image courtesy of turbosquid.com
So often in life we fight against our deepest inclinations.
There is comfort in the familiar, even if what is known is unpleasant. As
Shakespeare’s Hamlet so poignantly put it, we would “rather bear those ills we
have than fly to others that we know not of.”
In instances where we are trying to second guess life from
the level of our minds, it is certainly possible to go from one set of problems
to a worse set. Therein lies the reluctance to move away from what we recognize:
“Leave me alone! What I have may not be great, but at least I know what to
expect.”
By contrast, when our dreams tell us to shift out of our
current mode of living and into something else, the advice is almost always
worth paying attention to. Dreams have only one goal, and that is to help us.
Even our scary dreams, or our unpleasant, repetitive dreams are being obnoxious
purely because they want us to remember them. If they could get our attention by
being sweet and nice, they would. But that technique almost always fails. Even
unlikeable dreams are often trying to get us to shift out of a self-subverting
pattern and into a healthy one.
At a recent dream conference, a middle-aged man came to me
wanting help with a series of nearly-identical, repetitive dreams that neither he
nor his wife could figure out. The dreams were unpleasant and vaguely ominous.
A dream about
falling off a bridge
I feel as if I’m on
another planet, the kind of place where you might expect to encounter an alien
species. The landscape is barren—like our moon. It’s rocky and sandy and
craggy. But right in the middle of it is a kind of pond or lake, full of water.
Although I’m not officially with anyone else, there are people around. I’m at
one end of a bridge that goes over the lake to the other side. The bridge has
no railing. The people on my side of the bridge are trying to get to the other
side, because there is a crowd over there. I want to go, too. We all start to cross
the bridge, but about every other person falls into the lake and is eaten by a
giant, dark-brown turtle that is swimming around in the water. As I look down,
I see a bunch of skeletons lying on the bottom of the lake. They have obviously
been eaten by the turtle. I also get the feeling that their ordeal was a kind
of cleansing—a purification. That’s when I wake up.
Comments
Isn’t that odd? This is largely a dream that seems
forbidding and vaguely threatening. There is a barren, alien landscape, a
dangerous bridge, a man-eating turtle and skeletons. Yet, the dream ends on a
peculiar note: In the dream, the dreamer feels that the consumption of human flesh is a
purification.
I find dreams endlessly fascinating, and on Wednesday, we’ll
begin the process of isolating the symbols and then asking the dreamer to help
us learn what metaphoric associations he makes. Will this be a dream of
admonition or praise, or something else? We’ll have to find out.
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