Some additional ideas about your important group of dreams follows which I hope can be helpful in some way.
Starting with the most vivid one about your moving and the baby, it could perhaps be suggesting in part that a “wrong move” might be possible in the sense of leaving, for whatever reason, a certain positive mind-space close to the “country” (e.g. where your deceased grandfather is alive and well) and giving up something important to you (e.g. you’ll miss the fishing sporting event which is “valuable”, i.e. “expensive”). In this context, the image of traveling around town and being generous to people by giving them things could possibly imply that you might be trying too often to “please” people/society/the expectations of others instead of perhaps paying greater attention at this stage of your life to deeper inner needs as probably symbolized by the young “niece” and then by the baby.
The scene changes to a family picnic in the country and the subject of food and cooking is emphasized by the dream (e.g. you bring a salmon to cook and there will be a fishing excursion which you’ll miss, therefore also potentially missing out on eating a big catch). Psychologically, fish usually symbolize contents of the unconscious which have to be “caught” and brought out of the “waters of the unconscious”. Food in general often symbolizes experiences which have to be “eaten” (taken in) and “digested” (reflected upon) in order to provide the “nutrition” of understanding and meaning. Doing this in the context of family dynamics (e.g. you’re at a family picnic) can often provide valuable insights which can help to orientate a person in an effective way.
You’re a little jealous that your young niece will be going to the fishing event and rationalize that your plans, which have led to your leaving the area, will naturally stop you from attending even though you apparently feel underneath how much going could mean to you deep down as a reminiscence of youth and the emotions that you felt then.
For me, this sequence in the dream is an example of the true meaning of the term “sour grapes” as described in Aesop’s Fables but which is often misused in popular speech. In the fable, as you probably know, a fox tries very doggedly and persistently all day to reach a hanging bunch of grapes, finally giving up with a phrase something like “They were green and probably sour anyway”. This has been taken to mean that we often unfairly disparage what we can’t obtain. In this way of looking at your dream, it’s possible that maybe a variation of the fable appears in the sense that, while you have apparently been unable to find a basic level of contentment in some ways, any such state of affairs if it exists might be the result of not “fishing” the depths of your own psyche enough in an ongoing way. Maybe instead of overly blaming outer circumstances (albeit very difficult ones), it would be good for you to invest in looking within more often (which you might “disparage doing” to some extent). The dream seems to show how very valuable this process can be by having your grandfather make a point of showing you the receipt for the money he paid to have your niece attend the fishing event. That is, a lot of energy (money) is required to explore all facets of one’s personality, many of which are generally unconscious and therefore undeveloped to some degree.
The potential result of any such inner search is instantly shown by the girl baby which you’re then holding, an image of your basic inner potential as a woman which has to be “cherished” and “nurtured”. Because it looks like you’re around the approximate age of 35, this dream could essentially be a “memento mori” dream (Latin for "Remember that you must die"). Although we think of ourselves as still being young in our mid-30’s, from the point of view of dreams, we’ve passed the half-way point of our lives, and this type of dream spontaneously appears around mid-life and later in order to remind us of this point. The reality is that if a conscious application to completing ourselves by developing any as-yet undeveloped innate potentials isn’t begun around this time, it could be too late to do so in the end.
The baby is around five months old, suggesting that she might relate to the fact that you started work on your doctorate degree around that time in June. The idea could be that you need to stay especially closely attached to your instincts during this very difficult time (i.e. as symbolized by the country, fresh fish on the grill and the fishing excursion etc.) in order to protect this apparently important part of yourself. For example, you’ve had to give up your exercise routine and your body is under a lot of stress. In any case, something else from around five months ago could spontaneously come to mind (in the form of memories, thoughts and feelings) if you concentrated on the baby’s image in the dream which is very important to do in order to help confirm what she symbolizes.
Your other dreams about urinating and finding piles of dog feces likely relate to a possible understandable situation of having problems dealing with mostly unconscious, turbulent emotions during this difficult time. Peeing, the medical term for which is the “expression of urine”, is linked symbolically by way of analogy to the free and open “expression” of feelings which shouldn’t be “held back”, just like not peeing in a physical sense can lead to serious medical problems if regularly persisted in for long periods.
In addition, excrement and pee can symbolize, as an example, the “disgusting” results of having to “absorb” and “digest” various realities regarding our own lives and those of others.
The “by-products” of this process include such things as anger, resentment, jealousies and grudges etc. etc. which somehow have to be “gotten rid of”.
Because of the appearance of the next dream with its huge, terrifying spider, it looks like this could be a time to just reconnect to your deep instinctive side, including strong emotions, so that it will be reassured to at least some degree about your basic loyalty to it. Perhaps some small but vital niche has be carved out of each day to do this. It might sound like an unusual and even frightening idea, but you could try going back into your dream by focusing on the image of the spider and asking it “What can I do for you?”. It’s possible that a dialogue could start which would help to relieve the tension between you and the “spider” whose “bites” can symbolize, for example, unpleasant physical or psychological symptoms of some kind. Analyst Robert Johnson’s “Inner Work” describes this technique along with a very reliable introduction on how to look at one’s own dreams. And the failure of your husband to help in “getting rid of” the spider might be the dream’s way of showing that it really shouldn’t be gotten rid of (similar to your thought in the dream that you didn’t want to kill it and it’s bad luck to do so). In addition, it really is a “female energy” in the sense that it’s apparently deeply related to your overall potential self so that only your own feminine side can effectively connect with it.
In a nutshell and from a Jungian point of view (which is grounded on an in-depth and sensitive understanding of world mythologies), a spider embodies the frightening duality of creativity (e.g. beautiful shimmering webs with an “eye” at their centre) and predation (e.g. the ensnaring aspect of the web which can lead to death). The image of a spider is therefore a frightening microcosm of nature and of life itself. For you, life has been difficult for years in some ways as the result of stymied career plans and not being able to have a family. Now, for months you’ve been suffering from the additional blow of having your house sold out from under you just as a new phase of your education was beginning.
So the danger could be that the negative side of the spider symbol could tend to become too dominant under the current stresses to which you’re being subjected. Freud’s view which came to your mind that the image of a spider possibly means a conflict with a mother figure is indeed, like the majority of his views, cramped and incomplete as mentioned in another reply to your post. However, it does contain a grain of truth in that the “Mother” as symbolized by the spider is in this case Mother Nature herself but in her symbolic and mythological form as the “Terrible Mother”, the part which kills and devours in order to create new life. But this aspect in oneself cannot be taken lightly and has to be confronted in some reasonable way instead of avoided (e.g. by hiding under the covers and hoping it will just go away). Otherwise, a person can sometimes become susceptible to being depressed when things aren’t going well. So it’s possible that maybe you understandably “didn’t get it” about what the little baby symbolized in your previous dream, i.e. the potential of your overall completeness as a person (as opposed to only a “new job” as it were), and therefore, your basic inner instincts are tending to “rebel” so that you’ll “come to your senses” and embrace this living part of yourself in order to move forward more effectively over time despite your current challenges.
A very short but valuable publication by Jungian analyst Helen Luke “The Life of the Spirit in Women: A Jungian Approach” might be especially helpful in your situation. It’s available on Amazon by way of Kindle but otherwise, it can be difficult to get a print copy at anything like a reasonable price.
Your experiences of dreaming, for example, about a person whom you haven’t seen for years and then running into them is described in Jungian terms as a “synchronistic event”, or more simply as “a meaningful coincidence”. In this type of happening, two events are not connected by “cause and effect” (that is, the image of the mother of your high school boyfriend in the dream didn’t “cause” the meeting with the outer woman), but the two or more events in a synchronistic happening are joined by “meaning” (that is, the chance meeting with the outer woman had some kind of hidden significance).
In you want to explore this part of yourself more fully, some reliable books about synchronicity as written by professional analysts include “There Are No Accidents” by Robert Hopcke, “The Tao of Psychology” by Jean Shinoda Bolen, and “At the Heart of the Matter” by J. Gary Sparks.
Anyway, without knowing much about you, this way of looking at your dreams might not fit your personal circumstances very well, but as mentioned, I hope that these ideas can be helpful in some way.
Please feel free to comment on, or to ask any questions about, this particular way of looking at your dreams.
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