A Short Dream
Late last week a friend and I worked through a number of dreams. Three of them were short paragraphs, two were about a page and two were two pages or more. We had a few hours to work through the dreams so we thought we’d start with the short dreams, knock them out quickly then move on to the longer ones. I read the dreams, we started working through the process of applying interpretation principles and an hour and a half later we hadn’t moved past the three short dreams. As soon as we thought we had it the answer evaporated. We worked some more, trying to sneak up on the meaning of the three short dreams, knowing they were tied together, but the meaning eluded us once more. Time after time after time again the meaning seemed to be close but remained just out of our reach.
We did the only thing we could do. We called the dreamer to review the dreams. Lo and behold we found out that there were some crucial points of the dream missing. We were working through the dreams from what I remembered the dreamer saying and weren’t able to nail down the interpretation because parts of the dream were missing. Once we got the missing parts it still took some time, ( i worked through the dream another two hours by myself after my friend left), but I finally tied everything together and called the dreamer.
This whole experience got me thinking. It seems that the longer I do dream work and the more I learn, I realize just how much more there is to learn. In the dream classes I teach i rail against fledgling interpreters making assumptions as they work through dreams, and I made one of the worst assumptions of all — I assumed that if a dream is short that it is not only easy to work through, but that it is fairly limited in what it can communicate to the dreamer. Was I ever wrong.
As we worked through this dream meaning seem to spring up everywhere, and on top of those meanings possible meanings appeared. Let me give you an example from one of the dreams.
In the first of the short dreams the dreamer and her husband were driving on a literal straight and narrow road. The road was just wide enough for their car to fit, half the tires were off the road and half were on, without tumbling down sharp cliffs on each side. On the road in front of them were sliced beets. As they were driving the dreamer thought when we drive over the beets they won’t be perfectly round anymore.
At first, we explored what beets mean to the dreamer. Then we focused some more on the beets, and soon got so caught up by the oddity of the dreamer’s concern with the beets that wouldn’t be round any more after they were driven over that we missed several obvious things. First, the dreamer and her husband were in a high place and had an excellent vantage point of sight. Second, the well rounded foundation they are driving on ceases to be well rounded as they go forward. Third, and most importantly, it’s a metaphor that says that in part of the dreamer’s journey she’ll be known on a much deeper level than she’s currently known.
As you can see, not only is this short dream filled with meaning but the meaning has great depth. Layers and layers of depth can found in short snippets of a dreams like this. The lesson I learned about a short dream has convinced me all the more that there is so much, even to short dreams, that it will more than likely take a lifetime to unravel all the mysteries.
EB