Ants in My Pants
Working with image associations
The other dream night, apropos of nothing that was happening in my typically dynamic, constantly scene-shifting dreamscape, I noticed my bed was filled with ants.
When I woke up and started to recall all the details of the dream, in reverse order, I took a moment to consider just what the heck those ants might symbolize. I hadn’t seen anything ant-related the previous day, hadn’t had any ant-related thoughts, so I considered that this particular dream element might have some deep unconscious value to explore, some higher importance, since it was a rather unique image and had come later in my dream night.
The first dreams of the night tend to be seasoned with the previous day’s events and emotions. As the night progresses, the mental waters of the day become more settled, and that’s when the unconscious takes deeper dives into memory, where it spends a little more time in its lab concocting a really cool and interesting image or symbol for your conscious mind to chew on when you wake up.
My first thought went to Ants in My Eyes Johnson, a character in a faux television commercial from Rick and Morty who, as his name suggests, has ants in his eyes. A lot of ants. Ants in My Eyes Johnson owns an electronics store but he can’t tell if his prices are too low because, you know, he has so many ants in his eyes. (So much for that old “first thought/best thought” epistemological chestnut eh. When you have a mental stream of consciousness as overly-creative and over-stimulated as the one I have, and you also posses a patent love for the absurd, life is an anything-goes endeavor of continual excitation, both on and off the pillow.)
My second thought went to an image at the beginning of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” of that severed ear in the field, crawling with ants, feeding on the ear. When I see ants in my house, I don’t think of how strong or industrious they are, or how they’re such good team players, I think that I must have left some food out somewhere. Ants, to me, are all about the job of food gathering. Think of the ubiquitious presence of ants at picnics, for example.
Since the ants in my dream were in my bed, I made an association to my sex life, that it, like that ear, was severed and lifeless, detached from the main body of my life. Message received. And fair enough, I might add. It is, after all, springtime right now, and the fancies of a middle-aged man are not that much different from those he had in his youth. And perhaps it wasn’t just my sex life, I continued thinking, maybe my life has a lack of intimacy in general, that I’m in need of sustenance in this regard as well.
Then I explored all my feelings around all these ideas as an imbalance, a conflict within my psyche, as something that needs to be addressed: Time to loosen up a bit. Keep an open mind. Keep an open heart. Be more intimate with others in general.
All in all, I found that to be some pretty good and accurate messaging from the unconscious in its ongoing narrative process of my individuation. And it all stemmed from the dream image of ants in my bed.
Personal Image Associations
Notice how I started with image associations (from a TV show and a film), not words, to describe what came to my mind when I thought of ants. Images are the lingua franca between the unconscious and the conscious. They are a form of direct communication with the unconscious.
There’s a big difference between thinking about what ants mean to you and seeing what kind of associated images pop into your awareness. When you’re studying your dream elements to interpret a dream, it’s important to uncover any personal associations that the images have for you. See what’s there first before allowing your thinking mind to make some kind of logical sense about the dream elements.
(Notice too how feelings naturally arose — severed, lifeless, detached — with the associated image of the ear. Feelings are absolutely primary in any dream interpretation.)
As time passes, when I recall this dream in the context of the long-form narrative of my dream life, the ants will be seen as carriers of the dream message but not be as important as the message itself. And if I were to append this particular dream message with the Chinese fortune cookie game, I will remember how it taught me that I need to be more intimate with others in my life — and between the sheets.
