Even if we don’t ride rollercoasters in waking life, the rollercoaster is an established and well known metaphor for life’s journey, and an easy image to bring to mind. So when we dream of rollercoasters, it’s usually not because we have extensive connections with riding them but that it’s such an embedded symbol of our time.
We say that “life’s been a rollercoaster recently”, that life has its ups and downs, that we’ve been thrown a loop, or that something was jolting. Rollercoasters are both a symbol of freedom and thrill, as well as stomach-lurching and unpredictable, or extreme in their contrasts of speed, height and inversion.
As someone who grew up playing Rollercoaster Tycoon obsessively, but is terrified of riding them for real, my dreams of rollercoasters are rare, but usually enjoyable. I know I’m safe, but I get to experience the speed and freedom of them, without any physical discomfort. In this sense, they’re a joyride.
Recently I had a dream about a rollercoaster which helped me see them in another light as metaphors.
Here’s a similar dream to the one I had, for us to work with together.
We’re on a rollercoaster, we know this because we are keenly watching the tracks as we move along them, up and down, round bends, faster than a train. Focused on the track we don’t feel many other sensations, just movement. We get to a loop-the-loop. We round it… almost. It’s a bit slow and slides back. We focus, and the train tries again. This time, little shapes drop from the inverted coaster as we’re at the top of the loop.
We look, they’re scattered everywhere. The coaster is stopped, and we start scooping the shapes up with a dustpan and brush, clearing the platform they’ve fallen on. Once we’ve cleared the floor, the coaster completes the loop. We ride it onwards.
This dream is a tidy example of revisiting or circling back, perhaps to clean up the loose ends or bring something to completion, while on our journey. The whole dream emphasised movement rather than feeling, so when movement is stalled, re-attempted, and paused while we clear the decks of what’s fallen loose, the interpretation could be that we have recently cleared something we were revisiting or looping on in waking life, and provides the good news that we can now continue on.
When I experienced a dream like this, it was not this clear to me until I wrote it down. It was more an impression of rollercoasters and frustration at the loop-the-loop being hard to complete. On writing the dream down, objectively what happened, the picture became cleared and I could relate it to my life at that point.
Other types of rollercoaster dreams you may experience could contain: sudden drops, long suspenseful climbs, getting stuck, feeling locked into your harness or not secure enough, or the tracks running out. Each of these could have metaphoric associations to them, and combine with your feelings in the dream and your feelings towards rollercoasters generally, to paint a layered picture.
If you don’t like rollercoasters in waking life because you don’t trust them, and in a dream you’re riding one (with some concern), and the track runs out – what do we take away from this? We could look at your level of trust in life, what happened in the dream after the track ran out, what happens in life when ‘the rug’s pulled out from under you’, or a path you thought was there, isn’t. And finally, has the dream shown you something new?
There’s an understanding that your dreams will always show you something new, so it may have shown you a new way to hold your attitude towards a situation like this in life.
Do you have rollercoaster dreams? Have they shown you something that’s hard to understand? You’re welcome to share in the comments, I’d love to know.