OVERVIEW INTERPRETATION
Hi Tom,
The most prominent feature when you look at an X-ray photograph is bone, or skeleton, which makes it interesting that the brass key was a skeleton key.
Always allow for word play when interpreting a dream. There’s no skeleton in the closet featured in your dream but as you saw yourself as a child swallowing the key I get the feeling of a skeleton in your closet from childhood. What did you swallow, metaphorically or otherwise? Metaphorically we swallow words, swallow our feelings or swallow a line someone feeds us. (Surely not a fishing line though!)
Swallowing also links to swords, as in the swordfish: the circus act of sword swallowing. Now, isn’t it an old wives tale that sword swallowers manage their feat by having naturally contorted stomachs? That fits in with your dream too.
While a sexual interpretation is possible here (especially with the X rating in X-ray), don’t jump to conclusions unless you know this to be the case. Dreams usually portray emotional issues and the feeling here is one of perhaps swallowing sharp words or feelings.
The key was made of brass. We describe someone as having brass when they have courage. Any links?
In the dream you tell the doctor that you recall a cartoon character swallowing a key as a child and you copied him. Cartoon characters are unreal, two-dimensional and often escape harm through humour. (Think of cartoon characters falling off cliffs but not falling to their death, or animals biting bits out of people without hurting them, or characters making instant full recoveries after being blown to pieces by a bomb.) I get the feeling you may have dealt with childhood hurt by putting a humorous cartoon spin on it.
Did you ever act the class clown or cover emotional hurt with humour?
The key to your courage (brass) as a child may have been to take the cue from the cartoons and hide your swallowed skeletons in humour. I see the swordfish as part of the hurt, with its sharp sword-like face, but how do you see the swordfish?
Eating fish is potentially dangerous as we can choke on bones, just as we can choke on our words when we swallow them. Fish in dreams are sometimes seen as symbols of spirituality or religion (think of the Christian fish). Did you find yourself choking on the religion you were fed as a child?
The stomach is the main organ of digestion. A contorted stomach suggests contorted digestion. Have you had to contort the way you process hurt, the way you digest emotional upsets, to survive? I’m thinking of how we talk about bending over backwards to please someone being like contorting the way you process things that happen to you to make them okay by yourself and by others. The stomach perforation emphasises the hurt and damage that has occurred despite the contortions you have gone through to try to avoid it.
Humour can be a reality contortionist.
If someone or something in your life, past or present, had the personality of a cartoon swordfish, who or what would it be?
The doctor is your potential for diagnosis and self-healing. He removes what we imagine is the source of the original hurt and helps you to discover the key to understanding all of this. As with all people in a dream, they all represent you or the experiences, feelings and beliefs that you have incorporated (digested?) into your being. You have the ability to heal this wound. You no longer have to ‘stomach’ this skeleton from the past that has been affecting your digestion of life in the present.
Through answering these questions and contemplating your dream, I’m sure you will now realise exactly what the swordfish and the key represent. It’s possible that you will be able to identify a belief that you have taken on from someone or something, for example, “I took on the belief from … that the way to deal with hurt is to swallow it and laugh”. If you can identify a belief, then the best dream alchemy practice for you is a Give Back the Belief. (You’ll see how to do this below.)
Sometimes dreams reveal physical symptoms of our emotional distress, so you may wish to get a check-up on your stomach for ulcers, for example. If you do find a physical manifestation, don’t dismiss the emotional causes revealed by your dream though.
DREAM ALCHEMY PRACTICE
Giving back the belief:
By now you have probably worked out a belief relating hurt and humour
that is affecting your current situation.
First write down that belief in one sentence, “I believe that …” Then write down the name of the person who you learned that belief from. Then write down a new belief to replace the old one. Now you’re ready to give back the original belief. Use the example below as a guide on how to do this.
How to do this:
Here’s an example. You can adapt it to suit the belief you are ready to give back:
(From DREAM ALCHEMY, page 67.)
“A little boy was taught that ‘boys don’t cry’ and ‘fathers don’t hug their sons’. Of course this little one desperately needed to cry or be hugged along the way, but he grew up to hold back his tears and keep an emotional distance from those he loved. On the surface all was cool, but deep inside that little boy lived on, still crying rejected, unloved tears. He took on the beliefs of his father and suffered as a result.
To perform this Giving Back the Belief dream alchemy practice this man imagines going back to meet himself as a little child and hugs this child. He tells him that he can now give his father back this belief that boys don’t cry and fathers don’t hug because it belongs to the father, not to the child. The grown man helps the child to do this, in the visualisation, and sees the father agree to take back the belief. In its place the grown man must give the child a new belief to replace the old. He chooses to give the belief, ‘It’s good for boys and men to cry when they need to and to hug and express their feelings’.”
Make sure that when you give back a belief you replace it with a better belief, otherwise it is likely to be filled by another unsuitable belief.
How does this work?
The beliefs you carry are not set in concrete. You borrowed them from other people so you can give them back. Since dreams usually show the person you borrowed the belief from, that person is the perfect symbol to use to communicate with your unconscious mind. Like any symbol, the person lives on in your mind not as the actual person, but as part of your unconscious language. By communicating with the person-symbol through dream alchemy you give back your belief – you reprogram your unconscious mind.
More details on Giving Back the Belief as a Dream Alchemy Practice in: “Dream Alchemy”, by Jane Teresa Anderson, pages 336-7.
Jane Teresa Anderson
You can consult with Jane Teresa or her Dream Team and receive your interpretation by email within five working days.
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