Why is it important to know the difference? It’s due to the fact that life is full of experiences, both while we’re awake and sleeping. Reading, watching a movie, reviewing a dream, fantasizing, imagining, listening to music and much more make up our experiences. Each experience is filled with symbols, signs or both.
Signs are most familiar to us. As an example, a stop sign comes to mind but our language also includes signs. Each word has a specific meaning. This specificity indicates the word is a sign. Now, let’s suppose you hear a language other than your natural language. Assuming you speak English, then the Spanish language includes words with many potential meanings, even an infinite number of meanings, since each word is unknown. This potential is closer to how we understand symbols. Of course, once you know the specific meaning of an unknown word, it changes from a symbol to a sign. This is the relationship between symbols and signs.
So, symbols have many meanings. Not just one. When we tell someone our dream from the previous night, we read a myth or fairytale, or watch a Star Wars movie the images and the characters are actually symbols, each represents many possible meanings. So, why don’t we know these images are symbols?
Just like a word in your natural language is understood due to its one specific meaning, the images and characters in myths and dreams have also been assigned one specific meaning by culture or family. In this way, these symbols become signs. This specific assignment can help people to understand each other and experience similar realities; however, the wonderous possibilities of meaning belonging to symbols are lost. The vastness of symbolic meaning is restricted to a singular, specific meaning – a sign.
Let’s look at an example. The myth of Icarus is fairly well-known. Icarus was given wings constructed by his father. Unfortunately, Icarus then flies too high toward the sun. The heat of the sun melts the wax holding the wings together and Icarus plumets to his death. If we understand this myth using just signs, it is nonsense, considered just a fanciful, meaningless myth. Understanding the myth symbolically, however, introduces many different rich meanings, such as when a person’s ego (identity) becomes inflated (egotistical) a crash (illness, depression, or accident) will likely follow.
Of course, we need both signs and symbols in our lives. Most often, however, we don’t consider the symbolic side of life. If we did, life would be much more valuable and fulfilling.
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