Issue 74, October 2004
Vintage Whine
©Jane Teresa Anderson, October 2004 2004
“Let’s discuss it over a bottle of wine,” Marc ventured, extracting a corkscrew from the tangle of cutlery by the kitchen sink. His father’s kitchen, usually pristine, was a mess, as was the old man himself. Marc surveyed the wine rack as Harvey continued to grumble about the enemy invasion. A dusty bottle of Nuits St Georges beckoned. His father’s favourite would be a good place to start, he thought, as he grabbed two wine glasses and motioned the old man to sit down.
In the end the discussion took more than one bottle of wine. After the Nuits St Georges a bottle of St Emilion was washed down with a bottle of Chateau Neuf du Pap as Harvey came to terms with the enemy invasion. The two men embraced and Marc woke up. It had been a dream.
Marc* told me about his dream later that week. His father had been dead for several years and as for the enemy invasion, well, Marc thought his dream was set in World War II, perhaps France, given the wines. He was excited and wondered if his dream was a window to a past life. “What do you think?” he asked me.
What did I think? I thought back to my own dream of the night before, where I was sitting in an old armchair drinking a glass of chardonnay. It was one of those heightened senses dreams, every sip of wine zinging in taste. Half way through my drink I remembered that I had given up alcohol. I became acutely aware of the sensation of the alcohol in my bloodstream. I stood up. My head spun, my feet felt slightly numb as I walked across the floor somewhat unsteadily and a vague feeling of nausea rose from my stomach. I sat down again quickly, surprised that half a glass of wine could have such a strong effect.
What surprised me most when I woke up was the sensual accuracy of my dream. My dreams are multi-sensual: sight, sound, touch, smell and taste but this was the first time I had experienced being drunk. Not just dreaming about being drunk, or dreaming about staggering drunkenly, but experiencing the real physiological effects of drinking alcohol only magnified in hyper detail.
I was never a big drinker, a one to two glasses of wine or occasional whiskey or celebratory champagne kind of drinker, so when I decided to give it away – at least for a while – three months ago, I didn’t expect my dreams to offer much comment. But I was wrong. I had made the change for health reasons and soon started noticing more benefits. I had several highly sensual surgical dreams where doctors performed miraculous operations, removing bizarre items from my body. I felt the incisions of the scalpels, the effect of the anaesthesia on the odd occasion when it was used, and waves of warm healing sensations when each operation was complete. These reflected the clearing of physical toxins and unhealthy beliefs from my body and the healing consequences of both. Other dreams introduced me to the inner reformed-drinker – someone you may glimpse between the lines of this article despite my resolve to send her back to the shadows whence she came, to acknowledge her past.
But it was this last full Monty drunken dream that reminded me of the pitfalls of interpreting dreams ripe with sensual detail. It’s easy to believe that such dreams actually happened, to forget that they are symbolic. Sensuality is highly persuasive. As is a sense of past history, which brings me back to Marc’s question. Was his dream a flashback to a past life?
My approach to the question of dreaming of past lives is this: if past lives exist, and if you have access to past life memories, why would you dream of a particular past life on a particular night? The same question applies to childhood memories. Why did you dream of the house you lived in when you were nine last night and not the night before? And why didn’t you dream about the house you lived in when you were sixteen? The answer, of course, is that dreams are dealing with today’s issues, sometimes referencing the past symbolically if it is relevant to understanding yourself today. When you dream of the house you lived in when you were nine it is always a little different in your dream, and the dramas that take place there are symbolic – they’re not what actually happened. Our dreams are symbolic. Sometimes those symbols are drawn from memory (for example, the memory of being drunk) and sometimes they are created specially (for example, the armchair is not one I know). What is most important is to understand is how the symbols in your dream can help you to understand today’s issues. Whether any of your dream symbols are drawn from actual past life memories or are created specially for your dream is virtually unknowable. Devastatingly interesting, yes, but irrelevant if you want to get to grips with the meaning of your dream.
What did Marc’s dream mean?
It turned out that Nuits St Georges was Harvey’s favourite wine, St Emilion was Marc’s favourite and Chateau Neuf du Pap was one of the few labels they both enjoyed. This was a big clue to the meaning of the dream. In our dreams we often look for ways to resolve issues. In the dream Marc’s father was worried about the enemy invasion. The day before the dream Marc heard that a rival company had made a successful bid to buy the company he worked for. Marc feared for his position. Would he be replaced? Would he be downgraded? Marc was feeling invaded by the ‘enemy’. So far, so good, but why was Harvey in the dream?
Harvey, Marc informed me, lived through enemy invasion as a child in France during the second world war. As a child there was little he could do but accept it. Marc, as a child, could not understand this. He, Marc, would have fought the enemy. At least, that’s how he felt when he was ten. It became a bit of an issue between them, a vintage whine, so to speak.
So the three bottles of wine symbolised three approaches to dealing with the takeover at work: Marc could accept it like his father (Nuits St George), fight it (St Emilion) or take a more balanced approach (Chateau Neuf du Paps). And that’s what he did. He returned to work with an open mind, his bottled-up feelings released, and … well, things worked out rather well.
(* Marc’s dream has been adapted to retain confidentiality. Thank you to Marc – not his real name – for offering his dream illustratively for this article.)
Jane Teresa Anderson
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