Dreamscapes - Bridge

© Kris Vandereycken | Dreamstime.com
Image processed in Adobe Photoshop

Building bridges, burning bridges, crossing bridges - bridges provide not just a common metaphor for life, but for dreams as well. Bridges can hold positive connotations, such as uniting people and places, but they also have darker aspects, including gephyrophobia, or the fear of traveling over a bridge.

In dreams, a bridge will often represent some transition for the dreamer. How secure the dream bridge appears may indicate whether the path the dreamer is taking seems safe or fraught with peril. A dream bridge over water might mean the dreamer is dealing with emotions or the unconscious.

I've had more bridge dreams than I can count. They are all similar - I'm driving a car that is going up a very steep bridge, the kind you see near harbors that are built as high arches to allow ships to pass under them. The apex of the arch is so high, there are clouds at the top. In a related dream, I'm on a raised highway and need to take a ramp onto another highway, but the ramp is impossibly high, suspended in midair by nothing.

All of these dreams were scary, although I wouldn't call them nightmares. What was going on for so long in my waking life that I kept dreaming of driving into the clouds? The answer came when, after years of fairly heavy-duty spiritual questing, I walked away from my spiritual practice. I had concluded that it simply wasn't helping me. Shortly after, I had a dream that I drove down off a high bridge, back to solid ground. I ended up in a construction zone, but the feeling in the dream was one of relief. Time to come back to earth. Some type of work still needed to be done, but it wasn't going to happen up on the bridge to the sky.

I retain an interest in the spiritual, but no longer feel the need to beat myself up with ill-advised spiritual techniques. It's not very often that a construction zone looks so good.