elevation that makes us “better” than who we were before, but one that seems to occur as we become more integrated—as we reclaim pieces of ourselves we once disowned or searched for outside of ourselves.

In this dream, the elevator hadn’t moved yet.

I simply knew it was going up.

That distinction feels important.

I don’t experience the dream as telling me that I have arrived somewhere. If anything, it feels like another threshold.

I had reached the elevator with this healthy masculine figure, looked into his eyes, and recognized that what attracted me to him was also something I had been developing within myself.

And only then were we ready to go up.

Maybe consciousness doesn’t expand because we escape the parts of ourselves we don’t like.

Maybe we rise because we integrate them.

“I’ve Got Me” Doesn’t Mean “I Don’t Need You”

This realization connects deeply with the work that eventually became my new book, I’ve Got Me: Healing Your Nervous System, Building Secure Attachment, and Coming Home to Yourself.

For years, I thought healing meant understanding why I was the way I was.

And understanding matters.

But eventually, I realized there is a difference between saying:

I know why I do this.

and being able to say:

I don’t need to abandon myself here anymore.

Our survival patterns were created through experience. Our nervous systems learned through experience. Many of our attachment patterns were reinforced through relationships and experiences.

So transformation requires more than intellectual understanding.

We need new experiences.

The experience of setting a boundary and surviving someone else’s disappointment.

The experience of feeling an emotion without immediately trying to escape it.

The experience of allowing someone to misunderstand us without abandoning ourselves to change their perception.

The experience of receiving love without losing ourselves inside of it.

The experience of being alone without interpreting aloneness as abandonment.

And the experience of telling ourselves, I’ve got me—and building enough evidence that eventually our nervous system begins to believe us.

But I’ve got me was never meant to mean I don’t need anyone.

Secure attachment isn’t radical independence.

Healing doesn’t mean we stop desiring love, intimacy, community, or connection.

It means connection no longer requires self-abandonment.

We can walk beside another person without needing them to rescue us.

We can recognize strength, safety, groundedness, and love in someone else without believing they possess something we lack.

We can look into another person’s eyes, recognize the qualities that attract us, and perhaps realize:

I recognize you because I recognize something of myself in you.

Maybe that was the gift this dream was offering me.

I wasn’t following the healthy masculine toward elevation.

I wasn’t waiting for him to take me there.

We arrived at the elevator together.

And perhaps that’s one of the most beautiful parts of individuation: we stop searching the outside world for all the missing pieces of ourselves and begin recognizing what has been within us, waiting to be integrated.

I don’t know what was waiting at the top of the elevator.

I woke up before it moved.

But maybe I’m not supposed to know yet.

For now, it feels like enough to know that I’m no longer standing there waiting for someone else to push the button.

I’ve got me.

TAKE ACTION: If you are ready to create greater safety within yourself and build relationships that no longer require self-abandonment, explore Sonya Achara’s new book, I’ve Got Me: Healing Your Nervous System, Building Secure Attachment, and Coming Home to Yourself. Now available for preorder, the book offers a path toward nervous system regulation, secure attachment, and becoming your own source of support while remaining open to love and connection.