Dreaming Of Hone

[Midsummers Daydream]

Hello everybody
I had a dream last night that I hope someone could make heads or tails of.

First, some background information. This will only take a sentence or two.
Last year, I moved to another state. It’s not been a great experience and I’ve started making plans to move back.

Now the dream,
I was in my old hometown. Just me, no other family members. There was snow on the ground and it was starting to get dark. I realized it was time to get back home. Home to the state I live in now. I got on a bicycle and started heading down Main Street. How I was going to cross many states on a bicycle to get home is a mystery to me.

Anyway, the next thing I know, I’m standing in front of a pantry. I open it up and there’s three cup-o-soups inside. I grab the one in the center, take the lid off and see that the soup is already smoking. However, the soup is cold. Cold smoking soup. There’s no way I’m eating that. I put it back on the shelf when suddenly out of my left peripheral vision, see a door.

I walk towards it, open the door up and step outside to a gorgeous summer day. I look around and realize I am one town over from where I used to live. I see the road going up the hill that leads back home. I start walking up it and come upon an outdoor recreation center I know well. There are people there playing basketball and other people there, sitting on the benches studying.

I’m about to resume my walk when suddenly the road and the sidewalk are gone. They’ve been replaced by shrubs that are at least twenty feet long to my left and my right. I’m about to walk right through them when I notice a spider web with a baby spider in it. I start walking to my left to try to get past the shrubs but there are other webs with bigger spiders in them making it impossible to get through. I start to walk to the right only now I’m on a cliff side. I can see the ocean in the distance so I know I’m high up. I look around me and notice three things. One, I’m on a very narrow ledge that disappears in front of me on all sides. Two, the top of the cliff is only eight to ten feet above me. Three, I have no equipment with me for which to climb. The earth before me is too loose and if I try to climb without equipment, I could fall.

There I was stuck on a ledge, so close to home and I couldn’t get there. I woke up right after that. Any opinions? Does anyone see some symbolism in that dream?

 

[PaulKH]

Welcome, and thanks for the excellent recall as well as your work in communicating it. This dream is no doubt about obstacles--the brain is an amazing problem-solver, but we humans, in our foolish cleverness, have made a complex world with some problems too great to solve (or more often, conflicting solutions). Much in your dream speaks to the visualization of these problems-conflicts. See the obstacles with as clear a vision as you can (not just in focus, but in depth/breadth--always know that the broader your perspective, the more informed your choices) and make adjustments as best you are able to. If you learn with each dream and each step (happening/decision/result), you will always be advancing your individual life experience. For the rich imagery of your dream, you are mostly left to your understanding of all the variables in your life that could help this dream *speak* to you.

 

[Midsummers Daydream]

Hi Paul
This dream is speaking to me all right. Change of seasons, cold steamy soup (how the heck did that get in the middle of everything?), riding from the north to the south on a bike, spiders, spider webs, shrubs and ledges with a view of an endless ocean. It’s speaking all right. I don’t know what it’s saying other than there are obstacles but it’s speaking. 😂😂

 

[Helia]

" to spoon out the soup for someone else" is a german saying.
I stumbled over tjat soup...unusual symbol!
Other than that...in jungian depth psych. We talk about the
PATH of individuation...a long way with lots of obstacles. Your dream looks a bit like this...🎏

 

[Helia]

Jung calls individuation an unconscious natural spontaneous process but also a relatively rare one, something: “only experienced by those who have gone through the wearisome but indispensable business of coming to terms with the unconscious components of the personality.”
Often in dreams to see as a long journey.

 

[Helia]

Spinning is connected to our imaginative activity, wishful thinking, daydreaming, and "spinning something together," and symbolizes the independent activity of the unconscious psyche, which, as an expression of our psyche's self-regulation, creates inner images, fantasies, and symbols, thus releasing blockages in psychic energy.
I thought about all the spiders..🎏

 

[PaulKH]

Hi Paul
This dream is speaking to me all right. Change of seasons, cold steamy soup (how the heck did that get in the middle of everything?), riding from the north to the south on a bike, spiders, spider webs, shrubs and ledges with a view of an endless ocean. It’s speaking all right. I don’t know what it’s saying other than there are obstacles but it’s speaking. 😂😂

Ha! Yeah, I hear the "duh!" but I wanted to start with the obvious and encourage you to dig and have patience. Sorry, I forgot to add that part: many times, complex meanings only becomes clearer later, as more circumstances play out in your life and you make more choices based on those happenings. Dreams like to connect the what-if dots (the potentialities, likelihoods). Then (only later) if we have thought deeply about the dream and meaning, we might be more prepared to make the real life decisions that the dream reflected or speculated about. (Notice that dreams are not often in the "business" of immediate gratification or easy answers to the layers of life complexity; our ancient ancestors knew this far better than we seem to today.)

In an attempt to help, the *order* in your dream struck me as significant. At first you have easy choices: making it to the next town (very easy, symbolized by the standard dream "warping"), walking between hedges (steered, perhaps, but also easy), yet as you make your choices in your dream, the pathing becomes more complicated and then even steep (the analogy of the path getting steeper is very often about increasing difficulty), but notice that only happens after you turn away from the spider-filled webs (which you should recognize as choices you made/can make). In the dream, those choices led to more bafflement for you, but that could also be because your sliver of conscious mind was becoming more and more confused as the familiar warped into the "future" possibilities. Please understand that as present factors play out, the future ahead of us is weaving together into more and more firmness (what we might consider "certainty"), which is both an elegant and complex resolving that dreams sometimes try to approximate, and that activity can be very confusing to us if we aren't thinking in those terms.

I encourage you to be open to similar, "follow-up" dreams. Ask for them when you are ready. I wish you the best and hope you make sense of them as you dwell upon them.

(And Helia's mention of individuation cannot be understated, it is so important: this is a concept worth studying and understanding, if you are inclined to such things, because it can clarify many of the complexities you face and how they *by design* differ from others' experiences as the general understanding or trend becomes very personal in its application to you.) If you want a thought exercise/example, consider this broad application: "you are human" --> (leads to) "you have this set of personality settings" --> "you have this type of experience happen to you" --> "you make this set of choices and get results" --> "you grow, revise, learn (or fail to) in such a way that begins changing future outcomes"...and so on. Note that each step better defines "you" until you get to the point of uniqueness that fits only you. And I contend (agree with Jung with all my experience and understanding) that dreaming and the handling of those dreams play a *major* part in this process of individuation.

 

[Midsummers Daydream]

Thanks Paul. Your answer is very informative and I will pay closer attention to my dreams. I do have another question. I was dreaming that I was back in 1985 and saw someone there who wasn’t born until 1999. How is that possible and what could that mean? I wish I could remember more to give you better context. Hopefully it will come back to me.

 

[PaulKH]

Hi again. Heh, I dream in the past so often that it feels like a specialization, and so try looking at your above dream from that standpoint, that it might be analyzing and giving you personal history lessons (like how you got from your home place to where you are unhappy, perhaps signified by the cliff ledge, and how that might apply to your future).
I always trust that there are insights to be learned from the past that help us prepare for the future, and though I too have forgotten the details of many of the people I meet and places I "visit", I trust they add to my experience, perspective, and therefore wisdom because I am in that right frame of mind to make it so, open to learning from everything to the best of my ability, and knowing that ability keeps expanding as I keep pushing (with help from the dreams that push my boundaries, again, because I accept them as such).

Just keep in mind that dreams are often so layered that you are only pulling back a fraction of them, and they often work in the way that one detail (especially a strong symbol) can have multiple meanings from different angles/contexts. This is one legitimate reason why good insights can seem so vague: layers depend on insights and applications because the meaning is in the *benefit*, which is often entirely up to the dreamer to find or miss. This powerful dynamic is often overlooked, especially by people used to simple answers (that are by default wrong/incomplete, given the complexity of our existence). Yet, easy answers make for very poor life-exploration and stunted growth compared to what is available.

With all that in mind, I see a few distinct possibilities about the person born in 99: that they represent a "type" the dream wants you to pay attention to (look for similarities that relate to you or your choices); that time/setting within the dream isn't what you assumed it was, as indicated by that person; or that the layers of it are "bleeding" together--think of them like overlapping insights that have some kind of causality to each other, but not necessarily in terms we are used to thinking about, say, linearly. I encourage you not to get frustrated when doing this, since it is a lifelong, unending journey, and the more you learn to pull from your dreams and think in complexities, the richer you are as an individual being. And that is reward enough, even if there were nothing else.