Who Did I Leave Behind?

The Dream: I'm about to get into a full car. My brother Greg sits in the spot I traditionally sat in as a child, behind my mother. There's no room for me, so I want Greg to scoot over, but instead he gets out of the car, leaving me to sit next to my friend Polly. Greg now appears to be a child, about 5 or 6, and he's happily playing with a spotlessly clean dog with white fluffy fur. I'm having a hard time seeing him and the dog from where I sit so I shift positions to get a better view.

The car pulls away, leaving the two of them, and I begin to realize this was a vision because I am now aware that Greg has died. I say to Polly, “Did you see Greg?”

“Yes,” she says. I get some comfort from realizing that others have seen him as well.

I want to verify this so I ask her what he looked like. “Like you,” she says. “He is small, with sandy-colored hair.”

“How old is he?” I ask. Has she seen him at a different age?

“About 18,” she says.

“No,” I say. “Greg is very tall, and has dark brown hair and dark skin.” I can't think of how to describe his skin color. It isn't olive, but it isn't fair like mine. “He is pale in the winter, but very dark in the summer. His eyes are very dark brown.”

I'm disappointed that we didn't see the same “Greg;” it takes away from the reality of the “event.”

Interpretation: After we die, what's left of us? I'm having a hard time seeing my brother now that he's gone. The divergent images in the minds of two dream characters imply that our “vision” of the departed is so personal that it might have no relationship to reality whatsoever. I look for comfort from my vision; I want “my” Greg to be real. I soon learn that what I see isn't what Polly sees: he differs in every way.

I've pushed Greg out of the car, in a sense. We, the living, have left him behind. He's no longer going where I'm going. His dog companion in the dream, representing my brother's animal (his earthly, physical self), is white (the original color of death) and idealized. Greg seems happy where he is.

Pomona is Stepped On

The Dream: Someone has changed Pomona, one of my paintings that depicts the goddess of the fruits of the orchard. Five different shoes have been superimposed in the area between her navel and her breasts in a circular, asymmetrical arrangement. Pomona herself has been “pushed back;” blurred until she's a ghost of her former self, and I almost can't make out who she is. In fact, she takes on the name of another goddess from a different painting: Taera, who represents the earth.

We can't see the goddess clearly, but we do clearly see the shoes! I begin to like this alternative rendition of the painting; I think it's more contemporary and mysterious.

Clark and I go down a very steep sand dune to to the sea, and I'm not sure I'll be able  to climb back up. Clark tells me this is the “easy” way. On an adjoining sand dune I see a large menagerie of animals: emu, wolf, raccoon, and many others, charging up the hill. Nature has been restored, and I feel that the animals will not threaten us if they are given their own space.

Interpretation: Pomona is the goddess who represents nature's bounty, and Taera represents the earth. Both the earth and its bounty have been stepped on and obscured by our consumerist culture. I am so used to this that I can no longer see the goddesses who represent our crucial relationship with the environment. I have come to like and accept things the way they are.

I get to the sea (the unconscious) where I see things as they should be. The animals have an uphill battle, but they prevail and nature is restored. The dream tells me that it is important to honor the processes of the planet and get our priorities in order. Only then can we live in harmony with nature (the animals).

Time to Get Rid of Tired Old Ideas

The Dream: My uncle S is a very old, decrepit man. He walks bent over and is housebound, yet his spirit is domineering, his voice is strong, and he's calling the shots. My daughter, about 5 years old, needs a home and I've “placed” her with him. She comes to me saying he's kicked her out; he has someone older, an adolescent girl who can do chores. I wonder if he has a dirty old man's interest in an attractive teenager.

I realize I need to find a new home for my child, but resent this intrusion into my work-a-day world. I have so many projects—now this! But I soon realize what my true priority should be: taking care of my child.

Interpretation: This uncle represents the stern, unattractive  side of my animus, my own internalized patriarch. Forty years of feminism have weakened him, but his voice remains strong, and he has made no place for the feminine except as a convenience (a doer of chores) or a sex object. Of course I'm everything in my dream, so neither have I! At first I am too preoccupied by the busyness of contemporary life to pay much attention, but the dream tells me that this should be a priority. I need to care for the vulnerable (young child) part of myself, my inner femininity, and the first step will be to stand up to my own faulty conceptions of masculinity and femininity.

The Bitter Pill

The Dream: I am having stomach trouble and take some pills to alleviate it. Without reading the directions I decide that if one is good, five are better, so I take a handful. Then I read the packet's label that warns to take no more than one. I quickly spit out the oblong white pills. Most are whole, some are in pieces as if partially chewed. I hope that what I ingested will have mounted to no more than one pill.

Interpretation: I am swallowing the bitter pill of my brother's sudden death, an event that is so very hard to accept, to take in. It's too much to swallow, and dangerous to do so. The stomach pain symbolizes my emotional pain.

Death of the Attached Baby

The Dream: I am in a dune-like area. The sea is implied, but not seen. There is a modern road through the dunes, with a sidewalk and the sort of empty bus stop often seen in the suburbs. I wander here for a while, waiting for one of my husband’s colleagues. He works at a nearby high-tech scientific installation which will soon be dismissing its employees for the day.

It’s 5:00 o’clock, and the lab workers file out of the simple, modern building, about seven stories tall. I am with a woman who has just had a baby. She resembles an artist friend. She is obviously thrilled with her baby, and at first all seems okay; but it soon becomes clear that the baby is still physically attached to her mother—through the mother’s hand. They share capillaries. Then the shocker: we realize the baby has died.

Some medical technicians come and take the baby away. They wrap the baby in newspaper secured with twine; they throw her off a dump truck into a garbage bin. I am appalled. Why wasn’t the baby returned to the family for a respectful and loving funeral?

Back to the mother: She is now attended by her sister, a plain-looking German woman with short cropped strawberry blond hair. The sister is very upset and doesn’t feel the mother is adequately distraught. I know the mother is upset, but in a less effusive way than her sister. I put my arm around the German woman and walk her a few steps away, trying both to comfort her and to keep her from making a bad situation worse.

Interpretation: In the beginning of the dream I am in an intuitive, unconscious state (the sea, the dunes). But progress soon asserts itself in the form of a road, sidewalk, bus stop, and high-tech laboratory. This symbolically plots my early life, my personal progress between the ages of five and seven, which are the two numbers in the dream. During this time I moved from the idyll of a happy 5-year-old child living in a beautiful rural setting to the challenge of starting school and being subjected to the discipline and socialization that entails. At this age we still hold our mother’s hand. That the baby is not completely detached from the mother reflects the wrench that I felt on starting this new phase of life.

Then the dream veers into the present. How do I know? The mother resembles one of my current artist friends: this tells me the issue here is not entirely in the past. The baby, representing my authentic artist self at a critical juncture of my life (between 5 and 7), is carted away by technicians (the school system) and dumped. The dead baby’s crude disposal reminds me of a scene from the movie Amadeus. When Mozart dies he is given a pauper’s burial. The reusable casket opens at one end like a dump truck and his unsheltered body thuds into an open pit, a common grave. How could my baby artist expect any better?

The mother (my adult artist, the compromiser) accepts the death of her own potential with an equanimity that baffles her sister, the German woman, whose geographical proximity to the home of the Austrian Mozart tells me her opinion is important. But in my role as Dream Ego, I try my best to shut her up and keep her from making waves.

Yet again, the voice that seems most difficult in my dream is the one I need to listen to.