There was a train going along a high intricate bridge with water underneath. The train was going in loops and the sky was greyish but clear. I looked out the window often and was mesmerised by the bridge. I was always looking at where the train had come from.
Then I was in a big old house. I was a girl, aged about 21, warring with someone smaller than me. We were fighting with magic. We both stood at the doorway to a very dark room. There was something very powerful in the room, so powerful that we knew that we should not go in.
The smaller person started an incantation but I kept whispering secret words without the other knowing. I was changing her spell and she didn't know it. I was secretly smiling.
When it was complete a little shadow cat emerged from the room. The other person smiled then the cat suddenly grew to a huge shadow tiger and started pouncing around the house and roaring. It spoke to me in my mind and said “You don’t fully comprehend what it is that you have done”.
Next thing I am outside the house and it is like a child’s drawing, two-dimensional. All eight windows have fire coming out of them and still I can see the shadow animal pouncing and hear it roaring through the building. There were four floors to the house.
Next I sort of floated over to the house and raised my arms. I was wearing a pure white dress (was still a girl) with flowing sleeves. I looked a little like a fairy (Tinkerbell). I said “Enough of this” and waved my hands over the house and the flames went out and the sun started to shine. Before that it had been night.
In the story of Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, Peter and Tinkerbell listen to bedtime stories at Wendy Darling’s window, but Wendy’s dog, Nana, snaps at Peter Pan’s shadow and captures it as she chases them away. Later Peter Pan and Tinkerbell return and Wendy sews his shadow back on. In return they teach Wendy to fly. At one point Tinkerbell gets jealous and a fight ensues.
Just look at the overlaps with your dream! You are warring with someone smaller than you over a spell, just as Wendy and Tinkerbell were in conflict. The lost shadow appeared, first as a cat (little) and then as a tiger (big and powerful). By the end of the dream you are Tinkerbell.
Your dream features transformation from childhood to adulthood. In the dream you are 21, traditionally the age at which teenagers are given rite of passage to adulthood. You said the shadow cat “grew to” a huge shadow tiger, another reference to growing up.
The house turns out to be a like a child’s drawing, and, knowing this, you discover the power to magic it away.
You are a male dreaming you are a female, so you are dreaming about your Yin qualities, your inner world, your intuition, creativity, spirituality, sense of being, emotional heart and so on. Women are often portrayed as being feline, cat-like or tiger-like, in sexuality. There is a sense of emerging sexuality here. As a gay man your dream may be reflecting on difficulties you encountered emerging from childhood into adulthood around issues of your sexuality. Did you struggle to suppress it, or to keep it hidden in the shadows?
In your dream the “someone smaller than me” may have been yourself at a younger age, fighting to keep the shadow small, a friendly domestic (neutered?) cat. The 21 year old you is ready to change the spell, to let the full power of your sexual shadow come out into the light.
Your tiger shadow says, “You don’t fully comprehend what you have done”, suggesting you have yet to feel the true enormity of your own power, or perhaps come to terms with any backlash you may encounter as a result.
Once the tiger shadow is out, you begin to see things for what they were: childhood fears. There are eight windows. What happened for you when you were eight OR eight years ago? The fire suggests anger or perhaps passion. How does this fit in with eight years?
Your adult self found the magic to wave the anger away, to know when enough is enough, to welcome the sunshine of the new day.
At the start of your dream you were traversing a bridge. A bridge is a strong symbol of transition, carrying you from the past to the future. You were on a train, suggesting an element of ‘training’ or learning. The loops may reflect a more feminine pathway (as opposed to the more usual straight line approach of railway tracks) or may reflect a longer journey across the bridge, even a reluctance to arrive on the other side.
So it’s not surprising that you are mesmerised by the bridge yet “always looking back at where the train had come from”. This dream took you back to show you where you had come from, what might have held you back and to discover that lost power shadow and bring it into the open to complete your journey to adulthood. Adulthood can arrive at any stage. It’s a state of mind.
Consult me confidentially about your dream.
Visualisation:
Visualise yourself on the other side of the bridge, breathing in the sunshine of the new era ahead. Feel the energy of a fully-grown tiger – only the good stuff of course – leading you forward.
How often to do this:
Do this visualisation 20 times a day for a week, ten times a day for the second week and twice a day for the next month.
How does this work?
This practice will ensure that change occurs for you in the best possible way – a positive healing transformation. Your dream expressed your waking life situation using dream language – the language of your unconscious mind. By reliving the dream with changes, or by transforming one of the dream symbols (or by reliving and intensifying the dream in the case of a dream with a positive ending) you are using vision and feeling to reprogram your unconscious beliefs.
More details on Visualisation as a Dream Alchemy Practice in: “Dream Alchemy”by Jane Teresa Anderson, pages 329 – 330.
Jane Teresa Anderson
