Pushed into a Pit

Your dream will give you some clues about the origin of the issue it deals with. Can you spot what they are in this dream?
The Dream: A difficult aunt who I remember well from my childhood is in charge of two little girls. I expect that when I find them the girls will be crying, since that the effect Aunt A usually had on people. But no, they seem fine.

I'm at a snobby art event in a magnificent old museum. Several pieces of art that I own, and one or two that I painted, are hung in a very long gallery where a crowd is lined up to enter. Inside, the elaborately carved wooden steps and walls make the exhibit look like a medieval recreation.

I hear some admiration aimed in my direction but am disappointed to realize it's directed toward the pieces I own, not the ones I created. As we wind our way around the attractive labyrinth, a woman gets into an altercation with another and pushes her down, off the steps, into a side pit.

Interpretation: The dream tells me that my issue is rooted way back in childhood with several clues. Not only are there some little girls, there are two of them. There are also two kinds of my art on display: one or two (two yet again) that I painted and some that I own. Two women have an altercation. So this issue probably first surfaced during the pre-verbal part of my life, around the time I was two years old.

The medieval decor puts the issue in the distant past (of my life), and the carved wood evokes a pattern being imposed on a malleable surface. The dream dwells on images—paintings--because the child's self-image is being created at this time.

Aunt A was a childhood difficulty, but probably not the cause of this issue since the two little girls are okay with her. So perhaps some of her traits, shared by my parents, are the core of the problem. Both parents had very high expectations—and of course that is a good thing, overall, but I might have gotten the impression at an early age that I would not be able to achieve what they expected. The self I was in the process of creating (in the dream the images I painted) was not what was liked. What was liked were the images I had bought (the imposed persona).

I wander through this labyrinth of created and imposed selves, the various “pieces” of myself, thinking I'm in an attractive place until an abrupt altercation changes the mood. One “self” pushes another into a pit. One of the selves has been pushed aside. I wonder which one?

The Women and Children

Dream image: Three women in empire dresses and turbans hold two babies.

Interpretation: All babies are our babies, the children of our common humanity. All women are sisters. In this dream the women of the world unite to nurture the children of the world. I hope this image is precognitive!

What's Going on Here?

The Dream: I hear a very young child, 2 to 3 years old, screaming in a bathroom. I fear she is being molested. I bang on the door, saying I will call the cops. I push the door open. She is standing next to the bathtub, fully clothed. There is a man with her. I leave them, and make no report. Then I wonder if I've been remiss: I should have checked her for evidence of whether or not she had been molested.

Interpretation: This dream was very disturbing; the child was screaming in terror. It seemed she was not being harmed, but I didn't take any action to make sure this was the case. The dream was triggered by a snippet of a television show I'd watched the night before on PBS about a Chinese woman who had been raped and then abandoned by her family. I remember thinking how typical it is to blame the woman for her own misfortune. In a book I'm reading, Trollope's Vicar of Bullhampton, a young woman is ostracized for “prostitution.” It seems to me, the reader, that she was either seduced and abandoned or raped.

The child's scream is the scream of womankind at the injustice of centuries of abuse. Her youth emphasizes her innocence. The water of the bathtub represents the water of the Unconscious, where these terrors lie submerged. I turn away, just as society turns away, from what is clearly wrong, but inconvenient to acknowledge and difficult to deal with.

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.