I woke up at six am, but decided to sleep a bit more and when I woke up again after an elaborate dream, it was eight am. It is this dream I want to report and give it my interpretation. It will be a good example of how a puzzling dream carries a meaning once it is ‘worked on’ and how to do this work.
The dream was as follows:
I am going through some old socks sorting and stuff. One of my scouts [I was scout master around 1980] comes up to me with a query about games. I mention to him that board games here are surprisingly similar to the ones of the old country.
He says that his problem is about the electronics. I know some one who could help you and we go to look him up. He is also a scout and I know the family H. [in real life years ago now]. When we come up to the parental house, the front looks like no one is home. We go through the gravel around to the back, but no one is there either and the back patio door is closed. I decide to try it and as I open it there are my Mother and Father! The scout disappears after this.
I am flummoxed! ‘They must have come early’ I say to my self, also surprised that they would be at this family H. house and not my own. I approach my Mother to embrace her and to give her a kiss. However, she is huge and I only reach her midriff and kiss her there.
She is also enormous in extend and I cannot reach around her either. ‘You have grown a lot’, I say to her. My Dad plays this down. ‘I used to bend down in order to kiss her’ is my reply. ‘She must have been laying down’, my Dad - all in the dream - replies. ‘I know the difference between lying down and standing up’ I reply dismissively at being told such nonsense. My mother does not communicate or respond in any way during this encounter.
I know the difference between lying down and standing up
The scene now shifts to the indoors, where the family H. sits around an oblong table. At the head of it sits an expressionless father figure with a small son to his right. There are two non descript figures behind the table from where I stand. There is no talking or communication taking place. I leave and as I do so I notice the number fortyone (41) on the lapel of my Dad’s jacket. At this point this the dream ends and I wake up.
Comments:
At first I am inclined to forget about such an unlikely series of events as the dream presented. My parents died in 1996 and my Mother was a bit heavy, but never formidable dimensions like in the dream. But trying as I did, I kept mulling over the dream scenario, because it did have energy. Actually as I think of it now - writing - the energy is mostly with the figure of my Mother, my Dad has some and the rest of the figures none, except the early scout.
The other thought that kept my attention, was that this dream could be related to my insight of yesterday regarding the ’First connection’ and the events in the course of my life. Is this dream giving me something I need to know about my life, I wondered. If that is true and I dismiss the dream, then the process that started yesterday will peter out. That much I knew and it turned my attention to discerning the meaning of the dream.
Interpretation process:
While still puzzled by the formidable size of ‘my mother’, I kind of looked around and noticed that number 41 in my recollection. That is his - my Dad’s- age, it came to me. My Dad is forty one in this scene, well since he was borne in 1908, that makes it the year 1949 and that fixes my age at twelve (12) in the summer of 1949.
That is the time I had two unusual experiences of awareness as I had been recollecting yesterday about my ‘course of life events’. I have mentioned those events a long time ago and may again later, but not here.
My attention now returned to the H. family. In real life there is the son who still lives to this day, in the basement of his mother’s house. This makes the connection to the ‘formidable mother’ from who it is difficult to get away.
My age of twelve - 1949 - is the very time a young boy has to make that move away from the mother. Not easy to do, as this dream shows me and not every one does so successfully, which serves me as reminder not to underestimate the mother’s influence in my own life even today at my age of seventy seven (77) :-)!
This ends my interpretation of the dream, but it does not mean I’ll forget it right away. A notion lingers that there is still some further assimilation work for me to do, with respect to the formidable nature of the mother appearance in this dream.
A word of caution rises up as I think about this. It is that the mother symbol has archetypal aspects that no individual can assimilate. Attempting such an assimilation anyway may lead to being overwhelmed - possessed - by its collective cultural aspects. That is, becoming dedicated to a relating mother cause, without living one’s own life.
This results in a loss of control over one’s own life, having to express these overpowering - emotive - aspects of the mother symbol as we know it. The inclinations to nurture and be comforted by such emotive energies should be resisted. However, by acknowledging their validity we can then bring them into our own life through making our own choices to address aspects that we need to express as a person.
I think I just gave my self a prescription of how to deal with the remaining energies that this dream brought into my awareness.
<11:29am including a short coffee break and with editing 11:59am.
