Issue 70, June 2004
Trash Tells All
©Jane Teresa Anderson, June 2004
“I don’t believe in dream interpretation. Dreams are just the brain filtering through daily stuff, sorting out the trash. That’s why you get bits of work, bits of television, bits of things you’re worried about. You wouldn’t want to analyse mine! Let the trash go, I say. Wake up fresh.”
I love it when people tell me that dreams are the result of the brain processing the day, clearing out the garbage. I love the look on their faces when I agree.
“If someone went through your garbage,” I jump in between the lines of their jaw-dropped bewilderment, “how much could they tell about you?”
Big business takes trash seriously, shredding papers and wiping hard drives to prevent secrets being exposed while many a prospective high security employee has unwittingly had her home garbage bin trawled by company detectives while she slept.
Stop for a moment and think about what you throw out with your trash and what it says about you. Over a period of time a good garbage detective could produce a personal profile of your eating habits, what medicines you take (what conditions you suffer), your interests and political persuasions (newspapers, letters), your financial situation (cash dispenser receipts), what you spend your money on (shopping dockets), where you’ve been and when (train tickets, theatre tickets) and much more. And then there’s your electronic trash, the recycle bin on your computer and the decipherable ghost of every email you’ve received or sent and every website you’ve visited still etched on your hard drive way after you’ve pressed the delete key.
Trash tells all. Well, a great deal, anyway. To put it simply, everything you put in the trash represents a decision about what you decide to keep and what you decide not to keep. Sometimes you make mistakes and throw out the baby with the bathwater, or hang on to stuff that is more of a hindrance than a help to you. Sometimes you cleverly recycle your trash, finding new ways to make use of things you no longer need. Or you foolishly recycle garbage, perhaps rescuing a rain-soaked item only to introduce mould or termites into the house, or re-using an envelope bearing revealing sender information, for example.
When you sleep, your brain filters through your experiences of the last day or two. It filters not only the experiences you were aware of, but also the ones your unconscious mind registered. Dreams are a survival mechanism. If you allow someone to sleep but prevent them from dreaming, they become physically, emotionally and psychologically disturbed. Dreams do the job of sorting out your recent experiences in an effort to make sense of the world and your place in it. From babyhood your dreams have helped you to form your unique view of the world updating it nightly to accommodate your new experiences.
Unfortunately we don’t come equipped with a map of the world and a manual of how best to make our way through it. We learn that as we go, and we learn it based on our individual experiences. My world is different from your world is different from anyone else’s world. We write our own manuals as we go, and dreaming plays a major role in that.
So, on the surface, dreams “are just the brain filtering through daily stuff, sorting out the trash”, but on a deeper level they paint a picture of the dreamer, a picture that the dreamer can use to advantage. Look at these two examples:
Bill and Bob spent a day at the horse races. They each backed the favourite. It fell early in the race. That night they each had a dream featuring a horse.
Bill dreamed that he backed a winner. When he woke up he dismissed the dream as wishful thinking, a remnant of his day at the races, trash. Strangely an old work mate, Sam, was also in the dream. Bill had relied on Sam, many years ago, to win a contract they were working on, but, instead, they lost. They had drifted apart as mates after that. Over the years both Bill and Sam moved on to bigger and better things, opportunities that would have been missed if they had won that contract and been tied into it. On the day of the races, Bill was awaiting overdue news of a contract award. His dream filed the experience of backing the losing horse with his past experience of a contract loss turning out to be a winning situation. Bill’s dream revealed his world picture, based on his experience, that a loss is often a gain in disguise.
Bob dreamed he was driving a car at breakneck speed and ran over a horse. The horse died. When he looked at the dead horse he saw a tattoo of a fish on its neck. When he woke up he dismissed the dream as a remnant of his day at the races, the speed of the race and the fall of his horse. Bob had gone to the races under duress. He had a million and one things to do at work and only went because it was expected of him. It was a corporate event and his duty was to be present. He would much have preferred to go fishing. Bob was astute. He was a brilliant lateral thinker, practiced in the art of metaphor. When he caught himself, over breakfast the next morning, grumbling about work and saying he’d rather go fishing, he made a connection with the fish tattoo in his dream. He was living his life at breakneck speed at the expense of his passions, particularly his passion for fishing. He felt his throat constrict as he choked back unexpected frustration and immediately connected with the horse’s neck in the dream and its reference to breakNECK speed. Bob’s dream had filed away his horse race day loss experience and revealed his world picture that career advancement comes at the expense of time out to live and breathe his passion. Bob realised it was time for him to change this worldview.
Your dreams are a work in progress, an ongoing, ever-changing sculpture of your personal worldview. Take time to stand aside and contemplate your sculpture, to decide which lines to enhance, which to erase and which to change. Whether you see the fabric of your sculpture as trash or treasure is … well, revealing of your worldview, really, isn’t it?
CONTEMPLATIONS
1. Where and when, in your life, have you thrown out the baby with the bathwater? Have you had dreams of losing things or being lost?
2. Where and when, in your life, have you held onto stuff (physical or emotional) that has hindered your progress? Have you had dreams of obstacle courses, or carrying heavy baggage?
3. What, in your life, has been the result of clever recycling: getting gold from physical or emotional dross? Have you had recurring dreams with successful outcomes (where they had previously been unsuccessful)?
4. Where or when, in your life, have you recycled old attitudes or patterns of behaviour to your disadvantage instead of changing them? Do you have recurring dreams with unresolved or unsatisfying endings?
Jane Teresa Anderson
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