INTERPRETATION
Many dreams can be broken down into four parts, and Star’s dream is a perfect example of this.
Part 1, the beginning of the dream, states the situation. The situation here is that Star was climbing a treacherously steep mountain. You then relate this to your waking life situation. Star’s waking life situation felt like an uphill climb, battle and struggle.
Part 2, which follows the scene setting of part 1, states a question or problem. The question here is, ‘How am I ever going to reach the top?’ You then relate this to your waking life. Star’s waking life question was ‘How am I ever going to get on top of everything – achieve my goal?’
Part 3 is generally the longest part of a dream, during which a number of possible solutions to the question are explored. Often the solutions seem unworkable, but sometimes excellent solutions are found. Star’s dream came up with a solution: change the path into an easier one. Sometimes the dream reviews solutions you’ve tried over and over again in your waking life without success, and you may recognise these when you contemplate Part 3 of your dream. Part 3 is where you’ll identify many of your habitual patterns, behaviours and attitudes. It’s where you can learn most about yourself and the way your unconscious mind works. Then again, as in Star’s dream, Part 4 sometimes comes up with workable, new solutions. These mark our great turning points and epiphanies if we are awake to translating the dream solution into a meaningful waking life solution. In Star’s case this was easy – so easy that she ‘got’ the epiphany while she was still dreaming: She realised she had the power within her to change the way she thought about and saw her situation, and that simply making this change would remove the sense of struggle.
Part 4, for dreams that get as far as an ending rather than petering out in an endless number of unworkable solutions, is the resolution, the final, agreed, best solution to the question. Dream resolutions are not always brilliant (or worth following), but sometimes they shine. This one shines. The best answer, the final resolution, is to recognise that how difficult or easy a task seems is a matter of perspective.
Dreams never provide direct guidance. They often come up with one or more possible solutions to a problem situation as they do their work of processing the last two day’s of your experiences, trying to make sense of it all. The art of dream interpretation is to identify the dreamer’s habitual patterns and then see which of the dream solutions are just extensions of these patterns (old thinking, same old unworkable solutions), and which are breakthroughs with realistically applicable solutions.
Star saw and felt the magic of her dream resolution, and, as she reported, was able to wake up and make a change. Inspired by her dream, she changed her perspective, changed the way she looked at her life. She realised that if you think of life as a struggle, you experience it as a struggle, whereas if you think of life as easy, you experience greater ease because you discover simpler ways of ‘doing’ and responding to life. Rather than stressing out and doing things the hard way, for example, you relax and take a simpler approach, or ask for help.
What if Star felt the power, in her dream, of changing perspective, but didn’t know how to translate this in her waking life? What if she didn’t know how to change her view of life as a struggle into a view of life as a flat path? This is where dream alchemy is powerful. And I have given this as the suggested dream alchemy practice following this interpretation. Simply by doing the practice, Star would find herself automatically seeing the easy path approaches and apply them.
Taking a deeper look into Star’s dream, Star might ask herself why she ‘knew’ there was an abyss below. Was this abyss symbolic of depression that she had experienced before? Was it an emotional or material low that she had encountered before? Was it the low that followed her highs? Or was there no abyss, apart from in her imagination – did she fear falling into despair and did this fear work against her hope, making life a struggle against falling into despair rather than the easier path of trusting a positive outcome?
Star might ask herself why there was no way she was going to give up trying. She might ask herself what happened, in her life, last time she gave up trying to achieve a goal. Who, in her life, taught her never to ‘give up’, and is this always a wise approach to life? Is it, in fact, okay to ‘give up’ on some things? Who taught Star that life is a struggle?
Star said, in the dream, that she would sooner die than stop trying. Where does she see the parallel to this in her waking life? What does she feel she would lose by stopping trying, and why does she fear this loss so deeply that she would keep on trying?
Star’s initial response to the dream advice was ‘Are you kidding? After all I’ve been through I’m not going to give up now’. So, again, here’s the theme of not giving up. Star isn’t looking at achieving the goal – standing on top of the mountain – she’s looking at not giving up. Her dream is about giving up, not giving up, and all her feelings and beliefs around this. Her dream is about the virtues of not giving up, so it’s no wonder she has believed in struggle all these years. If she had got to the top of the mountain she would have been deprived of ‘not giving up’. She needed the struggle because it was only in struggling that she was ‘not giving up’.
So isn’t it wonderful that Star’s dreaming mind made this breakthrough, and released the need for struggle? And isn’t it wonderful that Star’s waking life wisdom enabled her to see all of this, to let go of her old way of thinking (give it up), and shift her perspective. Sometimes we need to let go, or give up, to know that we will not fall into an abyss –in fact, when we do this, the path to the top suddenly becomes clear and easy.
DREAM ALCHEMY PRACTICE
Visualisation:
Visualise the part of the dream where you said, “I can change it” and the flat, easy path appeared. In the visualisation, summon up the feeling of the flat path materialising beneath your feet as you hear the words inside your head and feel the power of those words. Feel ‘ease’ in your visualisation, in place of struggle. To add power, visualise that flat path leading you directly to the goal you have been struggling to achieve all this time. Feel yourself standing there, arrived at that goal. As well as doing your visualisation the recommended number of times, any time you encounter the old feeling of struggle or not giving up, instantly do the visualisation.
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 ensures 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 and intensifying the positive ending of your dream you are using vision and feeling to consolidate the positive resolution of your dream so that this flows on into your waking life.
Jane Teresa Anderson
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