INTERPRETATION
Many dreams help us to find a point of balance between two extremes, and you’ve captured those extremes in your choice of title for your dream, ‘Fire and ice’. Where, in your life in the day or two before this dream, did you feel emotionally fiery or emotionally cold?
Always look for opposites in a dream. Most dreams contain opposites (like fire and ice), and these help define the extremes of an issue you are experiencing in your life at the time of the dream.
When we feel at ease with opposite points of view, or opposite feelings, we generally find ourselves taking a balanced approach, somewhere between the two extremes. This is a bit like the Chinese middle way, or Tao. You can make good progress with your life when you walk the middle way, free to move forward instead of being pulled to either extreme, off-balance.
In your dream, you were exploring how to cool down. (Two of the boys were trying to teach the third how to cool down.) Always look at the words you use to describe a dream, and see if you can understand those words in a different way. In the dream, they were talking about ‘cooling down’ because they were hot comets, but if you understand these words in a different way, you realise the discussion is about how to ‘cool down’ (emotionally) about something in your waking life that had got you overheated, or upset.
Dreams are symbolic, not literal. And yet, in a funny way, if you look at them sideways, they are surprisingly literal, as you can read some of your words literally: “how to cool down”. Dreams often act out clichés or translate our everyday words literally, so here’s one that is acting out how to cool down.
Think about that day or two before this dream. What made you feel fiery? Did you think, at the time, that you needed to cool down, or did you feel justified? Was it only while you were asleep that your dreaming brain, processing the experience, came up with the thought that you needed to learn how to cool down?
Or perhaps you weren’t fiery enough! Or perhaps you feel you shouldn’t be so fiery, or passionate, or express your feelings. Maybe you feel you should cool down, play it cool, not let your feelings show. Have a think about this before reading on.
Dreams do not tell you what to do. They tell you how things are within yourself. Then, armed with this insight, you can choose what to do. What your dream shows is that you have an issue, or conflict, about how fiery or how cool to be in a certain situation. You struggle between the two.
In an ideal world, you would walk that middle way, at ease with both extremes, and not be swayed by either. You would feel balanced, enough fire and enough ice to be just right.
Whenever we struggle between extremes, it’s usually because we’ve been burned by one of those extremes. (Excuse the pun, but hey, you can get burned by dry ice as well as by fire.) For example, if one of your parents was very cold, emotionally, you may have grown up the same, having learned and absorbed the same pattern of behaviour. Or you may have grown up to be quite the opposite, having experienced the bad side of cold and decided you don’t want to be anything like that. Commonly we take on a mix of ‘same’ and ‘opposite’ from both our parents. Now, this is where it gets interesting.
If one of your parents was cold, for example, and you decided you didn’t want to be anything like that so you became fiery, the way this works is that you still have an unconscious pattern of cold that you struggle to overcome. All the while you take that extreme fiery position, it’s because you still have an unconscious pattern of cold. It’s like you have to work so hard at distancing yourself from it, which is why you’re at the other extreme. Once you find a way to undo that unconscious pattern of cold, you don’t need to be so far out fiery, and you can find a middle way and let the whole issue of cold-fiery go so you can get on with your life.
Whenever you find yourself at a point of extreme, ask yourself what the opposite is and ask yourself when you first encountered that opposite and how it affected you. Ask yourself if that first experience could have driven you so far into your extreme. Ask yourself if that is reasonable, or if this extreme is now hampering your own life. Ask yourself if you are ready to face that extreme, face that first experience, understand it, resolve it within yourself, and let it go.
So taking an extreme position is a sign of still being at war with the opposite camp, instead of being at peace within yourself. Re-read that sentence until you can really see the sense in it and let it work for you.
Look again at your dream and you’ll see another pair of opposites. These are high (flying high like a comet) and low (reaching earth). This is further illustrated, in your dream, with the warning that a comet can too easily become an iceberg – comets fly high, icebergs exist, for the larger part, below the water (lower than earth). So up and down, high and low. These are also extremes you are struggling with. When do you feel high and fiery? When do you feel low and cold? Is there a balance point in between?
In your dream, you knew the three boys were all part of you. You recognised three ‘voices’ or attitudes. At the time of this dream, these three attitudes were working, at a deep level within you, to find a point of balance. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say you were two parts of the way there, with one part (one boy) needing to cool down more.
You define the problem in the dream as being that while comets can fly and amaze everyone, they get so hot that they burn up before reaching the earth. Reaching the earth is a good thing – it’s ‘coming back down to earth’ (getting real, being grounded and balanced), and also, you’re not much use to anyone if you burn up and disappear!
Where, in your life in the day or two before this dream, did you feel you were ‘amazing’ everyone? Did you amaze with fiery emotions, or with fiery passions, or with incredible burning drive and energy? Did you reach, or foresee, burnout – that point where you overdo it and run out of energy? Not so amazing then, hey?
Did you get so ‘high’, or did you perform and amaze everyone so much, or did you set out to reach the heights of whatever it is that you are involved in, that you lost touch with reality? Did you need to come back down to earth, get balanced, get real?
Dreams can be interpreted on many levels, and it usually turns out that each level is correct. So you can look at your dream as being about a struggle between fiery and cold emotions, or about a struggle between high level performance and burning out, or as a struggle between being too way out and being in touch with reality. Most likely, each of these applies to you. I predict you will relate to two of these but that it will take you a while to connect with the third (like the two boys trying to teach the third), and when you get it, you’ll find that third level the most insightful and helpful of them all.
Your dream contains the best advice on finding that balance point, that middle way. “The trick was to draw the ice from deep within the earth to cool you down before you landed.” In other words, instead of occupying an extreme position (fiery, high) to get as far away from the other extreme (frozen, deep within, unconscious) as you can, and risking burn out, get in touch with and understand (draw on) that frozen energy deep within you so that you don’t fear it so much, don’t have to force yourself to the other extreme.
Your dream continued with a little fine tuning with the warning about not drawing the ice too close in case the comet changed into an iceberg. You get the picture – now practise getting the mix right, so you can make progress in a state of balance.
DREAM ALCHEMY PRACTICE
Dialogue
Discover more by doing a Dream Alchemy dialogue between Iceberg and Hot Comet:
Iceberg: “You look amazing with that fiery tail, way up there!”
Hot Comet: “… let Hot Comet reply in here ”
Iceberg: “...let Iceberg reply here”
Hot Comet: “… continue in this way”
How to do this
Give yourself no longer than 20 minutes. When you do this exercise do NOT think! Don’t plan ahead. Just let whatever happens happen. Let the two entities speak to each other on paper using whatever words come up. It’s a bit like writing a film script or play – but without the brain being involved.
How does this work?
By not thinking, by keeping the words flowing, you are letting your right brain and unconscious mind do most of the work. They created the original dream so they know what these symbols mean for you. They will reveal. You will be surprised.
Jane Teresa Anderson
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