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101 Dreams ...

Interpreted by Jane Teresa Anderson

(Real dreams collected worldwide)

DREAM #22

THE TRAVEL AGENCY

I am working in a travel agency. It is my first day of work. However there is no office environment. It is like a family home. Apart from mixing with the people there – a woman, her husband, and I assume, some older children – the only job that I do is to mow the lawn. There were two steep banks and a section up the middle of them. I was going to ask what my procedures would be the next day so that I would know what I had to do.

The husband had been to a sale and purchased a pair of large iron doors. He was going to clean them up and use them as gates on his semi trailer. An old abandoned low set warehouse had been broken into and we were inspecting the perimeter fence. We saw through the fence where the windows had been broken.

Working with this dream has been disturbing. I meditated on the warehouse, imagining myself going into it. I saw situations of the past that had been very hurtful. Then when I got right into the middle of the warehouse, there was nothing, just darkness. I began to break the walls down in order to open it up. I did this until there was nothing but the floorboards left and sunlight shining down. Then a girl appeared dancing in the middle of the floor. My instinct was that the feelings of the past were just that – past – and I was able to recognise them, but they no longer controlled or paralysed me. I was able to ‘move’ again.

But I am in a situation where I have to respond to selection criteria for a position with the police service and I am absolutely frozen. I have spent so much time trying to write my responses but there is just this complete block, which is incredibly frustrating. The steep banks and path up the middle in the dream remind me of the house I lived in as a child, a police station, and the path was the way into the police office.

I am wondering if it is possible that the dream, the current situation I am working with and my resistance or block is suggesting that the direction would be a backward step and not the way to go for me now. My thoughts about the criteria are that I am trying to give ‘them’ what they want, something I have spent a lifetime doing. Perhaps it is just something I cannot do again. My interpretation of working in a travel agency is that I am exploring ways of being.

INTERPRETATION

You have already done some great work with your dream. Meditating on a dream symbol, opening it up and exploring it often brings up memories and feelings that help provide insight into the dream.

If I were to look only at your dream, I would see the following:

You are contemplating a new situation and your role in it. What appears to be a work issue now seems to be a family issue. (The office environment is more like a family home.) You see your role as one of providing maintenance only (mowing the lawn) rather than one of making any creative progress or getting anywhere (travel procedures). But you do ask that question: what are my procedures for the next day? In other words, the dream moves from stating the situation to looking for solutions.

A fully remembered dream often follows this storyline:

1. The theme or situation
2. The question or problem
3. Actions – possible solutions
4. Resolutions – how the actions play out, given your current beliefs.

So what action does your dream explore? There’s the purchase of the iron doors to be transformed into gates for a semi-trailer.

And the resolution? Could this be the insight (following the action) that the old abandoned warehouse had been broken into? If so, what does this mean?

A warehouse may be a dream pun on ‘aware’ house. Here there is a breakthrough into an awareness of an old feeling of abandonment. It’s as if the next step you are seeking in your new job is given here: to break into and explore a past abandonment.

And the doors/ gates? Iron doors sound very strong. Did the doors guard a building? In your dream they are cleaned up for use on a moving ‘building’ – a semi trailer. If you think back to a past abandonment, would you say you created strong doors to close yourself off from your feelings around the abandonment? Even to shut away the memory itself?

What a breakthrough, to consider putting those doors to better use – to moving on rather than shutting out.

So, I wonder if your dream is suggesting that in order to move on (rather than ‘maintain’ the status quo – the lawns) you would be best to explore (travel) a family issue (that created a belief that is affecting your work situation) around a past abandonment, opening it up and using those experiences (doors) by transforming them into ‘moving on’ mode rather than ‘shutting out’ mode.

Looking again at your notes following your dream, how much of this fits? The trick is to replace ‘giving them what they want’ (shutting your real self behind doors for fear of abandonment?) with asking yourself why you’re applying for this job and does it really fit the moving on you wish to do?

DREAM ALCHEMY PRACTICE

You have already performed a dream alchemy practice in the meditation you did after the dream. There you broke down the controlling factors that often restrict you and this released the little girl, dancing. She is you - the hidden away, unexpressed you.

She is perfect for a visualisation dream alchemy practice:

Visualisation:

Visualise the little girl from your meditation dancing joyfully and freely. Visualise her moving on – dance her out of the (a)warehouse and onto a golden path.

How often to do this:

Do this visualisation 20 times a day for a week, ten times a day for the second week and twice a day for the next month.

How does this work?

This practice will ensure that change occurs for you in the best possible way – a positive healing transformation. Your dream expressed your waking life situation using dream language – the language of your unconscious mind. By reliving the dream with changes, or by transforming one of the dream symbols (or by reliving and intensifying the dream in the case of a dream with a positive ending) you are using vision and feeling to reprogram your unconscious beliefs.

More details on Visualisation as a Dream Alchemy Practice in: “Dream Alchemy” by Jane Teresa Anderson, pages 329 – 330.

Jane Teresa Anderson

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