INTERPRETATION
To discover the theme a dream is addressing, look at how it begins, remembering that dreams use word play. Since your dream begins with a ‘routine examination’, it is addressing the need to ‘examine’ a routine in your life.
What is a routine? It’s a series of steps that are always the same, predictable, safe, with no hidden surprises. (Even in dentistry, the worst outcome – perhaps a root canal or an extraction – is still one of several predictable results.)
How do you feel about routine? Is your life fairly routine? Do routines make you feel safe? Or do routines bore you? Would you prefer a change? Would you prefer an element of surprise? Would you prefer to embrace a little risk in place of predictable safety?
And what about the routines we all follow blindly each day? These are routines set in stone, often since childhood. They’re the automatic (or unconscious) steps we take, always following the same pattern, always with the same outcome. Sometimes they’re routines we’ve learned from our parents, and followed unquestioningly. Sometimes they’re routines we employed to keep us safe as children, and that we still follow even to our detriment as adults. The things that kept us feeling safe as children may be stifling us as adults – suffocating us, preventing us from growing.
Stifling, suffocating: the result of a punctured lung.
When you’re interpreting a dream, look for opposites. If a routine is predictable, safe with no hidden surprises, what is the opposite of this? Unpredictable, dangerous with hidden surprises – in other words, a sudden life and death emergency?
Your dream is about a routine that turns into an emergency. It’s about a routine that suddenly, instead of delivering a safe, predictable result, exposes a deep, underlying danger of suffocation. It’s about a ‘mouth’ routine that suddenly exposes a deep danger of suffocation.
What is a ‘mouth’ routine? It’s what you say, words you choose, how you communicate. What do you say, what words do you choose, how do you communicate when you feel suffocated in relation to the person you’re talking with?
Are you fearful of expressing your feelings in case you end up feeling more suffocated (restricted)? Remember, a dream always refers to the 24-48 hours prior to the dream, so look back and ask yourself if this fear came up for you at that time.
Where, in your life, do you feel restricted, limited, as if the very oxygen you need is being drained from your being?
Dreams use word play. Did you feel ‘punctured’ emotionally by someone in the day or two prior to this dream? Did someone’s words or actions ‘take your breath away’? Or did you feel that you said something (that words came from your mouth) that left you feeling ‘punctured’, as if you’d cut off your own oxygen supply?
As your dream suggests, this is a matter requiring urgent action and healing – an urgent healing operation. You need to take an action to stop yourself from feeling suffocated. You need to take an action to restore your full breathing space.
It’s time to examine one of your communication routines and to see the deep, underlying feeling of suffocation that causes you to communicate in this way. It’s time to address this at its root cause – way deeper than any dental root canal! It’s a life and death situation, so it’s time to face some pain – the original painful emotional event that left you feeling ‘punctured’. Then lay that painful past to rest (death of the old), let that old ‘mouth routine’ go, and know that, in your new life, you have as much oxygen and breathing space as you need.
DREAM ALCHEMY PRACTICE
Sit quietly and tune into your breathing. Start by expanding your abdomen as you begin to fill your lungs, then expand your lower ribs, then your middle ribs (front and back), then your upper chest and upper back. Lastly, feel your shoulders rise. With practice, feel the air travelling up your nose and into your lungs as you do this. Then, when your lungs are totally expanded, but without holding your breath, release slowly, in reverse, at the same time feeling the air travel down your nose as you breathe out. (Or go to a yoga or meditation class that teaches meditation focussing on the breath.) Strengthening your lungs and breathing fully in this way is like having the operation recommended in your dream. Mentally and emotionally, you will never feel suffocated again.
Jane Teresa Anderson
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