A head full of dreams

I’ve always been fascinated by dreams, mostly how creative we are when all the guards which patrol in our thoughts are sleeping.  My friend Karin was amazing at dream analysis, she would talk through a dream with me and arrive at interpretations which were real revelations.  She was very much against the school of thought which has fixed meanings, such as a snake means deceit (I’m making that up, I can’t remember them).  Instead she took a Jungian approach which relates the dreams objects and settings to how an individual perceives them.  Since she is a computer programmer I wish she would develop a dream analysis program.  Our subconscious speaks to us in poetry and mysterious imagery, I would love to unlock the door to greater understanding and self awareness.

In my teens and twenties I had recurring dreams about crocodiles.  The settings would change but the theme was always very similar.  I would be running through shallow water stepping on the backs of the crocodiles or I would be lying on something like a lilo and crocs would be snapping at the bottom puncturing the lilo.  There were many variations on the theme.

Over the past year or so I have a new and much nicer recurring dream.  I walk, wade or swim past the point where waves break on a shore.  There I find a magical place which is all brilliant colour, light, rocks and waterfalls.  I never wake remembering a particular story just filled with images of this wonderful place.

As a child I had a few dreams which predicted events which later unfolded.  A horrible one was an image of our dog under a car wheel, she was run over that day.  When anyone close to me was pregnant I dreamed the sex of the baby and was never wrong.  A friend of mine had more constructive dreams, she dreamt the winner of the Durban July one year and the winner of Miss South Africa (pity she didn’t place bets on those).  Last Friday Fjord dreamed that we did not go on holiday that day because our house caught fire.  We later drove 150km on our way for a weekend away and had to turn around because our house had been broken into.

This morning I woke with a bumper crop of dream memories, normally I’m lucky if I remember 1, this morning 4 were relatively fresh in my mind.  I jotted them down, now if only Karin were around to puzzle through them with me.

1.  The dream which woke me was a stressful one, a man had seen me enter all but the last numbers of my banking pin, he then walked away presumably to access my account.  I tried to phone to block my bank account but the person who I spoke to was wasting time with unnecessary questions while I was being reduced to poverty.

2.  A person sold a pristine river front property to a buyer who would pollute and destroy the river.  I was very critical of this, I then asked myself if under pressure to sell I would have also made an ethically wrong decision.

3.  An image of a fish tank with a paw-paw in it.  The paw paw was covered with real eyes and floating around it were many detached eyes.

4.  A very small snake bites me behind the neck, it looked like a miniature cobra.  I was told not to worry too much the more dangerous one was a snake on the ground which looked like a shongololo and was called a ‘walking man’

Dreams really are such fun, I have painted beautiful pictures in my dreams and written flawless poetry which of course is forgotten on waking.  They are a reminder of how far my mind can run when I’m not shooting it in the foot with “I can’t”.

Does God speak to us in dreams?  I think sometimes he does.  In other cases where dreams become reality I believe that we sense so much but block or don’t explore those messages while awake, in sleep they then speak to us.

I would love anyone who reads this to share your dreams under ‘comments’

2pm update – After I posted this I went to the church pre-primary where I do some volunteer admin work.  Today’s priority was the grocery shopping.  I didn’t take enough cash from petty cash so decided to pay with my bank card and get the cash back from petty cash.  The card machine hung “authorising” and printed a slip saying transaction cancelled.  At the same time I received 2 sms messages from the bank saying that the transaction had gone through twice with the same amount once for Pick n Pay and the other for Cafe Fiori (which I have never heard of).  It took a phone call to the bank and almost an hour to sort out the problem.  Very odd that it is years since I had to phone the bank about a problem with my card and I should dream about having to phone the bank with a problem the night before.  So long as I don’t get bitten by a snake today or encounter multi eyed fruit I guess it could be worse.