Ocean Dip
Jayne
Decision 1992

~~~~~~dream~~~~~~

I was wearing a white wedding dress and walking down a corridor when I saw a man sitting on a seat. I knew him really well in the dream (but not in waking reality). He had his head down and he was crying.

I went and put my arms around him and he said, ‘You shouldn’t go ahead. You really shouldn’t be doing this’. I reassured him, ‘Look, don’t worry, everything will be all right’. As I emerged from the corridor, my daughter came up to me and urged, ‘Mum, hurry up, because they’re all waiting for you to start the ceremony’.

I looked at her and I said, ‘Priscilla, I don’t think I’ll be going through with it. I just can’t go through with it.’ ‘You’ve got to, everyone’s waiting for you,’ she said. ‘No. That’s it. I don’t want to do it,’ I answered. I walked into a room where my boyfriend was and he was all dressed in his tuxedo ready for the wedding. ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I can’t go through with it.’

He accepted it. He wasn’t happy, but then he wasn’t happy in himself at the time anyway, so it didn’t surprise me.

 ~~~~~~

I was having a relationship with this gentleman, John, who was divorced and living with his three children. We were going to move in and live together and I was really bending backwards to make the relationship work, but it was rocky. I was so undecided as to whether to continue. I had two children of my own and my daughter was hassling me that if he moved in with his children then she was moving out. All three of his kids were really boisterous so it was a very big decision I had to make.

During these months of uncertainty, Jayne had a recurring series of dreams, which ultimately led to her final, life-changing dream, as described above.

In each dream I was getting ready to be married. I would be going shopping, always for different things, but it was basically the same dream. I might be shopping for a veil with my mother, for a headpiece with my sister, or preparing for something for the wedding with my daughter. They were always women on my side of the family. In the middle of shopping I would turn round and say, ‘Look, I don’t think I can go through with this’.

I was married before for nineteen years and that was a disaster. In each dream, as I was picking each wedding object, there was a fear inside me. I guess my fear was that the minute we moved in he’d be a different person altogether.

I had the final dream when I was more or less a hundred per cent certain that it would not work out and that I wouldn’t go through with it. I was so definite in the dream that I thought, ‘That’s it. That’s the answer to all my questions.’ It had been a hard decision to make but once I’d made it I felt a lot better.

I just cut all the ties completely and straight away. It took me ages to get over him and to get over the fact that there was nothing left there, but in the end I was happier. The wedding dreams were over and John has never entered my dreams since.

Now we work together and that’s all. There’s nothing left at all of the relationship and I have no regrets. In fact, we are better friends now than we ever were before.

Jane’s Interpretation

Jayne would never have asked me for an interpretation of her dream because it so obviously confirmed her waking life feelings. It was a role-playing dream which helped her to experience calling off the wedding, wake up, assess the dream and her feelings, and gather the courage to follow through with cancelling the relationship plans. The first question I would ask a dreamer who tested me with a similar dream would be, ‘Are you planing on getting married or affirming a relationship?’ If a dreamer with wedding plans consulted me with a dream like this, horrified by the dream because it contradicted her waking life feelings, I would look for symbolic content.

One important symbolic character in Jayne’s dream, though, is the man who was sitting crying. As Jayne remarked, ‘I knew him really well in the dream (but not in waking reality)’. When we meet a person or an aspect of ourselves in a dream with whom we readily identify, we instantly have this feeling of familiarity and closeness. People often interpret such characters as ‘guides’ presenting themselves at the dream level, and this may also be the case. Certainly the information or advice they give is usually wise and well worth following. In my own dreams I treat such familiar dream souls with great reverence. If this man was symbolic of Jayne’s higher wisdom, then his advice was invaluable. If he was symbolic of her inner male, then he represented her outer life (her Yang qualities such as interest in her career, assertiveness, intellectual self, logic, rational thought), which may well have been areas of her life she perceived as being threatened by her future marriage.

River 26
Arthur
Little Dove 1991

~~~~~~dream~~~~~~

A little dove is very young and immature. I ask, ‘What shall I do?’ and a man said, ‘Give it some nourishment’. With that the man squeezed the orange he was eating and a couple of drops of orange juice fell to the ground. This little bird drank up the juice and then settled down and started to preen its feathers. I said I would take it home and nourish it.

 ~~~~~~

I’m not sure yet whether this series of dreams and what happened has been life-changing, but it has all been very confusing.

The dreams and related events of the last few years have certainly challenged Arthur’s understanding of life, causing him to study, research and think deeply about the nature of dreams.

It all started, as far as I’m concerned, when Alice was looking after this old war veteran called Pete. Now the set-up was , Pete would pay off the house and Alice would take care of them, when Pete wasn’t on the booze.

Now this started when Alice was feeling poorly. Pete had had a few and he gave her this soup he had heated up, but didn’t tell Alice that he had put in some of his tranquillisers that would down a horse, let alone someone who weighed just over fifty kilos. Anyway I received this phone call from Alice that I could not understand and decided to ask one of her friends if she would come with me to Alice’s place, as I thought she was sick, so we had better go and check it out.

When we got there both were pretty incomprehensible, but when we finally found out what he had done we called the ambulance and had her taken to the hospital to get pumped out. They kept her under observation in intensive care overnight.

I had been reading about Edgar Cayce and how important dreams were and was wondering what I could do for the situation, so I asked, just before going to sleep, what I could do to help. I received the little dove dream that night.

Arthur’s commitment to care for Alice continued for some time, and over the events of the next year or so he gradually became aware of the connection between this woman and some of his earlier dreams.

Prior to my dove dream I had had two others about this lady dressed in white.

In the first, a very nice looking lady appeared to me dressed in a white suit. Her features were quite heart-shaped. When I think back it might have been a nun’s habit, because around her head all was white and I could not see her hair.

A few months later, in the second dream, a lady and myself had just stopped and parked the car. Another car was parked behind us with two people sitting inside. When we got out and started walking, two men got out of the car and came towards us and started to menace us. I called out ‘Dear Lord, protect us, for they know not what they do’. Next moment they were both writhing on the ground. They then go up and went to their car and drove off at great speed. Some people we knew came up and we told them what had happened but they took some convincing. The lady was dressed in white.

Around ten months after I had the dream of the lady with the heart-shaped face, I attended a Psychic Fair locally and I asked Maryanne if she needed anyone to do hands-on healing. So down I went this Saturday morning, full of good intentions, but there was no room to do any healing and so I gave my friend Len a hand to sell raffle tickets. Then I saw these drawings on the wall and Len told me the lady is a psychic artist. I decided to have one of those drawings done, which I did. When the lady had just about finished I got the shock of my life and I said to her, ‘I have had a couple of dreams about the lady, the only difference is she was in white and you have drawn her in blue’. I guess it would be pretty hard to draw someone white on white paper.

My final dream, so far, about the lady in white was in May 1992.

In the dream I met my beautiful lady and talked to her. She said that I had promised her that I would get in touch with her mentally, when I first met her in my dreams.

For the next eighteen months things went reasonably well with Pete and Alice and then they sold out and went overseas for a while. Pete stayed overseas, but Alice came back and went up North to work so I didn’t see her for nearly twelve months. She related to me the following incident:

She had this small car and decided to go for a trip to Mt Isa on her own. Around Charters Towers, she thinks, she took a wrong turn and finished up out in whoop whoop and nearly out of petrol, when she came across this young helicopter pilot who gave her some petrol and a feed. As it was getting dark she asked if she could stay there for the night and leave early in the morning, which she did.

Back on the main road she saw this couple walking along and stopped to give them a lift. Being a couple she thought she would be safe. The man had tattoos on his arms and looked quite the unsavoury type. After they had been going for a while he asked her to stop the car and they got out. Next minute he knocked the woman out and left her lying on the road and got back into the car and told Alice they were going to Adelaide.

When they had been going for a while he wanted to stop and have a bit by the side of the road. Alice said, ‘Let’s wait ‘til we get to the next town and do it properly and stay at a motel’. He agreed to that and the next thing he was asleep, so, very carefully, she turned the car around and headed back to Mt Isa. It is very hard to know which way one is going in that type of country unless you know where the sun should be. The guy woke up and wanted to know where they were and she said, ‘Go back to sleep, it’s not far now. I will wake you up when we get to the town.’

She woke him all right when she pulled up at Mt Isa police station and a big cop was standing outside the car door. She told the police what had happened. They got the money off him and then she hightailed it back to Cairns as fast as her car would go. She was a very lucky young lady.

I guess one of my dreams was telling me she was well protected. Her guardian angel was looking after her that day. Over the period I had a few little dreams about her, but never thought much about them: she was gone and I might never see her again.

Later I heard a knock on the door and lo and behold it was Alice and I said, ‘This is a surprise’. Over the next few weeks she called a few times and didn’t seem to know why she was there. Then she told me she needed this operation on her nose. She had fallen down some stairs and had broken her nose. The doctors had done cosmetic surgery before and put silicon in and she wanted it removed and needed a few dollars to pay for the operations.

She had told me the day of the operation but never what time it would be. On the day I went out to water the garden about 8.45 a.m. and I could not get her out of my mind. What the hell is going on? A couple of weeks later she came back and paid the money she owed me and I asked, ‘What time was your operation?’ She said ‘It was supposed to be at 11.15 but they moved it forward to 9.15’.

Just after this she visited and said, ‘I won’t be back again, wish me luck’. So I wished her good luck, shook her hand, and she was gone. As soon as she had gone out the gate this little voice spoke to me, ‘She will be back when she is sick’.

A few weeks after this I decided to visit a friend down south for the weekend. I had been asked months before and decided to make the effort. Driving down I could not get Alice out of my mind, and the only thing I could do was send her love in my mind, which I did. The next day, driving home, the same thing happened, so I kept on sending love to her. What was going on?

About 2 a.m. on the Monday morning I was woken up by a very bedraggled person standing over me saying, ‘Can you help me?’ What a mess! I got her cleaned up with a shower and gave her something to eat, and while this was going on she was telling me that she had been walking around outside Ipswich trying to get to Sydney. I said, ‘You can tell me tomorrow, but now you need some sleep’. This is what she told me the next day:

She had driven her car to Brisbane on the way to Sydney and had no money in her pocket. It was getting late and she met this very kind lady who got her a bed in a backpackers hostel. The room was divided by a curtain, and the chap behind it, who was having a beer, asked her if she wanted a drink. She told him, ‘No thank you’. He then asked if she would like to have a read of the Bible he had, and she said she would like that. After she had been reading for a while she thought the bloke was asleep, yet any questions she asked in her head about the things she was reading were answered by the bloke in the next room. All through this adventure she told me she knew what she was doing, but just couldn’t seem to help herself.

Next morning she thanked the people and started walking to Ipswich. How far out of town she didn’t know, but she got picked up by this Maori fellow who was a minister of some church and he gave her ten dollars to help her along her way. Next, when she was walking along the road with no houses about, this hoon tried to run her over, so she decided to walk through the scrub off the road. She was walking along and she thought someone was following her, so, as she was wearing a white dress and white underclothes, she thew them all away so she would be harder to see and laid down in the grass or what there was of it. After nothing to eat for two days and nothing to drink all that day she was getting pretty near exhausted. She finally came across this house with a towel on the line, draped it around herself and knocked on the door. The lady of the house came to the door and she asked for a glass of water. In all she drank seven glasses of water. The kind lady gave her some clothes and then rang the police and they came and picked her up. When they questioned her it had been them that had been following her in the bush. After that they took her to the Ipswich toll road booth where the lady in the booth got her a ride to my house.

Arthur had nourished his little dove and taken her home whenever she needed the rest. The connections between the lady in white of his dreams, his little dove, the artist’s psychic drawing and the way in which his dreams and daytime feelings intertwined with Alice’s adventures have left him questioning the meaning of it all.

Jane’s Interpretation

Doves often represent peace, while birds in general can symbolise the spirit or soul: flight and freedom. Perhaps the dove is a spiritual symbol of peace, and in Arthur’s case, spiritual inner peace was fledgling, growing, but young and needing attention and special nourishment. In his dream state Arthur is aware of his spiritual needs and asks how to help himself grow. Unless an orange had a special significance to Arthur, the dream interpretation might focus on the colour orange. In meditation, which Arthur did practice, orange generally symbolises harmony and peace. So the dream already reveals two symbols of peace: the dove and the colour orange. Essentially the dream advises Arthur to take what he has learned (the fruit of his learning?) on a spiritual level about peace and harmony and to let it fuel his own needs. Living in a peaceful, harmonious way encourages further growth. The way to peace and harmony is to let it work in your own life. He had to ‘take it home and nourish it’, just as he had to take peace and harmony into his own heart and live it.

This is all on an inner level. What happened in Arthur’s life, as it so often does, is that the outer world also presented him with an opportunity to apply his learning at the same time. He extended love to Alice, whom he saw as a little dove in need of nourishment, taking her into his home and his heart. By expressing his tenderness and helping someone else in this way, his own inner world was simultaneously enriched and nourished. Peace and harmony grew both in Arthur’s inner and outer worlds.

With our eyes open we see that what passes in our outer world of relationship and events is often a metaphor of a parallel development within our inner and outer worlds.

With our eyes open we see that what passes in our outer world of relationship and events is often a metaphor of a parallel development within our inner world, our psyche, our self. In waking life, the world around us mirrors our inner personal development. When we make rapid inner changes, our outer world situation shifts too. This is why it is instructive to look at each dream on an inner level, even if an outer level dream interpretation is extremely obvious. Taking action at the inner level first, even though this may seem too ethereal or remote, often causes the greatest and fastest changes in the simultaneous outer world. Dream interpretation can take you as deep as you wish to go: the choice of action is yours.

Answers, decisions..... all you need to know to change your life, or maybe just to smooth it along a little, may be contained in a single moment in a dream.

"The dream was a divine gift, a beautiful gift of the higher universal energies that are there for the asking. All we have to do is ask."
Francoise