THE DREAM Firstly my head started buzzing and In my dream I was asking to talk to the dead of Hurricane Katrina. A voice of a dead person come through and it told me her name, I can't remember the name on waking. I then asked this person her when she was born and then her spirit tried to speak through me but my face became paralysed and I couldn't move my mouth. The buzzing then got louder. Next in my dream I was looking into a mirror it didn't look like me it looked like I was staring at another woman, all of a sudden my body was taken quickly up in the air up over the stairs and landing and I was spun round so fast, the fastest you could imagine, I was trying to grab hold of the banister to stop the force from spinning me round and round, finally I got hold of the bannister and managed to pull my self to the ground. After that I felt my brain bouncing around in the back of my head where I had been spun so quickly it was horrible and I woke up suddenly. when I woke up I still felt a presence around me and I could hear scratching in my bedroom, it was like someone was in my room making their presence known. I was to scared to open my eyes just in case I seen a ghost. I held on to my husband next to me in bed so I knew it was really happening and I was a wake at that point. The outside security light came on and I could still hear scratching for about 10mins. After that I kept praying to god to get back to sleep and I drifted off after a while. I never felt so scared in my life. Can anyone tell me what this dream means please!!!

THE REALITY Before the dreamer went to bed she had been watching the news of hurricane Katrina. She found it difficult to sleep straight away but when she finally drifted off she had this nightmare.

THE INTERPRETATION Well this dream seems as if it was related in some way to the news reports that she had been watching. That means that the events there were intensely relevant to the dreamer. In this case the most likely cause of the dream is that the dreamer may fear the same thing happening to her. In many ways events appear on the TV and they are somehow divorced from reality. All sorts of death and destruction take place every day yet the news just continues on been ignored by most people. But sometimes a story will touch us. In this case because of the sheer scale of the events. But also because they happen so close to home. This happened in a city in the USA. In one day society was reduced to nothing. Children were raped, looters were rife. Society broke down. Its a shock to the system that the peaceful and secure lives that we have can be so cruelly disturbed. Its a shock to our complacent societies and minds.

The classic symbol here is the mirror. The mirror shows that the dreamer can see something in the lives of others that is extremely relevant to her. But for the grace of god it could have been her.

The names were also a good clue. Names are not tremendously important in themselves. They are symbolic. They show that the real event has been brought to life in a very specific way. The people involved are filmed and named on the TV reports. The dreamer captures this by using names in her dream. That symbolises how this news report had brought to life the whole event. It was not a series of faceless victims but rather real people and real circumstances.

The tornado itself is also maybe symbolic. It maybe shows that the TV coverage vastly changed her views. It was a whirlwind affecting the way that she sees the world. It probably brings home the reality of the disaster and because it happened in the USA the same thing could happen to the dreamer. It featured real people that she could identify with and who were very much like herself.

The dream ended yet the images still came. When we hear and see things after waking that is called hypnopompic imagery. It maybe shows that the dream was extremely significant. In this case it showed that disasters are real events and affect real people - they are not some news item that affect people thousands of miles away on different continents.

Symbolic Meanings
BED : "something you can identify with in an intensely personal way - hurricane Katrina "
GHOST : "an intense scary feeling - an eerie feeling - connected with hurricane Katrina "
MIRROR : "the dreamer sees the hurricanes victims but realises it could have been her"
STAIRS : "coming to a conclusion - the dreamer realises just how bad things were and what happened "

DREAM MEANING The dream captures the following feeling within the dreamer - "I am just beginning to realise how bad Hurricane Katrina was. I watched the victims on TV but when I saw them I realised that it could quite easily been me. This didn't happen in some far away country. These people were Americans just like me. Its scary".

See how the Symbolic meanings weave together to form a key insight