INTERPRETATION
This dream is about your resistance to some of the changes you are experiencing, and the fears behind this resistance. Once you understand those fears – with the help of this interpretation and the dream alchemy practice – you will be able to make positive choices and flow with these.
At the beginning of the dream you are getting some jewellery altered for a friend. If it was the type of jewellery that warranted altering, it must have been valuable jewellery. It represents your past values that you are now altering. You say in your notes that you are a first year university student encountering homeless people for the first time, so it’s not surprising that your values are being challenged and altered.
What is the personality of the friend you were altering the jewellery for? She represents the part of your personality that is altering values. Your younger brother probably represents the old family values.
The opening of a dream usually states the theme to be addressed, so this is it: altering your values. The rest of the dream looks at your conflicts and progress with this.
Next you discover that a shopping area has been shut down and suggest, instead, that you show your brother where you work in the city. This means some of your choices (represented by shops – places you choose what to buy) are now shut down as a result of the recent changes in your values.
What does the actor Ted Danson mean to you? What do you most associate him with? Which three words would you choose to describe his personality? In the dream, Ted stops you from leaving The Australian newspaper behind. You described this as being “still stuck” with this paper to carry. This is your first resistance, in the dream, to flowing with the new changes you are experiencing. Ted represents a part of you that is resisting the changes, that is ‘still stuck’ with something you ‘can’t leave behind’. Let’s look at this some more.
You mention in your notes that you were reading The Australian when you saw a homeless person for the first time, and you had also read an article about homeless people in this paper. Is this new change in your life – this new experience of homeless people – something you want to ‘leave behind’, but can’t? Is it something that’s ‘still stuck’ with you? Are you ‘stuck’ with carrying this ‘issue’ of homeless people and how you really felt about it when confronted by your first one?
In your notes you mention that the homeless person you saw smelt. Did this bring the reality of homelessness to you? Did you choose journalism as a career to cover subjects such as homelessness and then find the reality more confronting than you had anticipated? Or had you not considered homelessness at all until recently? Either way, the subject is one that has ‘stuck’ with you and is causing you some level of resistance to flowing with your new experiences. How has this recent experience affected your old values? Do you feel you’re altering your values in a positive way or are you altering your values in response to fear of such experiences as the reality of homelessness?
Next in the dream you confront the homeless issue more closely, stepping through them. Bins were too full, so you were still ‘stuck’, unable to dispose of this matter, until eventually you do, and that’s the point where you reach your place of work in the dream.
Now you find there’s a crisis at work in the dream. Well, of course there is! This represents the crisis you find yourself in about how to respond to your experiences and how these are affecting your values. You’re feeling ‘blocked’ in your current life, especially about the way you earn your money (represented by your city workplace in the dream).
The dead body is naked, exposed. This crisis has exposed something you have ‘killed off’ in your life. Your acquaintance would ‘rather not talk about it’ and this is followed by hearing a ‘loudspeaker’. These are opposites: not talking and loud speaking. When you identify a pair of opposites in a dream, they define an issue that is causing you conflict. Your conflict is over how much to speak out – part of you would rather not talk about something, and part of you wants to alert everyone loud and clear. (Everyone in a dream represents an aspect of yourself.) In the dream you had also chosen not to talk about something because you said you hadn’t written the news article.
Is this a value you have ‘killed off’ and you’re reluctant to talk about, even though it is obviously now exposed? Are you fearful that you’ll lose more of your old values? Journalism is all about talking and exposing in a very loudspeaker way. You can’t do journalism if you’d rather not talk about it! So on one hand this is about looking at your values as a journalist – will you write to expose issues such as homelessness, or to expose people’s private lives, or to avoid exposure of either kind by writing safe articles where you don’t really have to talk about anything confronting? These are huge questions to ask yourself at this stage in your career, and your answers depend on the values you set for yourself.
You woke from this dream terrified of being attacked and contaminated and you discovered that the girl who ‘would rather not talk’ had disappeared – presumably attacked and contaminated. As a journalist, not talking is not really an option, is it? What is it you would rather not talk about, and how can you overcome this?
This dream is likely not only to be about your professional life, but also about your personal life. In your personal life, what is it you would rather not talk about, yet what is it you would like to loud-speak about to guard against further attack? How have your values been altered, and how much ‘say’ have you had in this process?
In your dream you checked your bowels. A major theme in your dream was being shut down (shopping area), blocked (work place), stuck with (newspaper), left behind (paper), too full (bins overflowing with rubbish), not letting go (boyfriend’s hand) – all of which can also be applied to being constipated. Your dream suggests you were emotionally constipated, fearful of flowing with the changes you were experiencing, and as the physical body often follows the emotional dis-ease, it’s possible you were physically constipated too.
Resisting the flow, emotionally and perhaps physically, fearful of the changes you were experiencing, your values conflicted, altering according to your experiences - it’s time to set your values in alignment with your best intentions, not in alignment with your fears. It’s time to stop holding back for fear of attack, and instead flow in alignment with your highest values.
DREAM ALCHEMY PRACTICE
Your dream opened with getting some jewellery altered, and this was interpreted as altering your values. In the light of this interpretation, design a piece of jewellery to represent the new values you would like to take forward with you. Simply designing it on paper and putting your design somewhere you’ll see it every day will be enough to work the magic – to hold you to your highest values. You might like to take this a step further and have a jeweller make the piece for you so you can wear it as a precious daily reminder.
Jane Teresa Anderson
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