(1) If the accident in the dream involves only you - if, for example, it is a repeat of some accident diat actually happened to you - then ask yourself: am I accident prone? If you are, the dream may be expressing your worries about this accident proneness. It may also be asking you to do something about it.
Accidents are often less accidental than we think.
If there were no unconscious dimension to the human psyche, then we would be justified in speaking of ‘pure accidents’ - unless we subscribe to the notion of some implacable God or fate that causes them. But if we accept the existence of unconscious drives, unconscious desires and motivations, then what otherwise we might properly call accidents may be seen as misfortunes we have brought upon ourselves. We may, at an unconscious level, be playing the martyr or punishing ourselves for imagined guilt. Docs any of this apply to you? If so, try to discover - ask your unconscious to reveal - the cause of your neurotic selfpunishment. The cause will almost certainly turn out to be not so much a fact as a fantasy, and any factual element in it will almost certainly be quite innocuous and innocent. If, for instance, you concluded that the cause of your guilt-feelings and consequent masochism was connected with your father’s death, was it really you who killed him? Or if you think the cause is a childhood sexual desire for your mother or father, isn’t that a natural part of human development, and therefore blameless?
(2) If the dream strikes you powerfully as a premonition, act accordingly. Avoid whatever action might expose you to an accident of the kind depicted in the dream.
(3) If the accident happens to someone else in your dream, you have to decide who that person is or, alternatively, what part of yourself is represented by that person.
If the victim is identifiable as someone in real life, then, no matter how close the person is to you and no matter how much you love that person, you should consider the possibility that the dream is expressing an unconscious hostile wish or resentment towards that person. Even if the dream makes you anxious for the safety or well-being of the person, it may be that the anxiety is a cloak for repressed antagonism towards him or her. Feelings and desires arc repressed because they are felt to be unacceptable. But, however disgusting or morally reprehensible those feelings or desires may appear to you, it is better to face up to them in the clear light of consciousness than to leave them to brood and breed in the dark cellars of the unconscious. What is repressed does not cease to exist (what is out of sight is not out of mind!); nor does it cease to function negatively and destructively.
Siblings, as well as parents and spouse, are likely objects of jealousy and even of uncharitable death-wishes. For siblings, see also Brother / Sister; for parents, see also Father, Mother.
(4) Dream accidents of a rather different kind may be mere reviewings of actual happenings: forgetting your spouse’s / parent’s / sibling’s birthday, or failing to do in a certain situation what you normally do in that situation (e.g. complimenting a person on his or her looks or performance). What may appear to be accidental may, in fact, be the effect of an unconscious cause (see (1) above), and the dream’s repetition of the ‘absentmindedness’ or ‘inexplicable lapse of memory* may, in fact, be a prompting from your unconscious to get some inner conflict sorted out.
On the other hand, such dreams may be pure anxiety dreams, representing your fear of making such a slip. Remember, though, that anxiety can cloak unconscious anger, and it is anxiety that causes repression. (Freud began by saying that repression causes anxiety; but he later reversed that formula.) See also Anxiety.