Friday, 11 October 2013
Friday, 11 October 2013
From my sitting-room I see a drive (instead of garden) something like the one at Hassocks. In the middle of the drive Mum is weeding, looking peaceful, calm, meditative. I know, in the dream, she is dead so feel very surprised. I call out to her, outstretching my arms. She doesn’t see or hear. Then she disappears, and in her place is a small, pale blue, attractive, wooden bedside-cabinet. The pale blue impresses me. The cabinet lifts into the air and up towards an overhanging tree, where it changes into a large, attractive, pale yellow, autumn leaf and attaches itself to the tree among the other leaves.
Interpretation
The appearance of my dead mother and her transformation into a fallen/about-to-fall autumn leaf suggests this is a ‘death dream’, ie, a dream concerned with endings and new beginnings, whether psychological, spiritual or physical.
The dream begins with the ‘drive’, which may be a symbol for my drive, ie my life-force. This has accumulated weeds and needs weeding. The weeding is being done my mother, the bearer/giver of life. As the ‘mother-drive’ it may also refer to my unconscious life-force. Perhaps the weeding is accomplished through meditation. And does it begin unconsciously? - my horoscope has been urging me to notice and accept changes in my unconscious during this difficult, becalmed time.
Once the ego sees the weeding and tries to contact the unconscious ‘Mother’, she changes shape and time seems to go backwards. She changes from person to artefact to about-to-fall leaf.
Blue was mum’s favourite colour (though not especially light blue so far as I remember). The hollow cabinet may have a tomb-womb significance. And it is bed-side - suggesting sleep (the little death, and place of dreams), and sex or life-force. The weeding may be associated with this.
So the meditative, weeding mother becomes the womb and tomb, and then the fallen leaf which returns to the tree to fall again. This backwards motion puzzles me. Why not show a falling leaf becoming first a cabinet and then my meditatively weeding mother?
Is it saying: first do your weeding so you will be ready to ‘die’ - in one sense or another?
PS On the night of the dream, while I was out, a largish sycamore in the garden fell, with its leafy branches brushing my sitting-room windows. I had no idea when I returned home, and was mystified by the pressing leaves dimly visible through the closed blinds. How had I never noticed them before? In the morning, after the dream, I found out.