Issue 67, March 2004
A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing
©Jane Teresa Anderson, March 2004
"It’s only a dog. It won’t hurt you," Mum would always say as we walked to school past the dreaded house on the corner of Stroudwood Road. But it wasn’t only a dog, was it? It was a growling, barking, sniping dog that looked me in the eye and hurled itself up against the chicken-wire fence, yearning to rip my body apart. At seven years old I was terrified of that dog. In later years I would walk the long way round to school to avoid the confrontation. In much later years I realised the dog was more terrified of me than I was of him. Why else would he work so hard to frighten me off his territory?
Of course dogs would hurt me. Hadn’t Mum understood whenever I told her about those wolves in my dreams? For years since very early childhood, packs of hungry wolves would crowd the high cliffs lining the road up ahead, waiting to devour me. "It’s only a dream. It won’t hurt you," she’d say.
But dreams can leave you feeling hurt and frightened when you don’t understand them, especially when they spill over into waking life. One day I was in the kitchen with Mum and my sister when the kitchen door opened and in leapt a huge wolf! I jumped up onto Mum’s back and clung on, literally for dear life. "It’s only a dog," Dad said, bounding into the kitchen after the Alsatian, lunging for the chain around the dog’s neck to restrain it. "I got it from the pub. It swallowed a brick and needs a holiday." Any dog hungry enough to resort to eating bricks was wolf enough to devour a tasty little girl like me.
Knowing what I know now about dreams, I have a feeling that neither the Stroudwood Road mongrel nor the kitchen wolf would have plagued my young life if I had understood my wolf dreams and been able to address the issues they depicted. When dreams are misunderstood, the very symbols they employ often leap into waking life to confront you directly. It’s nature’s way of dramatising an issue you are too close to, bringing it alive in metaphor, speaking it in tongues of fairy tales. What was my fairy tale? Learning to love the sheep in wolf’s clothing?
My early dream and waking life dogs were frighteningly territorial. They needed their space and they would defend it – at my cost, if necessary, or so I believed. These were indeed relevant childhood issues: the need to defend personal territory triggered by feelings of invasion and fears of being devoured rather than nourished. In the way of family relationships, these issues applied to us all. Hand-me-down issues. We each had our place along the continuum marked ‘devour’ at one end and ‘be devoured’ at the other. Or should that be ‘wolf’ at one end and ‘sheep’ at the other? We were caught up in the deepest tangles, where wolves paraded in sheep’s clothing and sheep protected themselves in wolf armour.
For myself, the intricacies of finding the middle path, the establishment of a personal boundary that was neither a defensive barrier nor an invitation to invade, use and abuse, took many decades to hone.
When dogs appear in my dreams I usually find it insightful to look at them as symbols of personal territory simply because of my dream and waking life experiences. For example, several years ago a dream dog was trapped in a small fenced-in area. Through this dream I realised that at some level I was feeling the effects of personal invasion or restricting myself for fear of claiming rightful space. I needed to get the balance right. How did I do this? Apart from contemplating the way I was responding to the relevant waking life situation, I simply visualised letting that dream dog run free while feeling how peacefully joyful this was for him. Effectively I freed the fear, transforming it into peaceful joy. My waking life responses followed naturally. I freed myself from the fear-based trap.
Unchecked, feelings of personal invasion often grow into more physical form as viruses or bacteria invade and control parts of the body. Sometimes the invasion occurs because the immune system is down. The role of the immune system is to keep right boundaries. If it slacks off, invasion results, if it is overly defensive complications such as autoimmune diseases or food allergies result. The trick is, once again, to find that balanced middle path between extremes.
Once, suffering from a minor but annoying ailment, I knew my immune system was backing off. I went to sleep requesting a dream consultation on the matter. I wanted a dream to help me with this. A dream of a dog came to the rescue.
For a start the mere presence of the dog confirmed that this was indeed the requested dream. This was an issue of establishing right territory. My dream dog was unable to run because a small Norfolk Pine tree was twisted around its waist. What did this mean?
A Norfolk Pine tree is beautiful in form but its branches are sparse and offer very little protection from the sun. It amazes me that we have several famous beach esplanades here in Australia lined with Norfolk Pines. There’s no way in our blinding sunlit summers that you can enjoy walking beneath those trees! My dream was representing my immune system as a Norfolk Pine, unable to provide full protection and restricting my freedom as a result.
Now this dream didn’t really tell me anything that I didn’t already know but its gift was precious. The gift was that it showed me how my dreaming mind perceived my under protective immune system. It gave me the Norfolk Pine tree symbol to transform. When you transform a dream symbol (the practice of dream alchemy) you work at such a profound level of communication with your deepest unconscious beliefs that waking life transformation follows naturally.
I visualised the little dog, tangled up in the Norfolk Pine and then visualised the pine transforming into a multi-branched, many leafed, softly swaying tree made of golden light. Wherever the dog now moved, he took his shady protection with him. It never restricted him because it was as weightless as light and as flowing as a Norfolk Pine is stiff.
Now, if only I could persuade those beach planners to plant some magical golden light trees between those pines. Or maybe I should just buy a big sunhat. Walkies, Rover! Here boy! Rover?
Jane Teresa Anderson
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