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Exhibit Thirty Five: Acquired by the Dream Gallery 31 March 2001. Photo by Michael Collins

'Tango'

Feeling The Picture

Your feeling reactions to a dream are keys to its interpretation. These are my feelings. If this were a scene in your dream or life, how would you feel about being there?

I feel this picture from the perspective of the dancing woman, although she does not look like me. At first my feelings are all sensual: the warmth of the man's body, his smell, the cool mountain-sharp air on my back, the supple strength of my legs and the way our bodies curve to fit one another. I feel the power and strength of my moves and the following surrender of the man's. I feel this dancing moment as a sense of completeness, the boy and the plastic covered trolley in the background seeming incongruous and superficial. I feel the dance with my heart. Where once the steps were birthed in my head and practised to perfection, they now come naturally without planning or analysis. The dance simply is.

The Symbols

Symbols in your dreams often relate to your personal memories and associations, so always consider those first. Then let your mind play with other, more general possibilities. They will not all apply! Just open your mind and notice where the symbol seems to fit and make sense of the rest of your dream.

You may dream dance with a partner, on your own or in a group and the steps may be totally freestyle, freely expressed within a given structure, strictly choreographed or dutifully formal. In a world where we commonly rely on the spoken word to communicate, dance speaks a language of movement and rhythm. Look at how you move in the dream, how your body responds to the rhythm and music and how you interact with the other dancers or people. What does the dream dance communicate about yourself and your feelings?

The dream music can be seen (heard?) as your own harmony, disharmony, simplicity, complexity, the beat of your life to which you, the dancer, move in accordance. Life can be seen as a dance, an interaction between yourself and the situation you find yourself in: what dance is your life demanding of you right now?

Your dream dance partner may represent a belief, an attitude or capture the essence of a relationship issue if the partner is someone you recognise from your waking life. If your dance partner is a dream character, he may represent your Yang (the outer world, the left brain) or she may represent your Yin (the inner world, the right brain). Are your Yin and Yang in harmony? What is the dance of life offering you and how are you responding?

The dance pictured is a tango. Such a dream may be playing on the old cliché, 'It takes two to tango', or it may have personal associations for you. I have learned personal lessons from my tango dream dances, as this extract from Jane's Dream Sight Issue 25 describes:

"In another dream of years past, I tangoed across the tiles, leaning back so far in my dream stranger partner's arms that my body was suspended horizontal to the floor. I momentarily hovered only a few centimetres above the ground until I was lightly whisked and whirled back into the next staccato tango pose. The lesson from this dream dance was to find the balance between the extreme of being too flexible, too laid back and the extreme of expecting too much from myself through forcing over-extension." [* From Jane's Dream Sight Issue 25, September 2000, 'Dancing Yin to Yang'.]

The Questions

Here are some questions the dreamer of such a dream picture might ask to work towards a complete understanding of the dream.

If this process can work powerfully for this image, consider how infinitely more powerful the insights are when the image comes from one of your own dreams - direct from your unconscious!

1. Where are you in this picture?
2. Why are you here?
3. Where were you just before arriving in this street?
4. Where are you heading to after the dance?
5. How would you feel about stepping into the male dancer's shoes?
6. How would you feel about stepping into the female dancer's shoes?
7. For the rest of the questions imagine you are one of the dancers, dancing this tango: which dancer are you?
8. Have you danced this dance before?
9. How expertly are you dancing?
10. What is the best sensation about this dance?
11. What sensation do you feel uncomfortable about in this dance?
12. What is your role in the dance?
13. What is your partner's role in this dance?
14. How comfortable would you feel about changing roles with your dance partner?
15. How many weeks, months or years have you known this dance?
16. Considering your answer to Q12, in which current life situation do you feel you play this role?
17. Considering your answer to Q13, in which current life situation do you notice this role being played around you?
18. Considering your answers to Q16 and Q17, how comfortable would you feel about changing role situations with this person in this current life situation?
19. Look at your answer to Q15, and consider your answers to Q16 and Q17. Can you relate the time period to the origin of the role-playing you have just identified in your current life situation?
20. If you could change partners in this dance, who would you choose and why?
21. If you could change the style of the dance, what kind of dance would you choose and why?
22. What would happen if you applied your answers to Q20 and Q21 to your current life situation?