Strange Use Of A Food Processor: Post #2

 photo courtesy of bestadvisor.com

A woman had a dream in which she was grinding up non-food items in her food processor. The processor itself was gigantic, and she was grinding up chairs and stuffed toys in it.

We’ve already gone through the first phase of the dream interpretation process: I asked her to relate her dream, and while she talked, I wrote down the most important words. Those were the dream’s important symbols. Once I had them in a list, I then asked her to comment on each one. I wasn’t looking for a strict definition. Rather, I was hoping for a broader understanding of the word—more of a metaphoric meaning than a literal one. In each case, I simply asked her to “Tell me about it.”

Tell me about…
* Preparing:  Getting ready for something, and doing so with deliberateness.
* Thanksgiving:  It’s a really special time. It’s the only non-religious holiday and family gathering time. So you don’t get all the complications of belief systems and points of view, and also the sense of “I belong and you don’t.”
* Standing:  The firmest posture, ready for action.
* Kitchen:  It’s where I prepare my food, for sustenance. I also think of it as the heart of my home. There’s a lot of femininity there, a lot of soft, caring, nurturing.
* Counter:  It’s a workspace that is at a really convenient height so you don’t have to be in an uncomfortable posture.
* Cuisinart:  You use it to chop, blend and grind up food. It saves a lot of time and a lot of wear and tear on your body.
* Huge:  It was exaggeratedly large, and a bit surreal. Normally, you couldn’t work with anything that big. But I clearly had no concerns.
* Turned it on:  I began to operate it.
* Grind up and process:  Basically, what you are doing is taking food that is large and unwieldy and you are reducing it to more manageable sizes.
* Food:  It’s what you consume in order to survive and grow and stay healthy. It’s how you prosper physically.
* Weird choices:  They were items that you would normally be unable to consume.
* Bathtub toy:  It’s a plaything for a small child.
* Rubber duck:  It floats and looks cute and can inspire a child to use its imagination in playing.
* Ground that up:  Essentially, I destroyed it.
* Stuffed rabbit:  This is another toy. And it is certainly not intended to be used as food.
* Obliterated:  It was mauled beyond recognition.
* Stuffing flying around:  The innards were being flung this way and that, and were being torn apart.
* Dining room chair:  A place to sit and rest, but also a place to consume food in a relaxed manner. There’s a social element, too. It offers a place of community and communion.

Initial observations
The next step will be to reassemble the dream, replacing the original symbols with her descriptions of them. But even before we take that step, you can begin to sense where the dream is going by simply reading her comments above—the sections that are not in bold. There are a couple of consistent themes that are beginning to come to the fore.

On Friday, we’ll reassemble the dream in its metaphoric form.