Guest Dreamer: Coming Up

In Elizabeth's dream a lot has come up; let's take a look at it.

The Dream: I was in a large house (not my own, but I felt comfortable there), on a lake or sea (I'm not sure which-but it was large, calm, but vast). I was with several couples, whom I knew in the dream and felt at ease with but can't put names on most after awakening. I was there with a young, prepubescent boy, and in the dream I felt obligation to have an intimate/sexual relationship of sorts with this boy. I felt it was not right, and I remember thinking it would have to wait until he had matured, if ever. This young boy brought me a condom, the condom was different than one I'd ever seen, it was large and reusable, similar in ways to a female condom. I felt absolute in my decision to not be with him when he asked how it worked, even though I myself was unsure. I took the condom and walked out onto the deck, and hid it under a computer desk there. The group was outside quickly after, and a few of them were going out on the water to go fishing. The next thing I remember in the dream is a woman "swimming" back towards the dock (this woman I believed to be a very good friend's mother, someone I've known for 16 years-extremely wealthy family, I feel close to them, but distant in some ways as I've gotten older). Except, she wasn't exactly swimming, she was kind of shooting through the water at warp speed and popped up at the deck I was standing on. Following behind her were thousands or more fish, dead fish, floating on the top of the water and drawn to the deck almost as if by a magnet attached to this woman. I asked how they had fished, and somehow (I don't remember who told me or if I just knew) understood that they had used a method of fishing that was controversial, possibly illegal. It was a weapon that exploded under water but sent out shrapnel to catch all the fish in a several mile radius.

The next thing I remember in the dream was a barge of junk that had been uprooted from the deep sea in the fishing process. At the top of the clump of objects floating in the water were several old, classic cars. As the barge of junk approached the deck, everything was becoming coated in this whiteness. Almost like spray foam that insulates windows, but it was covering everything. As I noticed this whiteness covering the barge of things, I was walking across it. It had formed a sort of large boat. As I was walking across it, I met my father (my waking life father), and we were looking at the old cars, walking from each one to another. I remember thinking I'd like to preserve one for him, possibly with paper-mache. As I walked back onto the deck, I approached a man from the group holding a paper. I asked what it was, and he told me it was a map that he'd commissioned to be made, but it was a secret. He showed me the map, and explained that there were 3 hidden rooms under the sea, and he'd had enough information to work with a mapmaker to find the coordinates. The map had to be a secret, because he would have been in trouble with everyone else if they'd known he'd done this. Suddenly, the man was no longer there and I was holding the map. As I noticed all the other people around, I quickly went to hide the map under the same computer desk on the deck as before, except it was also now covered in the white foam like the barge of sea junk. I hid the map next to the condom I'd earlier hid there. And that is when I remember awaking in my bed, and I grabbed the journal feeling an urgent need to write it down, that there was significance to it. When I re-read what I'd written, I only remembered half, and I barely remember writing it. It felt as though I was in a half-waking space...

Carla's thoughts: As usual with guest dreams, I will think about Elizabeth's dream as if it were my own and hope that it will inspire her to look at the images carefully to ferret out their meaning for her. Only the dreamer can figure out what her dream means, and that's because the images in a dream can mean completely different things to different people. I'm afraid there's no getting around the hard work of figuring out your own dreams.

In my version of Elizabeth's dream, the house represents my Self, the totality of who I am. While I am comfortable in this Self, I don't feel it belongs to me. In other words, I have yet to get in touch with my authentic core. This dream is placing me on course to make that discovery.

The sea is a birth metaphor: my rebirth will take place here. However, as with most of the images in this dream, the sea has contradictory meanings. Yes, it is the place of my rebirth, but it is also the place that obscures the feelings and experiences that make that rebirth a difficult one.

The young boy represents a part of myself that I'm deeply ambivalent about. I feel obligated to integrate, or unite with (have sex with) this aspect of myself, but at the same time this assimilation is distasteful to me (I don't feel it's the right thing to do), and I'm not ready for it (he's not mature.) A condom is something that prevents the union of sperm and egg, and here it symbolizes the barrier to finding out what my union with this young part of myself would bring to fruition. I temporarily avoid the problem by going outside (At least I'm in the process of airing the issue) and placing the impediment (the condom) in my subconscious (under the computer, or thinking function).

The other people in this dream represent various aspects of myself. At times they are the parts that hold the views of a disapproving society, but some are ready to fish around for what's going on in my depths. A pivotal role is played by the woman who swims back to the dock. With her the ambivalence surfaces again: she is someone I am both close to and distant from. This tells me that the information she symbolizes is getting close to consciousness even though I might want to keep it at a distance. Her wealth symbolizes the immensity of my potential.

This process is moving too quickly for my comfort. (She shoots through the water.) She comes from below the surface, and what she brings up is scary and distasteful. Water represents the flow of emotion, and dead fish, according to Tony Crisp, can symbolize the “ non-expression of basic urges.” The magnetic quality of this woman emphasizes the duality of attraction and repulsion, the same ambivalence that we saw earlier with my feelings about my potential sexual union with the young boy. Again I see that something isn't right: the fish (the basic instincts) have been caught in a way that is not only controversial but possibly illegal.

What was murky is bubbling up into enlightenment (the foam with its white color). The underwater explosion that results in foamy whiteness is also evocative of a male orgasm. Cars represent our “drives.” The classic cars take me back to the past, perhaps to a time of my life when one of those drives, the one that results in a male orgasm, would have seemed to me an overwhelming thing that covers (obscures?) everything. I meet my father (the holder of the society's values) and we walk around looking at the cars (drives). Why do I want to give him a paper mache car? Am I trying to make sex drives less substantial, transforming them from the steel of a classic car to the kind of paper children use in craft projects? This hints that the child part of myself does not want to accept adult sexuality. Or perhaps it doesn't want to accept its own (the child's) awareness of that sexuality.

Then I meet the man with the secret map. He is the part of me that is sorting out these old secrets of my Psyche. There are 3 hidden rooms under the sea (in my unconscious). Again we have the unacceptable, the thing I think I'm not supposed to acknowledge. (The mapmaker would be in trouble if it were known he was giving me the route to this secret world.) The map, now covered in the white foam, is stored next to the condom. The various things that I've deemed unacceptable have been dredged up from my depths and are now in one place. I can take them out and look at them when I am ready to: I'm the one who's put them here. These things, hidden right under the computer desk (consciousness) are now very close to the surface. At some point I'll be comfortable taking them out into the fresh air of the deck.