Exhibit Thirty: Acquired by the Dream Gallery 30 September 2000
'Ladder'
Feeling The Picture
Your feeling reactions to a dream are keys to its interpretation. These are my feelings. If this were a scene in your dream or life, how would you feel about being there?
I feel a sense of expansion and overview as if I have climbed up the ladder and am now walking on the surface of a giant eggshell that is also, strangely, the surface of the earth as seen from a plane. I can peek into the green below, where there is a feeling of life and laughter unfolding according to daily drama, while I can stretch my mind and body up here and absorb a different dimension of the same world. I am exploring the world into which the inner, green world will birth when it breaks through its eggshell. Yet I feel the strangeness of the apparent lack of colour. I sense that the world up here is for different eyes, in the same way that a bee sees the colour of ultra violet light where we see nothing. I feel the challenge of adapting to new senses and new seeing: of tuning into a greater and more vibrant range of colour and intensity. At the same time I feel the easy pull of the enticing green warmth of the comfort zone.
The Symbols
Symbols in your dreams often relate to your personal memories and associations, so always consider those first. Then let your mind play with other, more general possibilities. They will not all apply! Just open your mind and notice where the symbol seems to fit and make sense of the rest of your dream.
Ladders may symbolise how we move from level to level: from one level of understanding to another; from one level of life to another, from one level of perspective to another and so on. A ladder may also represent a corporate ladder, a ladder of success and achievement, a way in or out of a situation. Being on a ladder can make us feel unstable so its presence in a dream may bring up issues of stability, security and grounding. We may have played in cubby houses reached by ladders when we were small, bringing the feeling of excitement, escape, play or the sharing of secrets into associated meaning. The childhood game of 'snakes and ladders' may have impressed our personal dream symbolism, giving ladders a feeling of winning, the chance of good luck, or of escape from the fearful situation (snakes) or the downside of the throw of the dice.
The shape containing the ladder is rectangular. Straight lines in dreams often symbolise straight (or rigid) thinking. They can also represent left brain approaches, in contrast to the curvings of right brain thinking.
The colour green may have personal association for each dreamer. It can also represent personal growth (like spring leaves), unconditional love (being the colour of the heart chakra), envy (existing in our cliché 'green with envy'), naivete ('green'), environmental ( 'a greenie') and so on.
The Questions
Here are some questions the dreamer of such a dream picture might ask to work towards a complete understanding of the dream.
Try these yourself: just give your 'gut reaction' answers to the questions - your answers will surprise you in the insights they deliver. The key thing to remember is, "Don't THINK about your answers - give quick gut reaction replies". Your unconscious will deliver.
If this process can work powerfully for this image, consider how infinitely more powerful the insights are when the image comes from one of your own dreams - direct from your unconscious!
- Consider yourself occupying a space within this image. Where are you?
- Which part of your body is in contact with which part of this landscape?
- Where were you before you got here?
- So have you already touched the ladder?
- Have you been into the green area?
- Did you climb up from the green area?
- Is this your first visit to the grey-blue area?
- Did you start in the grey-blue area and then visit the green area?
- If you have not already visited the green, would you like to?
- How do you feel about the prospect of climbing down the ladder into the green?
- What do you expect to find in the green or what do you already know about it?
- What are your feelings about being in the grey-blue area?
- What is the source of light in this image?
- Where is the light coming from?
- What do the lines on the grey-blue surface remind you of?
- Why is the hole rectangular?
- Would you feel different about the hole if it were circular or curved? In what way?
- Who put the ladder there?
- Is the ladder there permanently or temporarily? Why?
- What is the darker colouring across the top right side of the image?
- Which situation in your life now does the green area remind you of?
- Which situation in your life now does the grey-blue area remind you of?
- Considering your answers to Q21 and Q22, what does the ladder represent in your life now?
- How can you use this ladder for the best outcome?
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