“Dreams are illustrations…from the book your soul is writing about you.” Marsha Norman
I had the weirdest dream last night. (How many times have you said or heard that?) Well, I did. I dreamed I was riding in a box down a river, but the river was moving dirt. So I got stuck. (Don’t have to be a rocket scientist to get a sense of what’s going on here). But the clouds were changing into awesome colors, teal, oranges, pinks, golds, as if someone was painting them as I was watching them, like on a canvas. I didn’t know if it was sunrise or sunset colors, or a fantasy world. I woke up as the clouds were changing, but could hear the ca-ching of an old-fashioned cash register. Remember them? You actually had to push buttons in order to have the numbers register. Something like this, but newer-it was the one from Path Mark, a grocery store I worked in during high school.
As a therapist, I did a lot of dream analysis. I do believe like Marsha Norman, that the dream is the window of the soul, not the eyes, unfolding you. I usually did Gestalt Therapy. I used this therapy in the dream analysis in Moloch and the Angel , my mystery/thriller. It’s based on a simple philosophy: Fill your emotional voids so that you can then become a unified whole. Perls believed that dreams contained the rejected, disowned parts of the Self. Every character and every object in a dream represented an aspect of that Self. Ask questions of every object in the dream, take on the role of that object, and a person could very well uncover buried emotions and acknowledge what was missing in their lives. Dreams breathe life into consciousness. So I talk to different aspects of my dream. The me in my dreams are the dullest–so covered with defenses. I talked to the cash register, asked why it was there and what did it want. Most importantly, what did they think was I doing there? Same with the clouds, and the dirt and the wooden box–holding me from drowning in crap. This type of analysis is informative, and it’s fun–usually very revealing. It was the changing colors in the clouds that revealed the most. I had to talk to each color. Teal is my color, so the mixing with the other colors became the focus point of the questions. I don’t like the color pink, although I didn’t realize that color would represent all I didn’t want to do, and the people, I didn’t want to be with, and how I thought the interaction with the other colors would yield me nothing. Ca-hing, the draw opens and it’s empty.
The dream illuminated for me the desire to go back into my cave and stop doing so much work with so many people–definitely dragging me through the mud. But then again, I’m sure other interpretations can be reached through other types of analysis. But it felt good, and it felt right, so my soul keeps writing …