Taxi

The Dream: I'm in a taxi with my mother. The driver is a very sweet and intelligent older man,who I assume is working beneath his station. He's very patient and chatty, friendly. I think he has this job as a way of meeting people. At some point I realize I've lost something and search frantically through my purse.

Interpretation: I'm with my mother in this dream, and the taxi driver stands in for my feeling that she worked “beneath her station.” In other words, I felt my mother never had a chance to demonstrate her many talents and abilities in the larger world. And perhaps she did “drive” her children as a compensation for her own frustrated ambition. The driver's patience, chattiness, and friendliness line up with some of her other traits: she drove us in the nicest possible way. With her death I lost her, and the sense of purpose she instilled might be the thing I am frantically searching for.

A Crown of Thornes

The Dream: Clark is getting his teeth worked on. The dentist is very casual, but reasonably priced. He seems old-fashioned. Clark has a tooth crowned, and the procedure doesn't look too bad. He needs to have another capped and is waffling. I ask the dentist if the procedure will be similar to the one he just finished, hoping he'll say yes so that Clark will be reassured and get on with it. But the dentist indicates it will be worse. The second tooth is not fixed.

Interpretation: In any long standing marriage there will be on-going differences in the way we approach problems. This dream is telling me that while I think I know what's best for my husband—and while what I'm pushing for might be the inevitable right choice (getting the tooth crowned)--what I'm not understanding is how much pain, for him, is involved in doing this thing.

Three Faces of Eve

The Dream: Yoko Ono, it turns out, is responsible for starting the civil rights movement in America. She is on a visit, walking down a flight of stairs, the crowd pressing in from all sides—photographers, newsmen, and so on. Despite all the attention she realizes that no one takes her seriously because she is Japanese. So she starts the movement to change this.

Interpretation:Two streams of thought in waking life came together in this dream. The first was influenced by a book, Margaret Atwood's “The Flood.” The women in the book cope with the world in different ways. The three lead characters, Toby, Ren and Amanda, are typically underestimated. Each has a different strategy for survival, and each demonstrates a kind of archetypal woman. Toby is the sexless, healing, capable mother. Ren, a dancer and sex worker, kind and uncalculating, is sweet and easily led but loyal and fearless when necessary. Amanda is tough, worldly, and all calculation. These women are more capable than anyone realizes, and they survive by helping each other.

The second stream of influence was a philosophy lecture series on “The Meaning of Life.” The lectures presented many points of view; the one on Gandhi emphasized his insistence that we must act to right wrongs, as Yoko does in the dream. Yet her high-minded response to her personal dilemma is overlaid with a kind of typically female pique: No one is taking me seriously! As the feminists used to say, “The personal is political.”

Who Am I Driving?

The Dream: I'm driving Clark to work. There are lots of traffic problems and difficulties. After I drop him off I have to get to my own work, and I'm not sure how to get there from his office. I wonder why he didn't take his own car.

Interpretation: I need to involve myself in my own work, and not become too involved in the distraction of driving my husband to do his.

A New Reality

The Dream: I'm at a social event. Don is there. After a while I realize I must be dreaming because I know that Don has died. He looks very healthy and in some way I know he lives elsewhere. I want him to tell us about his new life. What's it like in the world beyond?

Interpretation: This dream gives me a clue as to what the precocious children represent in the last dream: their preternatural intelligence is not about things we are capable of knowing in our earthly existence. Don shows me a spiritual reality that transcends earthly existence, but he doesn't answer my questions.

Brilliant Children

The Dream: I'm in a room with adults and young children who are joyfully running around. At some point a little boy, quite a hefty little tyke, ensconces himself on my lap. I'm surprised he's so comfortable with someone he doesn't know, although he is a family connection of some sort. When I figure out who he is, I realize he's very young, 18 months to 2 years, but very big for his age and very precocious. I'm amazed at how quickly he's grown. It's lovely holding him. I pat his waist. We chat and again I am struck by such a young child having such a grown up conversation. His mother is busy with the boy's younger brother. Later there are older children, boys, around 8 years old, who speak like university professors. How can they be so intelligent?

Interpretation: Something wonderful has been growing, very quickly. I like it; I'm surprised by it. I get pleasure from interacting with this precocious “baby.” Consciously, I don't know what it is. I need to be on the look-out for clues.

The clues this dream gives me are that the thing has substance (it's hefty), and that while whatever it is seems new to me, it's actually something familiar that I don't recognize (there's a family connection). The precocity that is emphasized hints that this is something that knows too much for its age: in other words, I have gotten ahead of myself and must wait for things to develop in due course.

Mom Wants Her House Back

The Dream: My mother-in-law is well. She is in a nursing home, but has recovered from both her physical and mental incapacity. She seems young, in her 50s instead of her 80s, and as coherent as ever. She ask about her house, wanting to know if it is ready for her return. I have a sinking feeling, remembering that we fixed it up beautifully then sold it. I say to her, “I'll leave it to the others to answer that.”

Interpretation: The wonderful house (integrated sense of self) that I experienced in the last dream is precarious. My internal critical “mother” is trying to reassert herself and take back what I have achieved. I feel guilty for having displaced her. Not yet strong enough to speak to her directly. I slough the task off on “the others.”

I've Stuck My Foot In

Dream Image: I see feet and legs, truncated below the knee, standing in a shallow, rocky stream bed. These partial limbs do not look gruesome in any way even though they represent things that have been thrown away. Water rushes by.

Interpretation: The rushing water represents my unconscious. A rocky road (the rocky stream bed) is a difficult part of my life journey. My feet, normally the part of my body that grounds me, have been detached and are now useless (trash, something that has been thrown away): I am attempting to throw away my difficulties. The dream warns me that I won't be a complete person unless I face them; they are part and parcel of the flow of life.

Some Excellent Dream Workshops

Dreamworker Lisa Rigge will teach a couple of excellent dream workshops in the SF Bay Area this fall. Dream Appreciation will explore dreaming and working with dreams to better understand yourself and the nature of dreaming. You will learn how to increase dream recall, record dreams and decipher dream symbols. Writing and drawing exercises get you working with your own dreams. Two sessions starting Oct 4 and Nov 14 in Dublin, CA. For details see: Dream Appreciation

Lisa's second class, Honor Your Dreams Using Collage, teaches how to transform the images, puns and symbols dreams create into a collage and, optionally, poetry or prose.  In this class, rather than interpreting the dream the emphasis will be on working with and honoring it; nevertheless you might be surprised at what you discover about yourself in the process. Experience in working with dreams or in creating collage is not required. Offered twice, Nov 17 and Dec 1, in Livermore, CA. For details see: Honoring Your Dreams