INTERPRETATION
This very short dream provides a beautiful example of a recurring motif. It makes interpretation much easier. It’s a bit like doing a crossword puzzle where you’re having difficulty solving an ‘across’ clue until you solve an intersecting ‘down’ clue and everything begins to fall into place. The more down clues you get, the more across clues you can solve, and vice versa.
A recurring motif is a recurring theme in a dream. Most dreams have recurring motifs, but they can be hard to pick in a long dream drama. In your dream, Khar, the recurring motif is clear.
First there’s the recurring motif of the jump. In part one, a high school friend jumped out. In part two, people were jumpstarting someone’s heart. (The heart jumped into life.)
The jump was connected with resuscitation. In part one, there’s a resuscitation, in a sense, of a high school friend. It’s clear from the way you report the dream that you haven’t seen this friend since high school, so it’s as if he is coming to life again after all this time. In part two, there’s a literal resuscitation, someone coming to life again.
At the beginning of paragraph two, you say, “in another corner”, suggesting that part one took place in one corner, and part two in another corner. So there’s another part of the recurring motif – a corner.
There’s a recurring theme of working. In part one, the old friend was working at the dealership. In part two, people were “working on” someone, and “It worked”. So that’s three references to work that worked out well!
Finally, and more subtly, there’s the recurring motif of starting up an engine. The car dealership is a place where cars are parked, ready to start up if you buy them. In part two, there’s a man with a heart, ‘parked’ and ready to start up. The heart is the engine of the body, the pump, pumping blood in a similar way to a car engine which pumps petrol.
So, to summarise so far, we’ve identified this recurring motif: something that has stopped, or been left in a corner or even ‘cornered’, is jumpstarted into action and is now pumping and working and doing well.
Dreams always reflect your experiences – conscious and unconscious – of the last 24-48 hours. Have a think about the summary so far. In the two days prior to your dream, what was happening around getting something working again, and working well? If your experience was conscious, you will relate to this quickly. If it was unconscious, you will feel a resonance that feels right, even though you might not be able to quite put your finger on it just yet. You will see it clearly by the end of this interpretation though.
Your dream repeated one complex motif, which I’ve broken down into parts. I’ve described the complex motif in my summary, two paragraphs back. The parts include: jumpstart, corner, pump, working and so on.
The dream interpretation tip here is to look at a dream and see if you can spot a recurring motif. Once you’ve done that, break it down into its parts. You’ll find that as you identify the parts in one section, you’ll identify them more quickly in another section. For example, discovering the heart getting jumpstarted in part two of this dream might have helped you to notice the similarity with car engines – both are pumps.
If you keep looking at the recurring motifs in a dream until you see more and more correlations, you’ll get closer to identifying the waking life situation your dream is reflecting.
Khar, if you were really good friends with this guy in high school, why did you lose touch? Did you end up ‘cornered’ in some way, and lose the friendship or connection? Has something just happened to ease you out of feeling cornered? Or, are you ready now to ease yourself out of that cornered feeling and get on with life?
Which three words would you choose to describe that old friend’s personality or approach to life? Write these three words down. Have these elements been missing from your life until now? Have you just jumpstarted these, or are you ready to?
The heart, in your dream, had stopped due to a heart attack. (It might have stopped due to another cause of death, but you state heart attack.) You also mention the heart attack in the title of your dream. We tend to automatically put the important clues in the dream title. In what way has your heart (emotions, love) felt attacked in the past, particularly when you last felt cornered? Were you hurt emotionally in the past, leaving you feeling cornered, with elements of your friend’s personality dying off within yourself?
Your dream suggests it’s time to bring some of those elements of life (your friend’s personality and approach to life) back into your life now. Get yourself out of that corner, jumpstart those old positive feelings, bring yourself back into life, get pumping, get started, get things working. Like the man in the dream, you can “breathe fine on your own” again now. Cars are an excellent symbol for drive and motivation, for getting places. Jumpstart yourself and drive!
DREAM ALCHEMY PRACTICE
Your dream introduced the symbol of a car dealership, so have a think about what make and colour of car would best suit the elements you’d like to bring into your life and get working. If you were to bring these elements into your life, what kind and colour of car would you drive? Once you’ve decided upon this, find a picture of that car and go and test-drive one. Get the feeling of what it’s like to drive this car. Every time you drive your current car, imagine you are driving your chosen car. Really get the feeling – not just the visuals, but the textures, the smells. The object of this Dream Alchemy Practice is not to get the car (though you may well manifest it), but to use the symbols of your dream to get those positive elements jumpstarted and happening within your unconscious mind – everything else will follow naturally.
Jane Teresa Anderson
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