It can be helpful to summarise a dream in one sentence, using the present tense, staring with “I feel” and including the word ‘something’. Then look at that sentence and ask yourself where it applies in your life.
For your dream, that sentence would probably be, “I feel frustrated and annoyed because something seems far more complicated, difficult and expensive than it should be.”
How much of this applies to a situation in your life, particularly during the 24-48 hours before your dream? Looking back over your life, how often have you felt like this? How far back does this feeling go? When did you first feel this, and what was the situation?
I’ll go into your interpretation in more depth, but it’s really helpful to apply this technique so you can establish the waking life situation your dream is addressing. And it’s extremely insightful if you can trace the feeling back as far as you can, because it’s your first experience of this kind of situation that creates the beliefs that set into concrete as you progress through life. One of the most powerful things you can do, with the help of dream interpretation, is unset that old concrete and rebuild a more suitable foundation – a belief that is more helpful to you as you progress through your life.
So, here you are, today, with a belief that something is more complicated, difficult and expensive than it should be. What this really means is that you know, deep down, that things can be simpler, more straightforward, but, for some reason, you cannot see this simpler path, or it seems to remain hidden from you. Why can’t you see the simpler way? Might you have hidden it from yourself because you fear it in some way? Let’s explore this.
Everyone in a dream represents something about the dreamer, so the guy at the counter represents some part of yourself that prefers to work things out the complicated way. You reported in your dream, “I knew there was a simpler way ...”, so we can be sure that this is true. There is a simpler way, and you do know what it is, but there is a stronger part of yourself (the guy) that keeps “pushing me away”. So a part of yourself keeps pushing away the knowledge of the simpler solution in favour of doing it the complicated way.
There’s something more to be learned about this part of yourself that keeps pushing the knowledge of the simpler way away. “He insisted on showing me how to work it out.” It was a case of needing to work it out, rather than just being a simple answer – yes, your other bags have been sent ahead, or no, you need to pick up three more bags from that place over there. Even you, the one who knew there was a simple way, “tried to work it out”. Tried? To try something is to never achieve it. Trying is what we do when we don’t want to succeed. (Instead of setting out to ‘try’, if you really intend to succeed you set out to ‘do’.)
So, as you said in the dream, “I knew there was a simpler way to do it” but instead of just doing it (how simple is that!) you set up only to ‘try’ to ‘work it out’. To work something out means you can’t do it until you have worked out how to do it. Working something out when there is no need (because you already know there is a simpler way) prolongs the process, slows things down, slows the journey, delays you from getting to the destination or goal.
No wonder you get frustrated and annoyed! There’s something you want to achieve (represented by the destination in the dream) but you’re slowing the whole trip, putting obstacles in your own way, making things more complicated and expensive (hotel room) than they need to be, trying to work things out instead of just taking the simple straightforward approach.
So, why are you doing this? Why do you fear achieving your goal/destination?
If you’re still not convinced, look back at your dream. You had to grab your luggage from the conveyor belt because “it was going very fast”. Right there, at the beginning of your dream, is the feeling that things are going too fast for you to ‘grab’ or take stock of what’s happening. Because things feel too fast, you work to slow them down.
But why would you feel that speed is a problem? If you have a goal and things seem to be happening very fast towards achieving that goal, wouldn’t you normally be very excited about this? Yes – unless you fear getting what you want, or fear what getting what you want may also entail.
It comes down to trust. If you feel something is going too fast, there’s a lack of trust in the process or the outcome – or both. This kind of fear prompts you to slow things down by complicating them.
Think back to the first time in your life that things seemed more complicated for you than they needed to be, and see how all this applied back then.
The next big key here is to look for the real oddity in the dream – the bit that seems incongruous with the story line. It’s the pregnancy. It seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the story and – in fact – you almost deny it in the dream, “I didn’t want to say anything to her about it.” Everyone in a dream repesents something about you, the dreamer, and here’s something you notice but decide not to talk about – to deny.
What we deny is a strong key to understanding what is difficult in our lives. Denial is an obstacle to progress.
You could see a very pregnant belly as being similar to a piece of luggage – something heavy you need to carry around. Your dream was all about luggage – how to account for it, how to work it out, how to make it more complicated than it needs to be, how to slow it down, how to hold it and you back from your chosen destination/goal.
But there’s one thing about a pregnancy that’s different from luggage at an airport. You can’t slow pregnancy down. You can’t work it out – nature has that covered, and you don’t need to work out or understand anything in order to produce the baby at the end. Nature does it for you – you don’t even need to turn up!
So the pregnancy in your dream is a perfect symbol for letting nature take its course, for letting life progress at the rate nature intends, to judge it as neither fast nor slow, but just right. This is about trusting nature, trusting what is simple, instead of denying it.
You are pregnant in a way. You are pregnant with possibility, about to create (give birth to) something new and wonderful. It’s the destination you’ve been heading towards, your goal – or maybe it’s something else, something you’ve learned along the way, far more wonderful than the original destination you had in mind. Whatever it is, it’s time to let it progress its natural course, to trust the process, to stop denying your creativity, to stop denying the simple way, to stop trying to work things out and, instead, to let things be.
If you look back to the first time you experienced this, you’ll see why the element of mistrust crept in. You’ll see why you’ve been trying to slow things down and avoid real progress. You’ll see why you’ve been making things unnecessarily hard for yourself, and what you were trying to avoid or who you were trying to impress by doing this.
Notice that some of your dream bags may have been sent on ahead to your destination, and it was this that was causing the main confusion. So, again, in the dream you are questioning the speed of delivery of your goal. Yet, how wonderful to have your bags sent ahead and have less to carry and organise?
Luggage also represents what beliefs, thoughts, experiences, feelings and memories we carry with us. They represent how much of our past we carry in our present or project ahead into our future. Your dream luggage was on a conveyor belt, in a back-to-front version of airport reality where our luggage only appears on the conveyor belt at the end of the journey. The conveyor belt may represent what is happening automatically in your life, what bits of your past are automatically being carried forward into your future, and what you’d like to remove (grab) from this process and reconsider. The insights you’ve gained about yourself through this interpretation will help you to clarify your intentions – and what ‘luggage’ you need to take with you to fulfil these.
Consult me confidentially about your dream.
