It is very tempting to feel accomplished and fulfilled when the me-in-the-dream, the dream ego, does something heroic and saves the dreamtime day.  The dream ego is the aspect in our psyche that is most identified with our waking self, with our waking ego, personality, and assumed personal identity.  And it is for this very reason that we must be suspicious of the me-in-the-dream.

There is a reason the me-in-the-dream is also known as the dream ego.  There are remnants of the waking ego in our dreams, as the aspect in the dream we most identify with, which appears as the embodied me in the dream.  The waking ego has developed strategies to defend itself against whatever feels threatening, both in waking life and in dreamtime.  The waking ego has a tendency to defend itself against what is unknown, unfamiliar, unconscious; it defends itself against the unconscious–where what we don’t already know and what can really help us grow, evolve, and transform resides.

How the dream ego surely serves us is in pointing to those attitudes and behaviors our waking ego has adopted to defend itself against overwhelming truths that put our identity into question, that make us feel out of control, that reveal our choices may not hold the absolute power we want to believe they hold.

Where ego is, persona quickly follows. The persona is the shining image of ourselves that the ego identifies with, the idealized aspects of personality that ego is comfortable displaying to the world.  One of the main aspects that ego defends against is the shadow. The shadow includes aspects of personality that ego is unbearably uncomfortable with, aspects of self that feel threatening in some way, aspects that end up deeply repressed in the unconscious.  The shadow can be dark or bright; we repress into the unconscious the aspects others made us believe are shameful about ourselves, and the outstanding and extraordinary aspects of ourselves that made others feel uncomfortable or inferior in comparison.

The dream ego, as the waking ego, tends to want to control and to solve the dilemmas present in any dream situation.  It wants to continue to repress our dark and bright shadows; it wants to feature our shiny persona.  The dream ego also can come to grand conclusions about what is happening, and make definitive decisions on how to go about the issue.  These are, more often than not, mere distractions from the situation and the crux of the issue the unconscious is bringing to our attention in our dreams.

What the ego knows and fears is that everything in the unconscious has great power and influence in our waking life.  What the ego knows is that the unconscious requires that we let go of what is familiar.  What the ego fears is letting go of what it already knows, regardless of how heavy, hurtful, damaging, unhealthy it is.  What the ego doesn’t realize, whether in dreamtime or awake, is that the unconscious holds everything we need to become more healthy and whole.

And so, rather than admiring the me-in-the-dream for its grand gestures, let us inspect its attitudes and behaviors closely.  While the dream ego is trying to distract us from what our dreammaker, our transpersonal Self, is blatantly conveying with any given dream, the dream ego shamelessly reveals to us what is getting in our way, and how we are getting in our own way.  Let us lovingly observe the me-in-the-dream, as she or he is constantly revealing to us exactly what we need to pay attention to and work on in order to integrate the growth that is already occurring in our unconscious.