Most of today’s post was written a week ago. It was written in a moment of excitement as I poured thoughts into a bowl and began sculpting with the clay I’ve spent a long time working with. It was interesting to hear, and read, the comments I received.
Rereading what I wrote, I feel like an artist whose marble statue was perfect, but on second review, notices all the rough edges and excess material. I now take on the role of editor / reviewer in addition to my role of writer / creator, which is a difficult balance.
Is it possible that I change too much, ruining the entire sculpture? Of course. What I write today may be offensive and boring to the me that wrote this a week ago. I appreciate your efforts in listening to what I have to say.
Somewhere inside of me is a jewel, created through time and pressure like all other jewels. It lives largely as a jumble in my mind, but sometimes I hold it in my hands. These have been rare and truly glorious moments for me. Finding the capacity to simply exist as this jewel is the challenge I’ve undertaken; and I appreciate your being a passenger on this journey.
For part 1 of The Dream Call Reality, please click here.
Playing with the Elephant at a Distance
Dream Moods A-Z Dream Dictionary describes the elephant symbol as such: “To see an elephant in your dream, indicates that you need to be more patient or more understanding of others. Or perhaps there is a memory that you are holding on to for too long. You need to let go of the past. The elephant is also a symbol of power, strength, faithfulness and intellect.” For a long time I didn’t really like this definition. To me, the elephant symbolized one thing: wisdom.
For a long time after I had the Pond of the Damned dream, I thought of the elephant in the bottom of the pond as my wisdom, somewhere buried under tons of seemingly murky emotion (the water), almost untouchable and unreachable because of the threat of damnation and alligators. But at least I could see it – I knew it was out there. I only had to figure out how to get in touch with it.
My waking mind and subconscious were working on it. Some months after the Pond of the Damned dream, I had another dream with this elephant. In this dream, I was in a beautiful park. The sky was blue and there were very tall trees. As I was walking through the park, I saw a family of elephants walking in a row, each holding onto the tail of the elephant in front of it with its trunk.
They were a ways off, and I was intrigued by what I saw. I started to approach them when I noticed a gigantic, and very deep, pool full with clear blue water. In the middle of the pool was a giant round fountain, spraying water into the air.
There was a crowd of people standing around the pond, looking into it. I approached and looked down. Deep in the pool, small like I’d seen it before, was the elephant. Oddly, he had a computer with him and he was playing a video game with people standing near me.
My dream at this point becomes a little blurry in my memory. I know I was waiting for my turn to play with the elephant; I know that he was playing some form of a 2-person fighting game; and that he was absolutely demolishing everyone who came up against him, me included. I wanted more of an opportunity to continue playing with him; but others were scrounging for this opportunity as well.
At some point, the playing of this game shifted to the car of a commuter train, no longer at the side of the pool, but moving down the tracks – possibly at a point late in the day or early in the morning (when the sun is bright but the sky is dark). This shift was seemless, and at some point while this was going on, I woke up.
For me, this meant that no longer was my wisdom spending its time at the bottom of the Pond of the Damned. It was in clean, fresh water. And although it was still too far for me to reach physically, we were in communication, if only briefly, despite the craving of others. I knew it was powerful, and I wanted more of its attention.
Dreams are powerful; they can provide us with insight and access to a person inside of ourselves that we normally don’t have access to. This insight can provide guidance, inspiration, or a complete shift of who we normally are.
And I don’t mean just the dreams while we sleep; I mean our waking dreams as well. If you talk to someone, and ask them about what kind of world do they want to live in, you can learn a lot about them by their response. What do they dream about?
Last week, I formulated an interesting question: “What would you say about your life if you interpreted it as a dream?”
Our lives are full of symbols that we are so used to that we don’t take the time to consider what they mean from an outside perspective. If I had a dream about a lot of cars, I’d look up what cars mean in a dream dictionary, and try to interpret from there. The dictionary would give me clues as to what it means, and have a better understanding of myself.
However, I don’t often take the opportunity to evaluate what the car means in my waking life. To me, the automobile is essentially, for Americans, a vehicle for our lives. It transports us to where we need to go; depending on its state it can do this effectively or not. It can be clean or dirty, it can be full, it can empty, we can be driving it in complete control, or it could be out of control, or it could be driven by somebody else (or nobody at all).
The car is a perfect metaphor for life. We go about our lives, often getting stuck in traffic, in our cars, either alone or with passengers; most of the time things go as planned, if not a little stressful, and sometimes something scary happens. It could all be over in an instant, and for the most part, we never realize this fact. Sometimes we have an opportunity to get out of our car and try something else on, and sometimes we don’t want to get back into the old car. We want something new, or something different.
To take this interpretation even deeper, I’ll look at the status of my car in comparison to who I am. I have always had a difficulty keeping my car properly maintained by doing things like getting the oil regularly changed and having other regular checkups. This is reflected in how I treat my body through my choice of diet and propensity to run myself ragged.
My cars have always light, nimble, and quick. I tend to be a little aggressive and impulsive in them, and this has not always served me best.
In my car, I have always a large number of receipts, something which I have had particular issues. I save them, but I never do anything with them but create big piles. Sometimes I organize them into neat little piles, and sometime I file them away out of my direct attention, but I still hold onto them.
A receipt is a validation that a particular event occurred - it may say more than that, but it at least has that as an interpretation. For some reason, I want to prove to myself that something has happened. If I dig a little deeper, I see that I am still holding onto receipts as part of something I learned from my ex-wife. In other words, I’m still holding onto her in some way, and that is represented in my way of saving of receipts. This then carries into many areas of my life, but one particular example is in the piles of receipts in my car.
By looking at the symbols that I’ve surrounded myself with, I’m able to learn deeper meanings about who I am. Taking a different perspective of who we are can create a whole new world from which we can come from in our daily lives. This type of analysis is very powerful and we can use this to evaluate ourselves, our families, and our communities and culture. All you have to do is look.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
