At the time of this dream I was unable to sleep due to a messy break-up. I was on the verge of a major depression, almost suicidal. My head would not stop and I wanted it to desperately. I started chanting, "My body is a vessel of love and light"… and fell asleep.
I was in a space ship, or a boat or some vessel, and everyone there was working together for a common goal. A little girl said that they were all working to save me. They were moving furniture and fixing cracks in the walls.
Next the girl took me outside and showed me a tree under which was a single bed. It looked soft and lovely except I could see it had springs popping out all under the blankets. The girl said, "You made your bed".
Next my dead mother came to me. It really was her, as I remember her. In the dream I knew she was dead. She took my hand with love and compassion and said, "At least you now know how I felt". (My mother committed suicide fifteen years ago.) We walked and talked and when I woke I felt a great calm and a strange lightness.
This dream was so powerful for me.
What a wonderful dream.
On one level it’s a perfect example of how to induce a symbol into a dream. Your repetitive chanting and the urgency of your quest to clear your head and envisage your body as a vessel of love and light made the issue ripe for processing in your dream.
(Dream incubation is a similar process where you focus on a question or issue you’d like your dream to address. By repeating the question or focussing on a symbol of the issue as you fall asleep, your dream will often deliver. Sometimes you will see the chosen symbol in the dream, or recognise the issue dressed in a different dream symbol.)
So as you dreamed you were a space ship or vessel it’s clear that your dream was processing your quest to experience love and light and to bring up any issues surrounding that.
Now, you could have dreamed of any vessel, but I wonder why you thought it might have been a space ship? A space ship is perhaps ‘light’ as it travels in air at perhaps speeds greater than the speed of light. Do you think of space travellers (aliens?) as beings of love and light? Might you have ‘alienated’ love from your relationship?
My feeling is that the space ship was a dream pun on space – needing personal space to recover from your relationship (oh look- the word ‘ship’ in relationship) or needing personal space away from relationships to rediscover your own love and light. Needing head space. Needing to get in the right space. Isn’t it one of the clichéd reasons for a break-up, “I need more space”?
This may be emphasised by the single bed. Although you obviously are considering yourself to be single for now, perhaps the single bed is about getting space to yourself.
But, as your dream suggests, it’s all about “working together for a common goal …. to save me”. It’s about getting yourself together, fixing yourself up.
Your dream shows you the cliché “you’ve made your bed (now lie on it)” and the title of your dream shows you recognised this. Your situation is of your own making, but, by the same token, tomorrow’s situation is also in your own hands. (You can change things.) But first you need to acknowledge that the parts you played in your relationship and in its break-up were in your own hands. Responsibility for your actions. Like the dream bed, what should have been “soft and lovely” was broken.
How is the single bed related to breaking up something soft and lovely, do you think? Did you or your partner feel a little suffocated in relationship, feeling a need for some ‘single’ space? Did this take the ‘soft and lovely’ out of the relationship? Was it the cause of the break-up?
How beautiful, at the end of your dream, to reach a point of empathy with your mother’s situation, to begin to understand what might have caused her to suicide. In the dream she gave you love and you woke up with a feeling of lightness, achieving the sensation of “love and light” that you were focussing on as you fell asleep.
You may now understand how your mother chose to make her bed, but there are many alternative positive choices. How would you like to make your bed? How can you make the next bed as soft and lovely as it looks?
Affirmation:
Here’s an affirmation using your dream symbols:
“My bed is soft, lovely and full of love and light.”
How to use your affirmation/ and how often:
Say your affirmation out loud and with feeling 30 times a day for the first week. From the second week say your affirmation out loud and with feeling once in the morning and once before you go to sleep for three more weeks.
How does this work?
This works by communicating directly with your unconscious mind using its own language, to transform the belief your dream is revealing.
More details on Affirmation as a Dream Alchemy Practice in: “Dream Alchemy” by Jane Teresa Anderson, pages 331-333.
Jane Teresa Anderson
