Man, I was stuck. Like really stuck. All these books, all these online ‘gurus’ telling you what a snake means, what a house means, or what the deal is with flying. It’s all useless. It never, ever fit what I was actually seeing when I woke up with this strange, heavy feeling. I’d wake up with this absolutely specific picture in my head—like standing on a wet beach, but the sand was made of tiny, broken glass—and then I’d go read some guide, and it would give me some garbage about “facing emotional fragmentation.” Yeah, thanks. Zero help. It felt like trying to use a map of New York to navigate a back alley in London.
I realized I needed to stop trying to decode the symbols they told me about, and start mapping the territory I was actually traveling in. That’s when the whole idea of building a “city” started in my head. Not a real city, obviously. But a completely personalized, structured place where the dream chaos finally made sense. A system for the madness.
The Garbage I Had to Clear Out First
I just chucked all that official advice out the window. I mean, literally threw the books across the room. I started writing everything down. Not just the big stuff—not just the dragon or the tidal wave. I wrote down the texture of the air, the color of the background walls, the background noise that was barely there, the feeling in my gut when the thing happened. I was filling up notebook after notebook. It looked like a crazy person’s diary. I was just throwing words onto the page, trying to catch the feeling before it completely dissolved ten seconds after I opened my eyes.
The problem was, I had all the pieces, but I couldn’t build anything with them. It was just a massive, unorganized pile of observational bricks. I had descriptions of hundreds of streets, but no street names, no intersections, and absolutely no compass pointing north. I realized I didn’t need a stupid dictionary for the symbols. I needed a blueprint for the landscape.
Building My Own Interpretation Grid
I went out and bought the biggest whiteboard I could find and just started labeling quadrants. I didn’t use fancy psychological terms. I used simple, rough language that actually meant something to my waking brain. I forced myself to categorize every single memory:
- The Core Action: What was I doing? Running, hiding, standing still, desperately trying to open a jar? This had to be one word.
- The Emotional Weather: Not just “sad” or “happy,” but things like “clogged,” “electric,” “pressure behind the eyes,” “freezing cold despite the sun.”
- The Critical Obstacle: What was stopping me? Was it a locked door, a slow machine, a person’s angry face, or maybe the simple impossibility of moving my own feet?
- The Repeated Landmark: What was the setting? Always a specific, broken-down staircase? Always a dark, empty mall food court?
I took one dream and forced it onto this brutal grid. Then another. Then fifty more. It wasn’t some spiritual revelation or a moment of zen. It was a tedious, mind-numbing grind. It was hard manual labor, dragging these fleeting, slippery memories and nailing them to the wall, forcing them to hold still. I did this for six solid months, marking intersections with different colored markers.
And what popped out was the real kicker. The “city” wasn’t about the buildings being interpreted. The city was the structure I built on the whiteboard. It was a framework that showed me the damn repeating loops. Every single dream, no matter how wild or weird—the flying cows, the talking fish, the impossible algebra problems—started leading me back to the exact same three or four core intersections in my own personal map. It wasn’t about the car I was driving; it was about the fact that I was always trying to find a parking spot on the third floor of a dilapidated, ignored garage. That specific context mattered more than the object itself. The place was the message.
The “deep meaning” wasn’t some hidden psychological secret they teach you in a textbook. It was just the repeating patterns of my own hang-ups, laid bare by force of organization. The ‘interpretation city’ is just a way to organize your own mental crap so you can finally see where you always, habitually, turn right when your gut knows you should have gone left.
Why I Had to Build This Personal Map
I wouldn’t have gone through all this trouble if things hadn’t absolutely blown up in my face a couple of years back. I had a decent job, a nice routine, things were cruising, and then BAM. The whole department got shuttered without a single warning. Massive, messy layoffs. I was out the door faster than I could grab my half-full coffee mug. I literally walked out and felt like the map I had been using for my entire adult life just vanished into thin air. I had no direction, none of my old landmarks worked.
I was sitting there, collecting unemployment, feeling totally adrift and angry. My whole identity was tied to that old routine and office. I started having these crazy, terrifyingly vivid dreams—always lost, always running late, always trying to solve a puzzle with critical pieces missing. When I tried to use the standard interpretation stuff to figure out why I was suddenly seeing a specific type of burning statue, it was confusing and totally useless. It didn’t solve the real problem, which was the feeling of instability and the lack of structure that the layoff had triggered. The traditional, soft systems couldn’t handle the real-world shock I was dealing with.
So I had to build my own “city,” my own brutal grid, just to survive the mental fallout. I pulled myself out of that mess, not with therapy, but by forcing these chaotic nighttime narratives into a clear, cold structure. I didn’t get a new job until I mapped out exactly where I was mentally trapped in my sleep. It wasn’t about the symbolism they teach you; it was about the architecture of my own panic and fear of loss. That’s why I can tell you this whole ‘dream city’ thing is real, because I had to build the damn foundation myself, brick by boring brick.
