It’s always good to repeat the basics in dreams, because it’s easy to get stuck in the interpretation. Especially when dreams are emotionally loaded, and you automatically want to bring those involved in the dream, into the facts of the interpretation. Number one rule when working with dreams is to always begin on the first level of interpretation. You know, that level where everything in the dream is you. I always do this, even if I can see the big picture and even if I can recognize a drama from the past. And the reason is simple, at first I have to see ME and MY reactions, my blind spots and my responsibility for my own feelings. Before I turn my eyes to other participants in the dream I have to touch base. Just like you have to build the ground to the house first – before setting up the walls.
- A house is a building - a construction, a built form - which the dream symbolizes a mental, physical (or emotional) form, a like a pattern or condition you enter or leave. You may also say that this related the mental body, where thoughts build up and reinforce emotions.
- People in the building are aspects of the dreamer, belonging to that specific pattern the building or room is symbolizing. Other people occurring in the dream are always aspects of the dreamer on level one, they are never individuals visiting memories on level one. That belongs to level two of dream interpretation. People we know in the awake life are known aspects in the dream. Unknown persons are unknown aspects. Aspects we are not aware of yet, or was active or passive in the past and then forgotten. Perhaps even they are aspects brought with the dreamer from earlier lives.
- Men are Active Aspects, as in being Forward / Giving - doing
- Women are Passive aspects, as in being patient - Receiving and in stillness.
- Left brain hemisphere – is masculine - as in logical and mental
- Right brain hemisphere – is feminine – as in intuitive and emotional
- Right side of the body – is ruled by the left hemisphere and is therefore masculine and active
- Left side of the body – is ruled by the right hemisphere and is therefore feminine and passive
- Right side next to something is - intuitive / mysterious
- Left side next to something is - logical / rational
- Windows distinguish what is in the structure or shape, from the more natural non-affected state – that is symbolized by being outdoors.
- Being outdoors is to be relaxed and more natural, not influenced by thought patterns or modes.
- Looking through the window means seeing through illusions, see clearly.
- Doors lead to new thinking patterns (rooms) and also lead to being more natural (outside).
- Underground environment, basements, tunnels and digging, are usually aimed at the subconscious..
- ..as well as flying, may be possible to associate with having an overview and to let go and let yourself float out.
- A Forest is preferably seen as the unconscious, as the forest may contain unknown surprises.
- A car is the vehicle in which the self / soul travels and can thus be seen as soul travelling.
- Animals are natural aspects of the soul.
Do always look at the details in the dream in its natural context. What is it, where is it used, how does it make you feel, what are your personal experiences of it?
Everything is able to be interpreted as being something having to do with you, because that’s the nature of micro- and macro cosmos. As above so below.
I am writing a book, which of course involves dreaming, and when looking for a specific dream theme in my personal archive yesterday, I stumbled upon an old and pretty significant one, that I wanted to show you in the first level context:
“I find myself in a warm sunny yellow place. The light is glowing like the summer evening sun. I am standing outside a house. This is the house of my dreams. On a chair outside the door lays the clothes I had before I bathed in a lake together with a group of people. I can hear their voices faintly on a distance.
Around the house are big areas with grass and gravel paths. I understand this is some kind of time portal. And I become aware of a situation I have been in where I have been treated badly. I feel that I want to sort the situation out. The environment is still the same but it is now another time, and I see myself putting on a shorthaired wig with brownish golden hair, whose colours are misty and lingers in the air when I move. I put it on in defiance since I know I am supposed to leave the old, and not sort it out. I watch myself in a mirror and I have light yellowish gold coloured eyebrows and red blond light colours.
I come to different stations where I enter situations and act from the strength I have today. The last station is a classroom where my acting is discussed. My old classmate and antagonist K has the word, and he says that the one who has done this, knows it was wrong, feels it inside. I nod my head quietly and think that he wants to say that he acted wrong back then, against me.
But then he says that it doesn’t prove anything that I go back living this through physically again. Because it’s the course of nature that is the foursome. I realize that he all the time, meant that I was the one acting wrong. That I was wrong coming back to this situation, standing up for myself. I can see from one aspect that he is right, because it’s not the physical that is the proof. I really need to think this over. I look at my old Czechoslovakian gold tableware and see that it has become a little cracked, but that doesn’t bother me since it’s widely used by myself.”
So what about this dream then? Let’s go through the interpretation on level one, and there I find myself in this warm sunny place, where the light is glowing in a golden colour. The I in the dream is the watcher, the soul having a life experience. The golden sunny colours are to be found in the solar plexus, and the solar plexus is about self-confidence and the self-image.
Even though this dream is old (16 years) I remember that the house was yellow and that it was standing in the western quarter. And this house was the house of my dreams - in this dream, meaning the mental construction that the house represented - something I really was attached to.
A dream in a dream is dreamed by the soul, and this means manifestation of life. So, this special mental construction; yellow like solar plexus, was about what had been quite a big piece of my life. And the reason that I approached it walking towards west, the quarter for death and rest – was that I wanted to sort out the old situation when I had been treated bad. I wanted to end its impact.
I have been bathing in a lake together with unknown persons, whose voices are still to be heard in a distant. Water is related to emotions, being moved and following the flow. The closeness to water means having contact with feelings, and bathing is more related to be surrounded by and letting oneself be wrapped up in them, being in feelings without resistance.
The the fact that the aspects being there in the lake with me, are not following me to the solar plexus thought form, means those aspects belong only to the closeness to feelings – something not occurring in the solar plexus light. So, before the house I am standing alone.
The fact that my clothes are placed on the chair like still waiting for me there, suggests that I had been there before, and this place was also kind of a portal to which it is possible to return to many times. As in always ending up here.
I watch myself putting on a wig, which means taking on a role. The wig has tones of dark gold, and the colour of the eyebrows has golden tone too. Everything is covered in the solar plexus energies.
So, covered with those significant energies I enter different situations, still being just me myself and I. Then this old classmate shows up. A very specific one too, and here I would really be tempted to jump into conclusions about his participating having to do with his own need to apologize for some things that took place during school time. But no, no projections on level one. This aspect was an active one, and it had a say about my acting. Of course, since the discussion in my mental patterns is about me on this level.
So what was it that this active aspect of me was saying?
The one (me) who had done this (going back to the situation) knows it was wrong. But why was it wrong? Here it is time to take a closer look at this known active aspect. When getting to understand an aspect who is known, who is symbolized by a person from real life, you have to start from how your relation is or have been to that person, because that is what this aspect is representing. Your aspects are not only tolerant or loving towards you, they can be very judging and even mean, and this specific aspect of mine is both judging and disparaging.
This means I really have to pay attention to what this aspect is saying or doing, and it was speaking in the midst of many. My unknown aspects. Like an advocate or prosecutor speeches before a jury. To convince them to share his opinion.
And this is a place to which I return to sort out the fact that I was treated bad by the person who symbolizes my active aspect, and who was still treating me bad from the inside when this dream occurred. This aspect of me says that the soul is wrong returning to this situation, wrong standing up for itself - and that it knows that. That is how bad influence works from the inside.Trying to judge and disparage the decisions of the soul. It works just the way autoimmune diseases do, by attacking the own system. Attacking the self-confidence and obscuring the self-picture.
I said I had to think about what he said, in the dream. And the reason I really had to think it over was the following choice of words, that my subconscious had given this particular aspect:
“it doesn’t prove anything that I go back living this through physically again. Because it’s the course of nature that is the foursome. “
Back to the reason I found this dream. I was looking for the foursome, because in the book I am writing about the meaning of that term which have to do with stigmatizing the feminine. What does then the course of naturemean? Not to be interfered by human actions, leaving things to their own solutions. And what would it mean if interpreting that specific meaning?
Nature means what comes naturally, and nature as in forest means the unknown.
Unknown as in occult and hidden, would then be left to its own destiny.
Occult and hidden aims at the shadow, which is exactly the theme of stigmatizing when it comes to the foursome in my work. Shadow work in order to liberate the shackled part of the feminine.
But here on the first level it is about the dreamer, and the sentence given from my judging active aspect was to leave the shadow to its destiny, and that was a sentence built upon self-judging and fear. A bad habit to diminish oneself coming from a painful experience. But the end of the dream, ties things up in a beautiful way:
“I look at my old Czechoslovakian gold tableware and see that it has become a little cracked, but that doesn’t bother me since it’s widely used by myself.”
This tableware is quite a beautiful piece with Coffee cups and saucers, dessert dishes, a large coffee pot a small milk jug and a sugar bowl. With ornate of a small golden leave pattern, and created in old Czechoslovakia before the split of the country.
The symbolism is here that this is something valuable, a composite formationneeding all its pieces to be complete. It is all shining with the golden light that the dream is introduced with, and which is returning when the dreamer is watching itself in a mirror. The golden light of the evening sun; the colour of the western quarter. The quarter in which the yellow house was seated in, the place for learning and letting go.
The valuable tableware is a little cracked, but that is because it is well used, like it should be. This means it was right after all to return to the place of the old wound. Not to wallow in self-pity, but in order to learn and understand, to be able to move on - strengthened.
If I had not been so determined about interpreting dreams on the first level, also in those cases when the things I am searching for belongs to another context, I for sure had got stuck in the dualistic quest with my old classmate on one side and me on the other. Looking at him as the feared one, and me through his eyes; the way I experienced he looked at me back then in school. If doing that I would have been stuck in the loop. Living it through again – without thinking it through.
But this time I had left the emotions behind me, I had already taken the bath where I let myself be wrapped up in them. Then I almost in a ceremonial way adorned myself in golden colours, to wrap myself in the energies of ending this mind game. The active aspect was my watcher of the threshold and I really DID think this through when working with this dream now again, since it had been taken to another level (through my job writing my book).
The book is written in three layers where I weave together my own history with the history of the divine feminine - and the common and connecting thread are my dreams. I really am certain of that all is interwoven. That the past and the future is connected in the now, and that our dreams gives us the missing pieces of the puzzle. If I hadn’t been working on exactly this subject in my book I hadn’t found this dream right now, and then I hadn’t been working it through again – and if so – I hadn’t found a really important clue that I needed in my writing.
This is how it works. THIS is the course of nature, following the golden thread of synchronism, having faith in that everything will be as it should be – if you do your part. If you let your old Czechoslovakian gold tableware get some cracks in the brims. Being happy about it because it means you are really living your truth.
And when talking about synchronism.. I took a break a moment ago to take a walk in the wonderful winter sun, and with the warming sun in my face I pondered upon the symbolism of this tableware being created before Czechoslovakia was divided. Then I passed a house in which window there was a heart divided in two, and after that I crossed a park where someone had painted a heart divided in four pieces (like a foursome) on some electrical box.
What did I figure out from this then?
If perfection was able to reach before the heart was divided in the first place, that particular house of dreams which I obviously returned to repeatedly, also bears the history of what was before that particular solar plexus wound appeared.
Why did I figure that out?
Because in another old dream that I had already found in my archive, containing information of the mysterious foursome, a passive aspect of mine is put before a test which bestows of - the foursome. Here presented as a composite formation built up in four archive piles. The passive aspect gets informed about that the test is about “her entire history”, and she actually replies: “I have to think”, just like I said in the interpreted dream above.
A divided heart means doing things half hearted, not being able to go all in with a full heart. Being shattered and actually kind of both disarmed and disabled. There is a huge difference between having a few cracks and being divided and shattered, especially if there are forces wanting to keep things the way it is, saying it’s the course of nature that things gets divided both once and twice. And that it’s never going to be fixed too. I say no to that, and I know I am right because “the entire history of the lost feminine part”is not supposed to be hidden for eternity.
I am aware of that this way of working with dreams may seem kind of too much and of topic, but it’s not. It’s actually the kind of archaeology we have to be able to do, if we are interested in finding out the truth about who we are and why - on a micro cosmic level, and thereby being able to see the bigger and higher picture - the macro cosmic side of things.
And trust me, this begins with interpreting both nightly and awake dreams on the first level, where you take it all back to yourself without projecting squat. Doing that makes you see things really clear. Because you get used to do your shadow work and deal with your blind spots.
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