Dream narratives are often similar in structure and pattern to fairy tales. Both feature fantastic stories that require a suspension of reality as we know it. Both are filled with archetypal adventures in symbolic stories where anything is possible!
Create a ScapeGoat using the twigs, leaves and rocks that you find in an outdoor setting by a river. Wrap, bundle and bind all of your emotional attachments to the dream into a tangle of of guilty memories, mistakes, frustration and anger. Then, let the bundle go. Send it away, down the river!
How does your inner dream landscape echo the state of your feelings and emotions?
Like the sprouting of a seed, each dream offers us a chance to wake up from a long deep sleep into a new reality. If we are patient gardeners, we can release tremendous growth and expansion from tending our dreams.
Like a seed, a dream must be nourished to fulfill its genetic promise. It needs caring, attention, moisture, warmth and light to set roots deep into the earth so that it may burst through its confinement from darkness into light.
Invite a dream image to sprout with associations that have been planted in your past. Then, bring your dream forward into a flower of new growth. What new ideas and abilities in your dream are waiting to be liberated? What is the creative force in this dream? Write without stopping. Let your words burst forth!
Dreams about fathers are often about authority, traditional values, religious philosophy, and wisdom. They can be about will power, a warlike spirit or the ability to be strong. Father dreams can focus on responsibility, discipline and domination.
A mythic father figure might represent intellect, reason, action, power, energy, assertiveness, fortitude, courage; or a need for safety, guidance, support protection and security.
Conversely, the father figure can represent aggressiveness, righteousness, judgment, punishment, betrayal or anger. The father figure can discourage our attempts at independence. He can undermine our self reliance and self esteem by making us submissive or putting constraints on our autonomy.
Write a letter to yourself. If every aspect of the father image is an aspect of yourself, how have you fathered yourself?
Allow Alice to fall into your dream and to wander as an observer though your dreamscape. Listen to her as she politely asks questions of each of the dream images. Faithfully record the responses which may or may not make any sense at all.
Like a Labyrinth, the dream mirrors the outer journey by invoking an inner journey. Allow yourself to remain open to the unexpected, the ineffable, the transcendent as you meander with your thoughts on paper in a stream of consciousness. Write in a spiral on unlined paper instead of left to right.
The Art of the Dream
