Exhibit Forty: Selected from Michael's Dream Sight Gallery, 1st August 2001. Photo by Michael Collins
'Sandy Path'
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 the intense vibrancy of the road sign and a stomach-churning unsteadiness at the sight of the down-turning arrow. The sandy path has a shady softness about it. My heart tells me to continue my path and the whiteness of the sand keeps me feeling anchored. The road sign feels like a false warning. It is out of place here, where my feet know their path, yet the presence and vibrancy of the false sign upsets me. I feel confused. This path does not turn down - it continues straight ahead. I feel a sudden lightness as I realise that I can discern false signs and trust my truth. My heart steadies, my stomach settles and all is well with my world.
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.
Paths or roads in dreams generally symbolise one of your life journeys: your work, career, relationship, spiritual, emotional or physical journey … the list is endless. Sand may symbolise change and transience as sands shift and can leave us unsure of our path. Sand is the end result of the battering and weathering of the hardest of rocks. A sandy path, in a dream, may symbolise a path you have forged during tough times.
White can represent purity or spirituality.
The high banks to either side of the path may symbolise the given channels within which you move. They may define barriers or limitations which keep you moving forward or backwards but which prevent you from lateral approaches, divergences and thinking. Can a path be too straight? Restricted? Or can a path be too wide to encourage forward focus? Which is the way forward? Sometimes the best way forwards is to go backwards, to retrace several steps or to step sideways to find another approach.
The high banks may be a dream pun on 'banks'. What are you 'banking' on? How do financial banks come into this equation?
Yellow may have personal association for you. It is used as a warning colour in many senses: yellow road signs are believed to be more visible than other colours. Yellow is also the colour of the sun: of consciousness, of understanding. As the colour of the third chakra it stands for the energy of self-knowledge and intellectual clarity. Its presentation as a road sign, here, underlines its symbolism as a warning or attention-grabber.
The Questions
Here are some questions the dreamer of such a dream picture might ask to work towards a complete understanding of the dream.
Try these yourself: just give your 'gut reaction' answers to the questions - your answers will surprise you in the insights they deliver. The key thing to remember is, "Don't THINK about your answers - give quick gut reaction replies". Your unconscious will deliver.
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!
- Imagine standing on the path. How do you feel?
- Imagine standing on the left bank. How does this make you feel?
- Imagine standing on the right bank. How does this make you feel?
- Which way are you travelling along this path?
- Move yourself back along the path, beyond the picture. What feeling do you get back there?
- Now move yourself forward along the path, beyond the picture. What feeling do you have now?
- Look at your answers to the above questions. Which situation, in your waking life, brings up at least two of these feelings?
- Name that situation.
- If this path represents that waking life situation, name that journey. (Relationship, work, ageing, parenthood etc.)
- Continuing on from your answer to Q9, name your ideal destination.
- Now name the destination you feel you are heading for.
- What steps would you need to take, in waking life, to reach your answer to Q10?
- Which parts of the image above seem to relate to the obstacles in your life - the factors bringing you to your destination named in your answer to Q11?
- Reconsider your answer to Q12 in the light of your answer to Q13.
- Where, in this journey, have you come from?
- Looking back, what have you learned from this journey?
- Looking forward, what do you feel you can learn from the journey ahead of you?
- Are there alternative paths (other ways to learn the same lessons)?
- The back of the yellow road sign carries words bearing the truth of the matter. Walk along the path and read the back of the sign. What does it say to you?
- Who would you choose to accompany you from here forward?
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