Issue 50, October 2002
How To Cook a Chicken
©Jane Teresa Anderson, October 2002
I remember hearing the story about the couple who argued over how to cook a chicken:
Marie's method was to cut off the legs and wings and place them on top of the chicken breast, skewered into place through a bacon rasher. She said the chicken was more moist and tasty cooked this way. Cameron couldn't agree. To him the chicken tasted just as good when he left the body intact and, he argued, his method saved time and effort. Cameron did have an oddity though: he never ate the chicken legs.
Over the years they learned to live with each other's cooking methods, though each secretly believed that their recipe was not only superior but also right. The only time the discussion would come up was when their parents visited and chicken was on the menu. Cameron's parents would stare in disbelief at Marie's time-consuming efforts while her parents sniffed their disapproval at Cameron's method.
The main problem was that Marie and Cameron and their respective parents had all inherited their chicken cooking recipes from their grandparents and each revered their family wisdom. One day, in an effort to settle the matter for good - to discover who was right - Marie phoned her grandmother and asked her to explain the reason why chicken cooked her way was better.
"Oh," her grandmother replied, "It's not that it tastes better. It's just that I only had a small roasting pan and so the only way I could fit the chicken into the pan was to cut off the legs and wings. Then I had to add the bacon to keep the moisture in."
Cameron laughed all the way to the kitchen ready to speed-cook a chicken in celebration. "Not so fast," Marie called. "It's your turn now. Call your grandfather!" Cameron, who had no idea that his chicken leg aversion was at all idiosyncratic, decided to humour her and picked up the phone. After all, he'd proven Marie's method wrong, so what was there to lose?
"Well, Cameron, it's like this," his grandfather began, chuckling into the receiver. "Your grandmother only cooked chicken at Christmas and she was a kind-hearted soul. We were poor but she always shared what we had. She was well-known in the neighbourhood for handing out bread and tea to the beggars who used to knock on the door in those days. There was one special old man, Jack. Every Christmas, just before bringing the chicken to the table, she'd cut off the legs and take them to the back door where Jack would be waiting for his share of the feast. She kept her good deeds quiet, so all your mother ever saw were legless chickens .. she always assumed the legs were inedible, thrown away!"
And the link to dreams?
We all lead our lives according to our beliefs, but often we do not know the origin of those beliefs. For example, you may have excelled in all your school exams in an attempt to win the approval of your father because you believed, deep down inside (unconsciously) that only successful people deserve to be loved. In this example, your father may have given you loving attention as a young child when you met his expectations and ignored you when you didn't.
Or, as another example, you may be prone to throwing a tantrum or not speaking to someone when you feel hurt because you learned, as a young child, the belief that this kind of behaviour gets attention and cuddles from the person who, you feel, caused you hurt. (In another family another child might have learned a different belief: that the way to respond to feeling hurt is to smile and accept the pain because this may stop the person from dealing out more.) Neither of these two beliefs work well in adult relationship - like Marie and Cameron's methods of cooking chickens they no longer suit their original function. They are redundant idiosyncrasies. There are better ways to cook chicken.
So the problem is that beliefs you learn as a child are not really appropriate for adulthood - on the contrary, they usually make life harder. You might pass all the exams in the world without ever getting the approval you wanted, only to miss out on other life opportunities. Or you might tantrum or smile your way through hurt for years without ever resolving the pain or finding win-win ways of relating to people.
Your dreams show you these kind of unconscious beliefs. They show you what they are and who you learned them from. They show you how these beliefs are operating in your life now and how they are making life more difficult than it needs to be. You need to be able to interpret your dreams to find this information, but this is easily done once you have learned the basic skills.
Okay, so your dreams might reveal your outdated methods for cooking chicken, but how do you make a change? Many of our beliefs have been with us for most of our life and the thought of plucking them out and changing them can seem daunting. But it can be done. It's a technique called Giving Back the Belief* and you can read how to do it in the next issue of Jane's Dream Sight.
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