 |
Dear Mandy:So I'm in Seattle. I look out the window and a bus is flying into the sky. It gets onto a big cloudbank,
and the going is kind of rough on those bumpy cumulus tops. But then I see that the bus is headed toward the
cloud road, an indent between the bumpy cloud tops that's hard-packed cloud and easy to drive on. Having
attained the road, the bus drives on into the distance.
Then I am sort of in Archie McPhee, and there's a sale on where the prices of metal wind-up toys are very
low, but you have to buy a pair of them; they get to specify what the pair is. So there's a very cool
end-of-the-world wind-up toy that I really want. It's big and round, and inside the transparent globe are
small colorful explosions. But I do not want the companion toy, which is a small animal wind-up called
InkJet Squid. I wonder if I should settle for a less flashy end-of-the-world wind-up toy, which has a better
companion toy.
That's it. Does it mean I've been reading science fiction, which I have, or that we're planning to visit
Seattle, which we are?
Nadine |
|
Dear Nadine:
Your dream doesn't have anything to do with either science fiction or coming to Seattle, although it
does have something to do with traveling on the bumpy road of life.
Let's start with the flying bus. I associate flying dreams generally with a sense of liberation, freedom, or
being in that state of "flow." It's both significant and insignificant that you are not on the bus: significant
because it may represent an internal kind of separation from yourself -- like you're watching your life
happen rather than completely engaging it; insignificant because, of course, you really are on the bus (or
you will be), even though you didn't think you were.
I doubt you need much help with the bumpiness and then un-bumpiness. You are, or maybe recently have
been, going through some bumpiness of your own, searching, I expect, for a path that is not only more
smooth, but perhaps more importantly more solid. You need something under there to support you. Without
it, you're just on a bus in the atmosphere, which we all know is currently impossible.
The Archie McPhee phase is more entertaining, but no less allegorical. You struggle and feel frustrated at
what is not in your control. Life forces you to take the good with the bad: if you want the fabulous, colorful
toy, you have no choice but to take with it the slimy colorless depressing thing. It's a hard choice, which
means that the icky things that go along with the best things in life really seem pretty icky to you. You
believe that sometimes it might be better to settle for something less than what you really want or love,
because there is less risk associated with the downside -- and there's always a downside.
In this vein, I find it particularly interesting that you don't identify the "better companion toy" that goes
with the less flashy end-o'-world toy. This suggests to me that either you know what it was in the dream
and think it's unimportant or that you don't know what it is, in which case you are simply completely
confident that it poses less of a threat or risk than the "InkJet Squid" (which you yourself aggrandized with
the capital letters).
You might think it's significant that you are selecting from end-of-the-world toys. I don't. The "end" is
just an end. It could be anything. It could be a great thing, it could be a fateful
end sort of thing. It's more a personal destination, place, objective, or goal than it is a
universal end. Whew!
Thank you for sending me your dream, Nadine.
Mandy
|
|
