Here’s the situation. You find yourself, at the start of the dream, out in the open in a busy, public place. It’s a place of business for some (the hotel owners and staff, and business people who stay there), and a place of privacy and retreat for others (it is a country hotel, after all).
The opening of a dream generally describes the situation your dream is addressing. Here you are simply standing in the forecourt, observing. You seem to be neither a guest nor involved in the business. Just an observer, out in the open, and perhaps even feeling a little vulnerable, since the situation of the woman next door triggers feelings of vulnerability for you.
Does this describe your waking life situation at the time of this dream? Were you assessing your feelings about a business or public situation, or your feelings about your business or public life? Were you feeling a little vulnerable or exposed? Were you sometimes the businessperson, doing your public thing, and sometimes the private person, looking for time out and retreat? Were you assessing the balance, wondering about protecting a sense of vulnerability?
The business featured in the dream is a hotel. A hotel is a place to stay for a short while – it is transient – in contrast to a home, like the house next door in the dream, which is a place to stay for a longer while. At the time of this dream, did your business life feel transient, yet did your home life or privacy feel compromised by this?
Following the opening of a dream, the next part generally describes the problem or question to be addressed. This is the part of your dream where you notice the woman next door and you immediately put yourself in her shoes and see a problem: the problem is, how can she (you) cope with being so exposed to the public without feeling vulnerable? In fact, you see this as intolerable, a problem without solution.
You notice the low wall separating the house from the hotel, but you don’t come up with the obvious solution, in the dream, of building a higher wall. Clearly this simple solution would give the woman absolute privacy. You perceive a problem about her lack of privacy in the garden, but she could build a completely walled garden, a secret garden for total privacy, couldn’t she?
The reason you didn’t see this solution in the dream is that you haven’t seen this solution in waking life, or have chosen not to apply it. This is good, really. It would be easy enough to go into total retreat, to wall yourself off from business or from your public involvement, to protect your privacy. But would this really do you any good? Isn’t it better to face feelings of vulnerability, question why you have these feelings, understand them, and find a way to work with them, to strengthen your confidence in public situations or in business rather than to cope by totally removing yourself from this opportunity to grow?
Notice that it is the area out the front of each building that has your focus – the forecourt and the front garden. This is about your upfront image, your public profile and your feelings of vulnerability around dealing with the upfront and public side of things. So it’s about image. And that’s why you couldn’t see yourself in the woman’s shoes, having her private ‘home’ self exposed to public scrutiny. Do your concerns about how you are seen in public really go that deep? What do you fear losing if people could see who you are in private?
Note these are your feelings and fears as you stand in that dream forecourt observing the woman. The woman herself does not appear to be so concerned. She has a solution. Her response to the low wall is not to build a higher wall but to build a pergola – a partial screen. She can retreat into privacy when she wants, and she can also keep an eye on the business or public world. She can be seen when she wants to be seen.
This is your dream’s offering of a solution to your situation. Clearly you don’t want to distance yourself from the business or from the public, no matter what you may say in your waking life. The word ‘hate’ is a strong clue. You thought, in your dream, “how I’d hate to live in a house like that …” Wherever there is a strong emotion (hate) it usually indicates an inner struggle with the opposite position. We hate a tendency that we have so much that we do everything we can to deny it. You have a tendency to allow yourself to be vulnerable to work, business, the public. You hate it. Your dream says, “Maybe it’s okay. Maybe it’s not. But look, this is how it is, and here’s a great solution, a way of staying connected while working on your vulnerability, finding the right balance between public and private, business and retreat, transience (change) and staying put (status quo).”
In your dream, a truck ‘invades’ the driveway, delivering the materials for the woman to build what she needs to effect her solution. A truck is a work vehicle. So there’s a sense here of responding to work by making a change, extending herself (pergola) in a way that brings balance.
It’s how you respond to the busy-ness and the business that counts.
Examine your feelings of transience more closely too. Is your current situation transient? Are you extricating yourself from a business or public situation? Is this why you need to ‘live next door’ for a while, be open to dealing with stuff? Can you look upon this time in your life as transient, brimming with opportunity and change, taking retreat and sanctuary in a pergola kind of way while you need to remain open to the public situation until you can establish a new base when the transition is complete?
Consult me confidentially about your dream.
