Dreaming about strangers
Dreaming about strangers in the home: what metaphor is hidden in this kind of dreams?
Dreams about intruders involve dreams in which a stranger, a presence perceived as dangerous, sneaks into our home. We dream that someone wants to break into our home and we try to keep him out in every way.
Variants of dreaming about strangers in your home relate to uncontrollable and natural forces that turn your house upside down: wind, fire, animals, or even earthquakes.
Dreaming about strangers and the Tower of the Tarot
In the Tarot there is an Arcanum that accurately describe dreaming about strangers in your house: the Arcanum XVI, the “Maison Dieu”, commonly known as “The Tower”
To understand how to approach the interpretation of the intrusion dream it is interesting to make a short premise about the specific symbolism of this Tarot.
Jacob’s ladder dream and the Tower of the Tarot
Perhaps not everyone knows that the Arcanum XVI of the Tarot is related to the Book of Genesis of the Bible and is in particular linked to one of the oldest dreams in history: the biblical “dream of Jacob”.
I report here Jacob’s ladder dream to understand how the Tarot are imbued with an archetypal language that makes them a formidable tool for interpreting dreams:
“And Jacob went out from Beer-sheba, and went toward Haran. He lighted upon the place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took one of the stones of the place, and put it under his head, and lay down in that place to sleep.
(…) he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. Behold, the LORD stood beside him, and said: ‘I am the LORD, the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac.
(…) And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said: ‘Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.’ And he was afraid, and said: ‘How full of awe is this place! this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”
Meaning of Jacob’s ladder dream
As you may have noticed, the “House of God” (“Bethel”) is exactly the name of our Tarot!
All this digression leads us to frame the underlying psychological theme for dreaming strangers in the home. Let’s observe the symbolic language of our Tarot in Jungian terms: from a sun shaped disk (symbol of the divinity, that is of the psychic totality that Jung called the “Self”) a force is released that crumbles our house.
The house in dreams is a representation of our “Persona”, our mask, the envelope that we inhabit and with which we tend to identify ourselves.
A powerful message comes from above (our inner “God”) changing forever our destiny.
Explanation of dreaming of strangers in the home
In these terms, Arcanum XVI illustrates the upheaval that occurs in us when a higher force, the Self, manifests itself within the dream. It is the divine that is in us, the Self perceived as an autonomous energy that bursts into our everyday life and that asks to be obeyed.
It is a shocking energy that forces us to give up the old idea we have of ourselves to embrace our personal destiny or “inner God”. The vision of the divine, like an earthquake, crumbles the “tower” that we have built, exposing our essence. It is an event that, as Jacob himself exclaims, “terribilis est”
In Jacob’s dream also appears the sacred symbol of the ladder, a universal symbol of spiritual research and evolution that links the low to the high (“As above, so below” as in the hermetic saying).
Which makes this Arcanum also suitable for interpreting falling dreams. (I invite you to read here about falling dreams).
