Issue 61, September 2003
An eye to the future
©Jane Teresa Anderson, September 2003
I missed my vocation. Had I been on the ball thirty years ago I might have recognised my talent as a Monty Python scriptwriter.
This week, in a dream, I arrived at a closed door. We needed to be on the other side. Thankfully John Cleese magically appeared, popped out his eyeball ("an old trick," he mumbled) and rolled it under the door so we could see ahead and check out the situation.
When we deconstruct (lop off a few limbs, Pythonesque style,) our beliefs (body) we often see (eyeball) a way beyond the seemingly impossible. If you can't find a solution it may be because you are standing too firmly inside the square walls of your long held beliefs. Your perception of reality may be your problem. But if you step outside that square ...
Well, have a look at Valerie's dream:
Valerie dreamed she had to run a race around the outside perimeter of a square house. The course was fairly smooth apart from a rocky patch around the back. She looked down and saw she was wearing her stiletto boots. Hardly ideal for the run, she thought, as her heels could get stuck in the rocky patch and trip her up.
She considered putting on her running shoes. These would make the run easy, she thought, but the thick soles would numb any sensation of the rocky patch. In her dream, Valerie wanted to be able to feel her way across the rocky patch.
So what was her solution? Did Valerie find the perfect pair of shoes?
Yes. Her dream solution was to wear sandshoes. She wouldn't be numb to the rocky patch but neither would she be tripped up by it. She would traverse it with just the right amount of sensitivity.
Valerie shared her dream in a dream group and soon identified the rocky patch as a relationship rocky patch that had thrown her off course the night before her dream. So what was her dream telling her to do?
Ah - this is where we pause and restate that question in capital letters:
WHAT WAS HER DREAM TELLING HER TO DO?
As a dream analyst, this is one of the most common questions I hear.
The answer is that dreams don't tell you what to do. They show you how things are. Most importantly, they show you how things are in your unconscious mind. They show you the state of play of your unconscious beliefs - those beliefs that shape your perception of the world and affect your attitudes, decisions and actions.
A dream is a mirror of this moment in your life. Now. It may refer to yesterday to help you understand where a belief came from and it may refer to tomorrow to show you where your beliefs are taking you (if you don't change them), but the dream moment is right now. You are this moment right now.
You have the power to look into your dream mirror, understand (through the art of interpretation) where you're at and why, and then project ahead to see where your current beliefs are taking you. Then, best of all, you have the power to change the outcome by changing any of the beliefs.
Dreams allow you to project ahead, to roll the eyeball under the locked door, to think outside the square, to look at possibilities, but they do not tell you what to do. It's up to you to make decisions and apply a little Dream Alchemy magic to persuade your unconscious mind to reshape any out-dated, inappropriate beliefs that may be working against you.
The dream shows. You tell.
What did Valerie do?
She looked at the way she handled similar rocky patches in relationships in the past and saw that some were the result of over-sensitivity (stilettos) and some the result of numbing out (running shoes). Her dream mirror reflected a new attitude (the sandshoes) that was developing as a result of her recent dreamwork in response to the evening's challenge. She decided to work on perfecting the sandshoe approach.
If you are on the ball with your dream analysis skills you will be jumping up and down in your sandshoes, bursting with the other clues reflected in Valerie's dream! Catching her heels (heals), feeling through her soles (soul) and, of course, thinking outside the square of her previous perception of relationship problems.
Monty Python would have given the sandshoe the flick, I guess, and gone for the huge bare foot to stamp out life's irritations. But, hey, we learn by our mistakes and through our dreams, don't we?
Jane Teresa Anderson
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