Dreams Beyond Interpretation
A few months after I started to study dreams I had a significant dream. I felt something in my ear and as I put my fingers up to my ear I felt something small and hard. I tugged on it and realized that it was the stem of an apple and I pulled an apple out of my ear.
At the time that I had this dream, the interpretation was about my thoughts and the fruit my thoughts were yielding. The morning that I had this dream I woke up and wrote out the short dream. I then studied it and looked at it from all different directions to make sure that I had the correct interpretation. After going over and over it that day I talked about it for a few days and it got lost in the dream journal that I was beginning.
Fast forward three years and I awake another morning with a loud ringing in my ear and pressure building up on the outside of my ear drum. The ringing was so loud that it woke me up. I didn’t like it at all and began to speak against it. The ringing and pressure lasted for a few days and then it was gone as quick as it came.
A few days later I decided to dust off my apple dream and share it with a dream group that I’m facilitating. I was amazed at just how much relevance such a simple dream from a few years before had to my current situation.
The interpretation of the dream was pretty much the same, but the application of the dream had changed dramatically. Just after I shared about my experience with the ringing and the pressure, someone in the group received some insight into the application of the dream to my present situation.
It was simply this: the experience I had a few mornings before can be viewed not only as a negative experience (an attack on my hearing) but as a metaphorical experience as well. It was time for me to hold the fruit of my work and the vision that I’d had for years in my hand. That one statement had an application to my current situation because I am working on a dream book at the time and it gave me the hope and the motivation that I needed in order to move it closer to completion.
The point is simply this: I could apply the dream to the time I had it, as well as to a time three years in the future. And it’s not limited to only that. I have made it a habit to dust of dreams that I’ve had the year before and read through them, not only to keep them alive but to consider what application that they might have to my current situation.