River 23
Francoise
The Dolphin 1994

~~~~~~dream~~~~~~

Out of the blue I started travelling. It was like I was travelling in time or through the universe and I found myself travelling through space towards Planet Earth. There it was in front of me. I sailed in, went towards it, and it got bigger and bigger until finally there I was and there was the ocean: beautiful colours, brilliant, indescribable, natural, clear watercolours.

As I got closer there was a big, beautiful wooden sail boat, all made of wood. It seemed to me that it was probably one hundred feet long with beautiful white sails all filled with wind, a hundred sails. It must have been an old boat. It was an eternal boat; that’s what it seemed like to me. I kept coming down until I landed on the deck at the top end of the boat. I stood there on the bridge, looking out over the ocean, when a dolphin came out of the water: straight up and out of the water.

As the dolphin came up, its nose and its whole body moved up, right from the tip of my toes all the way up my entire body. It caressed me right up to the top of my head and then continued to leap into the air, such a huge, sensitive, strong, joyous creature. Then it came back down again and disappeared into the water. Throughout all this it made a sound, a deep, knowing, giggling, healing sound, and there was a feeling that accompanied the whole thing, that I’m still feeling now. It’s as if I’ve been touched by some kind of energy that’s still here with me.

I turned around and there was a man at the huge, wooden wheel of the boat, sitting in a chair. He had dark brown hair and brown eyes and, although he appeared to be middle-aged, he looked eternal, too. He turned, looked at me and smiled, and I smiled back at him. It was a knowing. The feeling the dolphin had given me was of uplifting happiness, joy and a feeling of aliveness and wholeness.

I went to bed that night needing an answer. I was totally stressed out, my relationship was falling apart, my personal life was crumbling and everything was disintegrating. I was feeling pressured, bursting at the seams and needing help. I decided that I had to get my life in order and that was that. I called for divine guidance. I was driven subconsciously, somehow knowing my being had to ask.

The dream bathed me in this electric, alive, soothing energy, so much so that I knew that this was my answer. It was so precious to me, it was almost like a sacred passage or initiation. I know beyond a doubt that the life force, or the universal energy of life, or of spirit, whatever you want to call it, is as real as I am holding this telephone. It is there, it’s everything. The dream was a divine gift, a beautiful gift of the higher universal energies that are there for the asking. All we have to do is ask.

~~~~~~

The dream took immediate effect on Francoise’s decision-making.

I decided, OK, I had to step into the unknown, so I moved out on my own. My partner has two children and I have one, all in their mid-teens. I left the kids behind, thinking my son could just go back and forth as he wished. That was the beginning of my disintegration and reintegration.

The very next day I was in the shop going totally gaga over the feeling of what had happened. A lady came in wearing a dolphin T-shirt. I said ‘Oh, wow, you’re wearing a dolphin T’shirt! I’ve just had the most amazing dream,’ and I told her about it. We started talking and she had just left her man. She bought something from me and when I delivered it to her a week later she gave me a book called Living in Joy by Sanaya Roman. I thought, ‘What am I going to do with his? Joy? What’s that? I know that I don’t have any.’ I still have the book and it’s taken me until now to be able to open up and say, ‘Yes, this is where I’m heading’.

Francoise’s process of disintegration and reintegration took place in a very short time: some ten months. Quite simply:

I feel like I’ve fulfilled one lifetime and I’ve lightened up and am living another life with much more joy.

So, how did she do it?

I believe that dreams are the Higher Self, or the unconscious, or that energy we all have. ‘The Dolphin’ was a positive knock on the head, a ‘hey woman, wake up’ call. I felt like that was the only real thing that was whole and pure in my life at the time. That was what helped me through. I had turned fifty and hit the mid-life crisis. The time was right. It was either ‘get your act together or die: become middle-aged and decrepit and disappear to wait for death to come along’. It was like a passage into spirit and it took a lot of trust in myself as well as courage, but I had to do it. It was like my very own personal invitation into freedom and a whole new way of being.

Francoise started by taking hold of her life:

Over a period of ten months I stopped smoking cigarettes, I stopped smoking marijuana, I stopped drinking coffee and eating sugar and I ended up in a black hole because of it. No-one to lean on: no crutches. That was horrible, painful and awful but I knew I had to do this. I did a lot of uncontrollable crying, drank litres of water and did yoga faithfully every day. Moment by moment, day by day, week by week , month by month, I got through. Eventually, slowly, my energy started to change and fill up with a higher vibration source of energy.

As I disintegrated, insights came which helped me deal with the emotional pain I was going through. I think I’m on the other side now because of the contentment, the peace, even joy that’s soothing its way into my being.

I had thrown my partner away, like throwing the baby out with the bath water, but I had to kill the relationship totally and not the person. That was painful for him and painful for me. I realised that I still loved this man, but not in the way that I had. Now I have this new strength and foundation, we are re-evaluating our relationship at a more fulfilling level.

He had gone through this thing, his own initiation, a couple of years earlier and he was waiting for me to either shape up or ship out (like the dream?). He sees the changes in me and he loves them. My sensitive son was very supportive. I told him this was something that I had to go through. I think some kids today are much more aware and not as caught up in the emotional stuff I’ve had to come through.

Although ‘The Dolphin’ dream caused Francoise to make spectacular changes in her life, she also relished the guidance in a profound dream she had experienced two years earlier:

‘The River of Women’ is as clear as I am sitting here. We’d gone to a marriage counsellor to try to sort our life out. Our sexual lives were all over the place, naturally when all this stuff happens. We were getting nowhere. I had my side and he had his side. We knew we wanted to hang in there with the relationship but it just wasn’t happening for us. I was pretty isolated and it had been my idea to get some type of counselling. Obviously neither of us was as evolved as we are now, or capable of understanding things as we now can. I knew that there were male and female games going on between us and I was trying to identify whose were whose, when I had the dream.

River of Women 1992

~~~~~~dream~~~~~~

I was living at the very top of this green, lush mountain, up in the clouds in the blue sky. There was a big wooden shelter which was also a temple at the very top. There was a river going all the way down the mountain, through the valley. Sea level would have been ten miles down, so the river travelled a long, long distance! Normal rivers have rocks which appear to just sit there as the water goes through, over and between them. The further down you go the rocks become smaller, while big boulders and big rocks occur higher up. In this dream, there were no rocks: instead, they were all beautiful, eternal women! There were older women, younger women, ancient women holding newborn female babies and children. They were all sitting and standing in place of the rocks and boulders, relaxed and totally composed, real, alive and totally integrated with nature. They went all the way down to the bottom as far as the eye could see! I was up there wandering around feeling this woman energy: this eternal woman thing.

 ~~~~~~

I took the dream to mean that whatever was happening for me, whatever it was I was trying to express, or feel, or touch and be part of, was being given to me in the dream. I think I was soaking up my feminine side in the dream.

This dream helped Francoise to make progress in the earlier counselling sessions and probably contributed towards the later explosion of changes initiated by ‘The Dolphin Dream’. Francoise delights over the changes in her life:

As I get older, I feel like I am getting younger and younger - I feel like I’m a little kid again. I would recommend anyone to follow their intuition and listen to the messages. This is your divine life-force energy talking to you.

Jane’s Interpretation

Such dreams need no further interpretation. They brought Francoise the light she needed to transform her life - and they worked.

Ocean Dip
Willow
The Precious Jewel 1991

~~~~~~dream~~~~~~

A precious jewel had been stolen from some people like Incas. It was sacred to them. I’m not sure if I had stolen the jewel or not, but I decided to take it back.

The jewel was hidden in the ceiling of a house. When taking it back to its rightful owners, I came across Shirley MacLaine. She was a bad person in the dream, and a fight took place between her and a man. She was wearing a mask which the man took off to reveal her identity, only to find another mask underneath which looked exactly the same. This was her real face.

~~~~~~

My marriage had broken up in 1987, four years before this dream. Since then I had been on a search for my own identity, which I felt I had lost during my unhappy marriage.

Most prominent in the dream to me was the mask being removed to reveal another mask that was exactly the same, then the realisation that this was the real face. My physical appearance was always very important to me from my teenage years. I was a model for a short time and I spent a lot of time in front of the mirror, trying out new make-up styles. I used to wear a lot of make-up and would never been seen by anyone without some make-up on.

It was a way of hiding the shy, self-conscious person that I was. This dream showed me that I didn’t have to keep hiding behind a mask, that I could let my real self show through. Once the mask was gone it allowed me to explore just who I really was. I felt that during my relationship with my ex-husband, which had started when I was only eighteen, my self-development had come to a complete halt. I am now forty.

I believe the jewel was my own spirituality and gifts such as psychic abilities hidden in the upper recesses of my mind. The fight could have been between the ‘anima’ (female side) and the ‘animus’ (male side) struggling for balance in my personality. I had to realise that I am the special person that I always wanted to be.

Willow’s understanding of her dreams was an art which she developed over the years, so her final interpretation was perhaps not fully in her consciousness when she originally contemplated the dream. However, she understood it sufficiently to take action and she took her cue from Shirley MacLaine.

The dream made me realise that it is OK to just be me. I don’t have to wear masks to be liked or accepted. A matter of weeks after this dream I came across one of Shirley MacLaine books ‘by accident’ in the library when I was looking for some astrology books. This book led me to her other books and I eventually read them all. Unknown to me at this time, the film version of one of her books, Out on a Limb, was being shown on TV.

This whole series of events, which began as a result of this dream, led to a path which I am still following. It has enriched my life and helped me to work through my personal growth, as well as increasing my interest in dreams, which have been a part of my development. I can really help myself and others now. Physically, I used to experience severe back pain and this is now non-existent.

My attitudes to everything and everyone have been altered for the good and it has made all of my personal relationships so much more satisfying. My life has been changed completely. I could never go back to the way I was before.

Jane’s Interpretation

Presumably the Incas represented an ancient sacred wisdom in Willow’s mind. Precious jewels in dreams usually symbolise the dreamer’s unique and precious self, talents, gifts..... a recognition of true inner wealth and value. Willow’s sacred connection with life had been stolen. She says, quite wisely in her dream, ‘I’m not sure if I had stolen the jewel or not’. We are usually the perpetrators of our own demise. Recognising that you have denied access to a part of yourself, or permitted events and others to rob you of expressing your inner qualities, is the first step to returning to full self-power. Since the jewel was hidden in the ceiling of a house, I would say it represented either an intellectual or spiritual gift (the higher levels of our dream buildings generally being the higher levels of our mind or being).

Shirley MacLaine must have had some personal significance to Willow, or perhaps she appeared in the dream as an actor, being a person who wears masks and plays roles for a living. (That is, until she takes off her masks and writes books to express her personal experiences, beliefs and philosophies.) The fight between Willow’s male (Yang) and female (Yin) sides illustrates her struggle, at the time of the dream, between her need for self-expression (Yin and currently masked) and her need to relate to the world at large (Yang). The ‘bad’ aspect of her Yin is the denial of her true self and the wearing of masks to fit society’s (actually her own) expectations of how she should be in the world. The synchronicity of coming across Shirley MacLaine’s books shortly after the dream enabled Willow to witness the actor’s personal Yin/Yang struggle and subsequent unmasking.