In the website to which you linked I didn't see any specific answers to anything in my dream. I only saw questions to be asked in an interview, nothing applicable to me.
Shades your answers to the questions are what is applicable to you.
Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.
Chinese Proverb
Using Delaney's method you don't rely on universal dream symbols. You search for the unique symbolic meaning of your own imagery that you made up with your own mind. You have an enormous amount of imagery and descriptors to sort through in this dream. If you're super interested in dream interpretation, I suggest keeping a journal of your dreams to see if you notice recurring themes because you likely will. For example, if there is an ongoing source of stress or anxiety in your life, you will probably see stress expressed in the imagery of your dreams even though the images change. If you choose to journal your dreams, I encourage you to illustrate them. ;-)
You start at the beginning (I might have started with your timeframe description. I chose to skip it.)
BACKSTORY:
I was a passenger aboard a "colony ship" (my word for it; that word combination never occurred during the dream itself) sent out to, uh, colonize a planet an incredible distance away from Earth but known to be able to support life as we know it.
What is a colony ship? (In your own words, you describe it. Your words are key to the abstract interpretation of this symbol.)
Yet to do------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The ship was incredibly large, notably with an open interior, but nevertheless able to land on the surface. Onboard was everything necessary to get a colony up and running and self-sustainable, with the ship itself meant to be dismantled for structural parts and spare machinery when necessary. The destination was so far away that there was no hope of any contact whatsoever with anyone from Earth for several generations to come, at the earliest. Ergo, everyone involved with the project--especially me--knew full well that this was a one-way trip.
BEGINNING:
I was brought out of stasis, a.k.a. "hypersleep," with a few hundred others. The ship had already landed on the surface, as was the plan. After wandering around a bit trying to get our bearings, we came to realize, to our surprise, that a few hundred more had been brought out of stasis quite a while before us and were already well underway at the task of unloading the ship and setting things up on the surface to begin life there. This shocked me, since I sort of assumed we'd all be woken up at the same time, but then I saw the sense in avoiding the "too many chiefs, not enough Indians" syndrome at the all-important juncture as the initial landing and debarkation.
As for the planet itself, it was a temperate paradise, with plains and freshwater lakes. The atmosphere was easily breathable and the water easily drinkable. Flowers absolutely ABOUNDED, far more than you see on earth, and their colors were probably more vivid than anything earthly. They were literally "scintillating." They seemed to grow on on top of the other.
MIDDLE:
Fast-forward an undetermined length of time. Everyone was "awake" and the colony was well-established and otherwise running smoothly, but then I had an awful realization: We were at war. All human colonists were at war with "the others"--yeah, creative name, but that's honestly what we called them in the dream. They were the native beings of the planet we were on. The problem was, we couldn't figure out just what, exactly, "the others" were. I or we had narrowed it down to three possibilities: A) They were corporeal beings just as physical as us, B) they were entirely non-corporeal, existing as sentient energies or energy fields; or C) they were a much more sinister version of B, having the ability to occupy human bodies surreptitiously to turn "us" against each other and thereby fight us from the inside.
To make matters worse, it was clear that we were losing. Most humans had retreated back into the original ship, and "the others" may or may not have made incursions into it. Although people were fighting--or doing their best to do so, under the circumstances, since the enemy wasn't easily identifiable--the danger was clear and everyone was looking to board what passed for the escape pods. Yeah, I know that escape pods on landed spacecraft aren't of much help, but these functioned more to provide an impenetrable "safe zone" that couldn't be breached from the outside.
Me and a friend went from one to the other, but they were all already either in use or jettisoned (yes, I'm aware that this contradicts the above paragraph, but hey, it's only a dream). Then we made the decision to find, and board, the "last resort" escape pod, sort of the "boss" escape pod, if that makes any sense at all. We made/fought our way to it--I can't remember the finer details--and upon reaching it, we found that we were the first ones there. Ours for the taking! We boarded it and then sealed ourselves inside.
END:
Upon sealing it shut, I found out, the hard way, that this pod functioned in a way entirely separate from all the others: Whereas the others created a hermetic seal against outside danger, ours was fully that but also provided a second escape feature: Escape via temporality. Specifically, our pod slowed down time itself in the interior so that time appeared, to us, to be passing at an incredibly fast rate on the outside--with the intent that by the time we left the pod the danger would've permanently passed.
While watching things unfold at a blindingly fast pace, I saw that we humans somehow rebounded and, against the odds, won the war. With the danger gone, I saw activity uptick, with tiles being laid all around us, just inches away from my face (the walls of the pods were mostly glass). When my friend and I eventually left the pod, the colony was a fully-built, fully-functional township with all of society, along with every mechanical system, fully operational and running like utopian clockwork. [/color] So, that was my dream. Does anyone have any ideas on what any of it means, if anything? Assuming that there's even a little bit of validity to the concept of dream interpretation, of course.
Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.
Chinese Proverb
You believe my dream could mean I am a pervert or a sexual deviant. This really intrigues me; what evidence in the dream leads you to conclude this?
Thanks to the four of you; I appreciate the feedback. If any of you have any more insights--or if anyone else would like to chime in--I'd love to hear (back) from you.
Yes, it could mean you are a pervert in the sense of repressed and subconscious sexual desires, a.k.a. the evidence is as interpreted by all things Freud. Otherwise I took a Jungian approach, which is equally entertaining but a bit more palatable for the high road folk - but i am not adverse to any convenient exploitation and combination of the two.
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires...seek discipline and find your liberty I can tell if a person is judgmental just by looking at them what is chaos to the fly is normal to the spider - morticia addams If you're not upsetting idiots, you might be an idiot. - Ted Nugent
Perhaps you thought everyone would enter the spirit world at the same time, hence your surprise upon awakening. The world you found yourself in was the spirit prison. The others were spirits who had never gained a physical body. It was a battle to not allow them to enter, influence, and control you. Satan was loosed for a time but ultimately the followers of Jesus prevailed. The world you ultimately saw working like utopian clockwork that you saw was the terrestrial kingdom.
And when the confederates saw Jackson standing fearless as a stone wall the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.
Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
It reminds me of a series of stories written by Orson Scott Card. I think they were combined into the Jason Chronicles or some similar title.
As for dream interpretation, I'm with Analytics and believe dreams serve a house cleaning function. My understanding is that as dreams progress through the night they become more resolved and psychologically positive compared to early dreaming. So it makes sense the conflict in your dream is sorted out at the end while the middle of your dream is defined by unresolved conflict. The continuity between the dreams is most likely more dissociated than appears in the telling as they were probably broken periods of dreaming your mind reconnected whenever it reemerged into a dream state from a dreamless one. So in that sense, it sounds like you are on to the meaning your mind was seeking as you mention up thread there are stresses you feel that may be represented by problems so poorly defined or out of your control it may seem escape to safety is the only option you have. Your mind then resolved the conflict into a psychologically protective end where it all works out without the resolution itself being apparent. Your mind can't tell the future nor has the key to resolving the issue so it papers over it in your inner-mindscape to reassure you it will all work out in the end. Hopefully this provided some sense of peace of mind but it seems you are still stuck over the lack of clarity around the resolution and hoping to find additional meaning that can carry over into your real life. I don't think dreams can provide that.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
The emerging view in neuroscience is that dreams are related to memory consolidation happening in the brain during sleep. This may include reorganizing and recoding memories in relation to emotional drives as well as transferring memories between brain regions.
During the day, episodic memories (memories for events) are stored in the hippocampus, a region of the brain specialized for long-term memory that learns particularly quickly. At night, memories from this region appear to be transferred to the cerebral cortex, the region specialized for information processing, cognition, and knowledge. [2] [3]
Studies in animals have found that during sleep, the neural activity of the hippocampus "replays" the events of the day. This replay happens faster than real-time, and sometimes happens in reverse. The activity replay is correlated with neural activity patterns in both the visual cortex (responsible for visual experience) and the prefrontal cortex (responsible for strategy, goals and planning). The memory replay occurs during REM sleep and dreaming.
...
Stickgold et al (2001) propose that the emotional features of dreams "reflect an attempt, on the part of the brain, to identify and evaluate novel cortical associations in the light of emotions mediated by limbic structures activated during REM." In other words, the brain is trying to interlink our experiences of the world with our emotional drives. [7]
So while dream content might not be our subconscious trying to send us messages, the analysis of dreams may reveal the underlying structure of the motivational forces driving our life strategy and choices.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
This is a variation of a science fiction theme that has occurred in a number of works. Having such a dream would suggest you have a high degree of creativity, a propensity for the color blue, and a love of Boston cream pies.
Your mention of scintillating flowers abounding would suggest something is caught underneath the photocopy machine at work. Best check that out.
The part of the escape pod leading to a utopian future suggests that good things await in the future and that possibly you should schedule a vacation to someplace exotic.
The dream means a few things. First, it means you perceive yourself as a loner -- escaping earth, escaping the planet; unsure where you belong, and along for the ride. Along for the ride: You're detached while others built and navigated the ship, a first group had everything set up for you, others are primarily doing the fighting, you escape and after escaping, you encounter the colony once again, totally set up by others. You're not really participating. Further, you identify as teen, at best, hanging with a "buddy" rather than as a middle-aged guy with a wife and family and a narrative of responsibilities or interactions with the others in your personal life or community.
Second, it means that you believe in fate of a good kind, perhaps something akin to salvation. Along the lines of the first point, you're tossing to the wind -- going on a spaceship and it takes you to a utopian place, and then you throw yourself in an escape pod, and it ends with taking you to a utopian place. The guiding hand of something else is getting you out of trouble and making your dreams come true.
Third, and this is my favorite part, you have a child-like impulse that if you close your eyes the bad stuff will go away. But this goes much deeper. Like a child hiding in a closet to escape an intruder, you jump in this pod, and an interesting assumption is revealed. Fast forwarding to the future in no way whatsoever takes you to safety. It may get you to the answer regarding your ultimate safety or doom faster, but it doesn't provide any extra protection whatsoever, even though for you, subjectively, it feels like it does. Had the pod been breached 92 days after you stepped in, your world would have quickly ended within a few seconds of your time. Accelerating time for you adds nothing to your protection. This reveals that certainty, "getting to the verdict quickly" with a minimal fight on your part has an illusionary, subjective quality of safety for you. (as it does many people)
A final note: Nothing in this dream suggests any kind of perversion whatsoever, if anything, it reveals the opposite, that you're something of an idealist. This is subby projecting his own dark secrets on others to feel better about himself.
Anyway, this is what you're dream means! Enjoy!
Lou Midgley 08/20/2020: "...meat wad," and "cockroach" are pithy descriptions of human beings used by gemli? They were not fashioned by Professor Peterson.
LM 11/23/2018: one can explain away the soul of human beings...as...a Meat Unit, to use Professor Peterson's clever derogatory description of gemli's ideology.
My personal experience with dreaming is that they often involve a great deal of confabulation that attempts to make sense of something that occurs to me while dreaming. For example, were I in Shade's place with the dream beginning with myself and a few others attempting to start a colony of some kind, there would probably be a moment where my mind asks why we're doing this, and then the ship and the fact we were awoken from stasis would backfill in as the rest of the dream begins to conform to this. If it were me, I'd suspect that my dream state slipped deeper and then back up so that the "new" dream suddenly had more people around and as my mind realized this it would then confabulate the idea that these people were awoke first and had already been at work. In my experience, those sorts of things happen all the time in dreams where each dream phase stitches itself together through confabulated just-so stories that then become the reality of the rest of that dream sequence. Being aware of this and dream journaling, I used to look for those places where it happened to try and recognize changes in sleep states. I don't dream journal anymore, but that's my take on it.
Looking at Shade's story suggests that each of his three acts were likely multiple dream sequences and knowing how long he was asleep would help identify the rhythms where those internal changes happened, such as:
Things seem to be going well, check out those flowers!
Whoa, what the “F” just happened to that person and where...huh, yeah we're building society from a ship, so....
Others! They are attacking us! I don't recall conflict before now, what is...oh, they're possibly taking over us.
Now crap is getting real because if they can take over our bodies and blend in, we're screwed.
Wait, how can we escape if we just came here on a one-way space ship...
Something along those lines but below the level of conscious questioning.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa