OVERVIEW INTERPRETATION
Hi Suzanne,
You are right to look at the animals in your dream as representing your instincts and feelings, and how these are faring in your waking life.
You associate Chillie with light-heartedness and joy – your OWN light-heartedness and joy.
You associate the snakes with the ‘hideous and evil stuff going down’. Clearly this is how you feel about some elements of your waking life, but you get more insight from a dream if you look at EVERYTHING as reflecting your own inner beliefs and feelings. Hmmm, you may think, what does this mean? That I am hideous and evil?
No, of course not.
But why is it that different people deal with the same situation in different ways? I don’t know what your hideous situation is, but let’s take an example:
Let’s imagine the hideous situation is blackmail. One person may not know how to overcome the situation and end up succumbing, paying the blackmailer, emotionally and financially, as he or she demands. A second person might find a way to undermine the blackmailer, to expose him or her, and not lose out emotionally or financially.
The example shows that a situation FEELS a certain way according to how we deal with it – and that often depends on our own beliefs and experiences. In other words, the most important factor in any given situation is not so much what it seems to be, but what our own inner beliefs are.
If your inner beliefs were changed in some way, you might find that the hideous and evil situation is a bubble you can blow away.
So, let’s look again at that snake, Suzanne:
Look at all animals in a dream as representing instincts and energies within you. Here is something that can inflict pain to protect itself; that is hard to kill; that should be toast (dead) but isn’t. Here is an energy that is deadly but also “cut up pretty badly”. It makes terrible sounds because it is in pain (?) and you feel at risk of further pain if it strikes you.
Snakes in dreams often represent healing as healing involves facing pain (instead of burying it). Have a look at the paragraph above and see how much of that energy sounds familiar to you:
Do you sometimes feel an urge to say or do something that may be hurtful because you are trying to protect yourself? What is the pain within you that feels “cut up pretty badly”? Wouldn’t life be easier if this pain was gone – if it was toast? But it lives on, doesn’t it? And the more it lives on the more you feel at risk of further pain. The only way to avoid FURTHER pain is to face the past/ current pain and let it go.
The potential for healing is to face the pain, to see it for what is.
You wondered if your dream meant that the light-heartedness and joy of your life (Chillie) was being killed off by the hideous situation. But although you were pretty sure Chillie had been bitten in the dream, it’s interesting that he was okay when he returned. He HAD faced the pain (and perhaps felt it if he had been bitten – really got in touch with it) but he seemed to be still alive and joyful.
I wonder whether light-heartedness and joy is the means to overcoming the situation.
You will find it helpful to read ‘Snakes’ in Dream Alchemy, pages 176-82.
DREAM ALCHEMY PRACTICE
Think about the situation you are in, and other situations in your life right now. Include relationship situations, job, health, financial situations and so on.
Make a list of these.
Now consider each one in turn and get in touch with how you feel in each situation. How do you feel when things are going well? How do you feel when things are not going so well? How do you feel when communicating with people in each of these situations?
Then consider which animal would best represent each feeling in each situation. For example, you might feel like a rabbit talking to a work colleague, and like a lion when you consider your health.
When you’ve done this, simply observe, over the next few weeks, the range of animal energies within you. As you do this you will gain greater insight into the roles that Chillie and the cut up snake play in your response to life, and you will become clearer on how to act in a healing way.
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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