By Night One Way, By Day Another: What Your Recurring Dreams Are Actually Telling You

"Donkey!"

Okay I'm done. 10+ house points if you got that reference. 20+ if you said it in the voice.

But let's talk about it.

In Shrek, Fiona (the female protagonist) has a curse placed upon her. “By night one day, by day another. This shall be the norm. Until you find true love's first kiss. Then take love's true form.” We see her transform by day into a princess and, by night, into an ogre. And, throughout the whole movie, she's trying to get back to the "right" form before anyone notices.

Sound familiar?

We're going to talk about the duality of women. How the parts of ourselves we've been taught to hide — the parts people find too loud, too much, too raw — don't just disappear. They show up somewhere. In our moods. In our relationships. In our dreams. And what can happen when we finally stop running from them; when we find people who love us as we are.

Her ogre form is the part of you people told you was too much.

Not evil. Not broken. Just inconvenient. Too emotional. Too opinionated. Too needy. Too real. The ogre isn't the villain of the story. She's just the version of Fiona that exists when no one is watching. The version that exists outside of formality and obligation.

Carl Jung had a name for this: the Shadow. It's the part of the psyche that holds everything we've been taught to reject about ourselves.  The emotions, desires, impulses, and traits we've buried because they weren't acceptable to the people around us. Jung believed the Shadow doesn't go away just because we stop looking at it. It goes underground. And from the underground (from the darkness of the shadows), it runs the show in ways we don't even notice.

Fiona's ogre form is her Shadow made flesh. Literally, every night, the part of her she was most ashamed of takes over her body. She couldn't outrun it. She couldn't pray it away. It came back every single night.

Because that's what the Shadow does. It leaks into the crevices and spaces that are left unfulfilled by the narratives that others have projected.

Her princess form was built on expectation, not identity.

Here's the thing about Fiona that doesn't get talked about enough — sis’ was not a damsel. She could fight. She had skills, instincts, and a whole personality that had nothing to do with waiting in a tower. But she waited anyway. Because that was the story she'd been handed. Wait for rescue. ‘Twas the norm, her destiny; waiting for a prince. For true love’s kiss. Happily ever after after acceptance and acknowledgement.

Jung called this kind of inherited role the Persona, or the mask we wear to function in the world. The Persona isn't fake exactly; it's just crafted for the audience. It's the version of you that gets the job, keeps the peace, earns the love, avoids the conflict. The problem is when we start believing the mask is who we actually are.

Fiona's princess form was a Persona. The polished, obedient, and patient version of a bad ass. Performed. And underneath it, every single night, was someone completely different trying to get out and be acknowledged.

And her "destiny"? It wasn't even really hers. It was a punishment placed on her parents that she inherited. She didn't choose the narrative, the narrative chose her; it was thrust upon her. Then she internalized it, sat in that tower, and rehearsed a life that was never about who she actually was.

How many of us are doing the same thing? Performing a version of ourselves that was scripted before we could even read?

This is a fictional story that still parallels the lives of women who were cursed by other people's narratives about who they should be.

Who were handed a "destiny" that was really just someone else's expectation wearing a tiara. Women who split themselves in two: the acceptable version for the daylight, and the full version that only comes out when no one's watching. Who've been waiting, sometimes for decades, for the rescue that was supposed to make it all make sense.

And here's where dreams come in.

Jung believed that the psyche communicates through symbols. When we can't face something consciously — when it's too painful, too shameful, too contradictory to who we think we're supposed to be — the unconscious finds another way. It builds a story. It creates a character. It casts us in a dream where we're running from something, or being chased, or showing up to a place we don't recognize but somehow feel we've always known.

Dreams aren't random. They're dispatched from the parts of yourself you haven't made room for yet.

The Shadow you've been suppressing doesn't send an email or an outright sign in the physical. It sends a nightmare. Or a recurring dream about a version of you that looks different, acts different, wants things you'd never admit to wanting out loud. It creates symbols that resemble a locked room, an old house, or a stranger who somehow feels like you; because the psyche knows you won't let the truth walk through the front door, so it sneaks in through the side door.

This is what was happening to Fiona every single night. Her body was doing what her mind couldn't: releasing the part of herself that didn't fit the story. And as long as she fought it, as long as she was trying to be back by morning, she was at war with herself.

So what does integration actually look like?

Jung called it individuation — the ongoing process of becoming whole. Not perfect. Not healed in a linear, checkbox kind of way. Whole. The Shadow doesn't get destroyed in individuation; it gets met with kindness, empathy and understanding. You stop projecting it onto other people, and hiding from it in the open or in your dreams. You stop performing a Persona so rigid there's no room for the real you inside it. You start to recognize the parts of yourself you've been taught to despise as information rather than evidence of your wrongness.

For Fiona, integration looked like Shrek. It looked like someone who saw the ogre and didn't flinch. Who made her feel like the full version of herself was not only acceptable but worth choosing.

But here's the thing the movie kind of glosses over: she had to choose it too. She had to decide that the life she'd been promised — the Persona, the tower, the prince, the tiara — wasn't worth more than the life she actually had.

That's the work. And a lot of it happens first in the dark. In sleep. In the symbols your mind builds when you're too tired to keep the mask on.

Reflection prompts:

What part of yourself only comes out at night — in your dreams, in your thoughts, in the quiet moments when no one's watching?

What's the story you inherited that was never actually yours?

And what would it look like to stop waiting for someone else to tell you it's okay to be the full version of yourself?