Wednesday, February 22, 2012

The Sea



The Dream: I’m on a beautiful beach in Maui. The waves are delightful and the water temperature perfect. The scene switches and I’m in law enforcement, riding in a van looking for perps. I drive an old battered van, its front window shattered by a bullet, yet I’m full of confidence.

I want to go back to the beach. To get there I have to go through a door, as if the beach is in a room. It’s my last day on Maui, and I want to enjoy it. As I experience the lovely sea I think that now Clark will understand why I like the beaches on the East Coast—the water there is similar, warm and pleasant.

Interpretation: The conflict here seems pretty clear: my sensual pleasure-oriented part versus the rule-following enforcer. The relatively bad shape of the enforcer’s van, and the fact that the window (my point of view) has been shattered, hints that this part of me is losing ground, that in some way how I see things has changed.  And sure enough, I go back to the beach.

To get to the beach I go through a door, symbolizing a transformation and emphasizing that something has changed. I choose enjoyment and the renewal or rebirth that the sea represents. The reference to the East speaks metaphorically of an illumination—the sun rises in the east, the Wise Men came from the East, and so on.  The dream is telling me that not only have I changed, but that I will soon realize it.

2 comments:

  1. Hello Carla, Just some general observations on "the beach".

    Ah, the shore, the beach, the strandline The place where land meets water, unyielding meets yielding, where differentiated meets undifferentiated, where the limited meets the unlimited, where conscious meets unconscious. Where either-or meets both-and. Dreams - waves of unconscious spirit breaking on the shores of the rational mind? Sometimes they lap sometimes they storm. It's at the interface that transformations take place.

    Best Wishes
    Openfoot

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  2. Hi Openfoot, Thanks for your comment, and for pointing out the significance of the littoral, indeed a place of profound transformation. For example, our human ancestors emerged from the sea to become land creatures.

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