Author

Subject: Angel, Lover, Friend or Phantom...who is it there?

Anna

14:45 06/12/1999 

I am in an herbal aromatherapy store in my college town, and the owner of the store, named Dawn, was hosting a large Christmas dinner.

A long table was stretched from the luncheon area to just a few feet shy of the door. There was a red tablecloth on the table, and there were GOBS and GOBS of food!

To my memory, there were approximately 20 people at the table and I knew NONE of them! So until the food was served and the meal blessed, I was feeling lonely, to say the least.

Yet I could not help noticing a young fellow approximately my age (around 21 or 22) just totally grinning at me! He was not very tall, but he head gorgeous blond hair that was cut in an old-fashioned page-boy style, and every now and then, the candlelight would catch a red highlight or two in his hair. His eyes were a deep Norwegian fjord blue and his smile was just as dazzling.

But there was no look of malice, harm or danger in this man's eyes. He just kept looking at me as though he were completely in love with me. He was neatly, but casually dressed in a beautiful forest green sweater, dark navy blue trousers and brown loafers. He had long elegant hands, and his gaze rested on no one and nothing else but me!

I later found out, via an after-dinner game, that this man's name was Adam. When the game was done (the game was some sort of "mixer"), I had this sudden urge to put my hand over his, so I did.

His name was the only thing he revealed to me, but he was not the one who told me his name. I know this because not once did I hear Adam speak, nor did the owner, Dawn, know the man.

When I laid my hand over Adam's, I could not help but cry because of this bolt of emotion rushing up my arm and filling my body so that it felt like my solar plexus was bursting with energy. I could only describe the emotion is Love...real Love. Adam slowly removed his hand from mine, and lifted my chin, brushing my tears away ever so tenderly.

Note:

Before bed I was feeling rather lonely and I was wishing for what seemed like the umpteen millionth time that I had a significant other.

The dream was strangely sane and sequential in its order of events, despite the fact that I had not taken my antidepressant medication. I was very tired upon going to sleep and taking my Zoloft would only make me more tired upon awaking.

Dream edited for easier reading - JT, 2005

2008

Jane Teresa's View

Jane Teresa Anderson

Overview Interpretation & Dream Alchemy Practice suggestion

INTERPRETATION

You mention your Zoloft medication, and vivid dreams are often quoted as a side-effect of Zoloft, both while taking the drug and on the first nights following withdrawal. However, a dream is a dream, and all dreams are meaningful reflections of whatever your mind needs to process from the last 24-48 hours.

Dreams while on medication may embrace your experiences of taking the drug, as well as your experiences of the depression the drug is designed to alleviate. Dreams while withdrawing may embrace the withdrawal itself as well as dealing with non-medicated depression if this is an ongoing issue.

People readily dismiss vivid dreams that occur while taking medication (or while they are withdrawing), and I congratulate you on simply mentioning the medication as an aside and looking for an interpretation of your dream. All dreams are meaningful and worthy of interpretation. Certain drugs may or may not enhance dream recall, and dreams may or may not reflect the many changes - physiological, mental and emotional - that accompany medication as well as the causes and symptoms of the dis-ease requiring medication.

Whether or not you take a drug to help combat depression, interpreting your dreams may help you to identify deeper causes of your depression or additional remedies.

So let’s get on with the interpretation!

At heart, yours is a common dream theme. It’s the ‘soul mate’ dream. Typically, the soul mate dream features meeting someone of the opposite sex, previously unknown to you, who is magnetically awesome, someone who usually looks you directly in the eye in the dream, someone whose eye colour and depth you particularly note, and someone who, if you touch them or they touch you, causes a rush of emotion, usually love often followed by a release of tears. As you can see, your dream includes all these features!

So what does it mean?

Remember that everyone and everything in a dream reflects something about you, the dreamer. The person who appears as the soul mate reflects a wonderful, understanding and deeply loving part of yourself that you have lost touch with –or perhaps never found. The dream comes at a time when you are beginning – just beginning – to identify this mysterious, longed-for energy. The emotional rush you feel in the dream is the return of emotions you have lost touch with for so long. (They may or may not be here to stay – but through understanding this kind of dream you can choose to get to know this long-lost energy and really embrace it, really bring it fully into your life so that those uplifting emotions stay with you.)

Tears or grief often follow the rush of love because that’s how our emotions work. Once we feel more love for ourselves – more unconditional love – we are free to release hurt we kept unexpressed, or hurt we felt deeply but felt unable to set free. For example, when we feel guilt or low self-esteem we often feel we should suffer our pain, but when we love ourselves enough to care, we love ourselves enough to free ourselves of pain and hurt, so we can move on to more positive life experiences. In a soul mate dream where deep love releases tears, this process is begun.

When you look deeply into a dream soul mate’s eyes, you are looking deeply into your own ‘I’, your own soul. Eyes are the window to the soul.

Many people have been so inspired by a soul mate dream that they have gone in search of someone in waking life who looks exactly like the character in the dream. It’s a long and usually fruitless search! Far quicker is to identify the ‘soul mate’ within and bring all that wonderful energy into your daily life as part of your being. Once you become more whole in this way, you are extremely likely to attract a wonderful soul mate. Ideally relationships aren’t about two halves making a whole – finding your ‘other half’ – but about two whole people making extraordinary magic together.

(See our Soul Mate Dream slideshow which illustrates this.)

You need to look at the dream soul mate for clues as to what kind of energy you need to bring into your life - apart from the unconditional love, of course.

Your dream soul mate was called Adam. Have you known any Adams? If so, think about their personalities. Which of these personality traits or attitudes would be good for you to cultivate in yourself?

There’s a saying, ‘I don’t know you from Adam’. There were a lot of people you didn’t know in your dream! I wonder whether Adam’s name is simply symbolic of the vast unknown parts of yourself that you need to start identifying.

Is Dawn someone you know – the real owner of the herbal aromatherapy store – or is she a dream figure with a dream name? Either way, your dream has picked Dawn, and dawn is the beginning of the day just as Adam, in the Bible, relates to beginnings – the dawn of woman, the dawn of sin? I always think it’s funny that the first woman was named Eve. Dawn would have been a more apt name – dawn instead of evening.

Might Adam represent new, ‘beginning’ energy – exciting, vibrant – yet there’s a connotation of sin that I’d like you to explore here.

Your dream features Christmas, which you may or may not see as a religious feast, and it also features blessing the food, which is definitely a religious gesture. You also have Adam, a name from the Bible associated with religious sin.

What really intrigues me in reading your dream is that you meet this stunningly wonderful Adam and YET you say, “But there was no look of malice, harm or danger in this man’s eyes.” Why would you say this, do you think? It suggests that you would normally EXPECT someone apparently wonderful and deeply attractive to harbour malice, harm or danger. Why? What past experiences have led you to expect this?

This is where I see Adam and sin (Bible) somehow mixed up with a beautiful, attractive soul mate that has, until now, been banished from your kingdom. What energy –within yourself – have you cut off in the past because you associate it with sin, perhaps religious sin? If you relate to this, it’s time to see that ‘sin’ in a new light, to love yourself and allow yourself to embrace this energy because, as your dream shows, there really is no malice, harm or danger after all.

Here are some more clues as to this Adam energy you might like to bring into your being:

He wears a green sweater – green is the colour of the heart chakra, the colour of unconditional love, and a sweater is worn close to the heart, so this is a confirmation of giving yourself more unconditional love. (Your dream is set in a herbal aromatherapy store, so I assume you know a bit about aromatherapy and the colours of the chakras.)

He has red highlights in his hair – red, in chakra/ aromatherapy terms, is the colour of physical energy – passion, material things. Bring some of this on board!

He’s around 21-22, which you said was around your age. Look exactly at what you were doing at age 21-22 for clues as to what energy he represents. What was happening at that time (or is that exactly now) – what had you lost and what was coming back into your life?

What do the clues ‘old fashioned’ and ‘Norwegian’ mean to you? These are personal symbols. What’s your personal association? What ‘old fashioned’ qualities could you do with embracing? What kind of Norwegian energy have you lost touch with?

His hands were elegant. It’s time for you to get back in touch with handling life in a more elegant way. Hands are about handling life, creating things, ‘touching’ as in ‘getting in touch with’. Bring back –or develop –elegance in what you do or create in your world.

You said, in your notes, that you were contemplating loneliness before sleep. You didn’t know anyone, apart from Dawn, in your dream to start with, and felt lonely until the food was served and blessed. So it’s time to nourish/serve yourself with love (represented by nourishing food in the dream) and ‘be blessed’ (accept god’s gifts?), to put an end to loneliness.

There is an abundance of nourishment (gobs in the dream) for you, so celebrate (like Christmas) and bring it all on. The opening of your dream featured a place where one shops for balance, so approach your loneliness/depression from this point of view – shopping for balance. Your dream takes you back to your college town, so look at what wonderful abundance you’ve lost touch with related to college, a kind of abundance that reinstates balance.

There were ‘about 20’ people at the table, and you knew none of them. This most likely refers to you being ‘about 20’ and knowing very little about yourself in reality. There’s so much more to you than you have known – reach out and touch that wonderful unknown energy that your dream wrapped up for you as ‘Adam’. Trust that malice, harm and danger are gone. You are safe to be whole.

Your dream title is, '...who is it there?' Well, you know who’s there now, don’t you? It’s YOU.

There are many causes of depression. One is a deep sense of something missing. You know what’s missing now – turn things around!

DREAM ALCHEMY PRACTICE

The feeling of love you felt in the dream when you laid your hand on Adam’s was so strong that you can still recall it, can’t you? About twenty times a day, close your eyes and get back in touch with that feeling from the dream. Feel your hands together and feel that love energy rush through you. As you do this, know that you are getting in touch with a deeper part of your own self - realise how powerful you feel, how you can ‘handle’ anything hand-in-hand in this way. Feel a new sense of being whole.

Do this for a week, then just twice a day for the next five weeks, or whenever you wish.

Jane Teresa Anderson

You can consult with Jane Teresa or her Dream Team and receive your interpretation by email within five working days.

ORIGINAL THREAD

Below is the original forum discussion on this dream, contributed before Jane Teresa's 2008 interpretation.

Carole

22:24 15/12/1999 

Dear Anna

What a beautiful dream. It must have made you feel so much better. That is the wonder of dreams, they provide all the things we need which are lacking in our waking life.

The dream is set in an aromatherapy store. This is a place where our senses are required (via smell) and perhaps the fact that you did not take your medication allowed you, in the dream, to be able to contact all your senses / sensations/ feelings, without anything blocking them.

You are presented with a table simply groaning with Christmas food. The dream may well be showing you that everything you need - physically, emotionally, spiritually - is within you and yours for the taking, if only you would look.

The owner of the store is called Dawn. When I think of Dawn, I think of the end of a dark night, and perhaps you are becoming sensitive to the fact that your 'dark night' is coming to an end (i.e. your depression).

The main character in the dream is a handsome young man, who only has eyes for you. In fact, you say he kept looking at you as though he were completely in love with you. His name is Adam, and this conjures up for me the picture of first man, both innocent and sexual. As I said previously, dreams often compensate for what is at present lacking in our lives, but if we take the symbol of Adam within us, he may be urging you to realise that you ARE beautiful, you ARE loveable.

When you touch Adam's hands, you are hit by a bolt of emotion which makes you cry, which brings me back to the idea that your feelings have been blocked in reality but in this dream, you are able to get in touch with them. When we touch another with our hands, we are feeling. You are able to cry. What a relief to feel! When we freeze our feelings, (grief, pain, rage are the usual ones we'd rather not experience) we unfortunately freeze all the good feelings, too (love, joy, exuberance).

Anna, if this were my dream, I'd be comforted by the fact that there is within me a loving, supportive 'something', which is urging me to take another look at myself and start loving what I see.

Jane Anderson

22:58 15/12/1999 

Hello Anna and Carole,

Yes - and did you notice Dawn/Eve? (Adam & Eve). The evening and the dawning, the ending and beginning?

Jane Anderson