Image Sixty-Six: 1st October 2004. Photo by Michael Collins
Freezer
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 have opened the freezer door to look for food and I feel vaguely disappointed that there is not much here. The food looks mundane: rice, pasta. Then I see the toy duck and I feel a surge of gratitude to the unknown joker who has lodged this plaything to refresh my quirky sense of humour and put the mundane back into perspective. I feel playful as I plan the duck’s next surprise appearance.
Your dream feelings correspond with feelings (conscious and unconscious) related to your waking life experiences. Can you identify that waking life parallel? Then move on to consider possible meanings for the symbols in your dream so that you can begin to see the whole picture.
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.
The freezer is the place where you store things away for later sustenance, although things often get hidden at the back or become submerged in ice, lost and forgotten. Your dream freezer might be the place where you store ideas or future plans, or it might draw your attention to ideas or feelings you have lost touch with.
Water in dreams often represents your emotions, so your dream freezer may represent frozen emotions. What emotional issues have you buried in ice rather than confront? In which situations do you freeze, emotionally?
Remember to look for visual clichés in dreams. We “put something on ice” when we postpone it. We “chill out” when we relax (note the chill pack in the image), or we have “emotional blocks” or “mental blocks” (perhaps the ice blocks in the image). In cliché-land feathers remain unruffled “like water off a duck’s back”. Could this duck represent immunity to feelings?
The chill pack is on hand to help heal pulled muscles or scalded fingers. Might this dream symbol represent your ability to heal your hurts?
Look for word plays in a dream. Could the frozen pasta symbolise something frozen in your past, perhaps a memory you could thaw, revisit and heal – perhaps with the aid of the adjacent chill pack?
Look for personal symbols. What does rice mean to you? Mundane? Substantial? Ever eaten a duck rice dish? When? Does this bring back any emotional memories you’ve put on ice? These are the kinds of questions to ask to probe your dream symbols to reveal their personal meaning for you. Or does rice just sound like 'ice', reinforcing the ice symbol?
The bottom of this freezer is rusty. Where are you rusty, or where do you feel rusty? Literally in your joints? Figuratively in your brain?
The duck is a toy. Have you put a sense of play on ice? Have you abandoned something from your childhood? Is this a good time to rediscover it?
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!
1. Why have you opened the freezer?
2. Which item do you want to take out?
3. What are you going to do with it?
4. Who put the duck there?
5. How do you feel about the duck being in the freezer?
6. What’s in the top freezer container?
7. When might you use the contents of the top freezer container (what kind of event)?
8. Do you feel uncomfortable about any of the items in this freezer? Which?
9. Why do they make you feel uncomfortable? What feelings do they bring up?
10. Which feelings would you prefer to keep on ice?
11. What would you have to confront if you thawed these feelings and brought them out into the open?
12. What would hurt?
13. What needs to be healed?
14. The duck is a child’s toy: how could a playful approach help you?
15. Look at your answer to Q12. When did you feel this as a child?
16. What childhood memories might you need to thaw and heal?
17. Look at your answer to Q7. How does this kind of event or situation tie in with your answer to Q16?
18. If each of these items could speak, what message would they each give you?
19. Which of these items has been the most insightful for you?
20. How can you act on this insight to improve a waking life situation?
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