Nosy Neighbor: Concluding Post

My waking dream about a nosy neighbor revealed a set of metaphoric meanings that reads quite clearly.

My restated waking dream

The place I live inside of myself is aging and is starting to show real signs of wear and tear. I am doing repair inside of me to fix the years of weather damage. This can get out of hand with so many parts of me working at once. There are parts of me protecting myself from “stormy weather.” Other parts of me are keeping me safe. Still other aspects of myself are making sure that the “water” flows smoothly. Then there is another part of me that lives right next to all of this. This part of me comes along and obstructs the flow of my own personal workers’ movements. This part of me is obsessed with a project that can wait; it is not time sensitive. It has to do with cleaning out rotting organic material that can get in the way. It’s also worried about a minor issue with a pest that has been stirred up by the rest of the work. I am infuriated with this interference and my anger won’t go away.

My own assessment

As I pondered the restated dream, its message and the issue in my life that it refers to were both obvious to me. I am approaching the age of retirement, and there are a number of changes going on. I am putting less emphasis on my “day job” and pursuing other interests—like dreams—with greater purpose. As with any transition, there are innumerable questions about what my future will look like. And I find that I have a tendency to try and micromanage issues that I have no control over. The amount of energy I expend trying to second guess my future is absurd. It’s no wonder that my dilemma is expressing itself as a dream, telling me that I am actually getting in the way of more important issues; I need to back off.

The bigger picture

Pondering my waking dream—an experience I had while I was going about the business of my daily life—leads to a question that I am frequently asked: Was it a coincidence that my daytime experience expressed symbolically an issue I am dealing with in my personal life?

There was a time when I would have thought so. But years of working with waking dreams have caused me to change my mind. I have seen waking dreams address issues in the dreamers’ lives so consistently and accurately so often, that I am now convinced that these dreams are a universal form of communication. Although most of us don’t pay any attention, waking dreams go on constantly in our lives.

So which is the reality: the outer experience of a neighbor being obnoxious, or the metaphoric message to me as the dreamer? They are both real, and the more I observe this phenomenon, the more I pay attention to the metaphor!

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