We are in a hotel. We enter the lift to go up to our room, scan the keycard and press the level button. The lift starts moving, but after a moment it tilts and starts going diagonally up through the atrium. This is a surprise. It opens at a floor but the floor level is halfway up the door of the lift. We press our number again and the lift jerks into movement – we stumble – there are no walls on the lift anymore so we crouch down, feeling some vertigo, and hold onto the floor. It seems to go up very fast, and judders to a stop right at the top of the building. It’s still lopsided and not aligned with the floor exactly but we quickly scramble off and it rushes back down away from us. We are quite shaken and hope we don’t have to go through this again when we want to go back down to the lobby.
With this dream I am going to go back to basics again and start to identify each symbol in the dream. For one, this dream is unsettling to experience, and two, elevators don’t bring to mind an easily accessed collective meaning as I consider them.
So, lifts (or elevators): They are a mode of vertical transportation, they reduce the effort required to get to high floors and back down, they carry a small group of people at once, or just one person, and they have buttons so you can direct the lift.
Directions of travel: normally vertical, moving potentially from lower consciousness to higher perspective and consciousness. Diagonal movement possibly revealing unexpected movements / thinking out of the box, a more pronounced change in consciousness?
Not aligning with the floors: perhaps relating to misalignment mentally with reality?
Walls coming away from the lift: usually walls are related to boundaries and in this case also safety, so having less boundaries or ‘safety’, perhaps when combined with mental perspective this helps add to signify thinking new (‘dangerous’) thoughts or thoughts which break through our previous boundaries.
Keycard: Although it played a small role in this dream example, at other times in other dreams the keycard is significant because it does or doesn’t work, or is or isn’t needed. The keycard for me would signify here something like the ability / conditions to access a new level.
And we were in the lift alone: which would suggest to me that this is an individual pursuit rather than a group or family effort.
One other thing that occurs to me as I write, is that lifts are a modern thing – you probably won’t find them in an ancient myth or fairytale. Although they have been used symbolically in contemporary novels and plays, I personally tend not to bring those interpretations in – unless of course any of them were strongly relevant to you personally – for instance you were just studying a play which featured the elevator as a key symbol within it.
So – upon review of our symbols and their metaphoric meaning I’m going to take a first stab at this dream and see if it resonates with myself.
The dream could be talking about how we are gaining a new, higher, possibly uncomfortable perspective in life, which may feel transgressive (or risky) and which does not neatly align with our established understandings and ways of thinking (or does not align with our community’s established beliefs).
On reflection, this feels like a really interesting interpretation that I had not considered before. My next question of myself might be, “what was happening in my life around this time?” – if, for instance, I had learnt some new knowledge or was trying out a new way of thinking or acting from a different perspective to my community, I think I would have hit on a pretty accurate possible meaning!
It reminds me of the hero’s quest in that it contains many bumps and surprises, but which ultimately brings the hero to new heights of understanding, and then back to where they started (in this dream’s case, back down to the lobby eventually), with a transformed perspective.
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