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    1. The Little Giant (Fence Autosymbolism part 3)

      by , 08-24-1975 at 02:24 PM
      Morning of August 24, 1975. Sunday (the day before starting 9th grade).



      This dream is like an O. Henry tale and as such, is more like an amusing (but nonsensical) ”story” than many of my other dreams. There was a time when I titled it “The Smallest Giant” to have a titular relationship with other (though unrelated) dreams such as “The Smallest Rabbit” and “The Smallest Ghost”.



      In my dream, a fictitious family lives directly south of us and seemingly shares their house with another family, or perhaps they are only visiting them or staying with them for a time during the upcoming school year.

      A fictitious wooden fence, much like an old cattle fence (but of only two separated narrower boards high), runs east and west at the southernmost end of our house all the way out to the train tracks. The grass is also longer in our backyard than it had ever been in real life.

      The main idea is that there is a “giant” living next door. I think the giant’s name may be John but I am unsure. (There is only a vague awareness at one point of the Edward G. Robinson movie “The Little Giant” from 1933.)

      However, the male that had been thought by others to be a giant is eventually seen to not be very tall at all, but he is chubby, and at one point, seemingly only a little taller than the average height for an adult male. He seems mentally “slow”, though. He vaguely reminds me of Kenneth W, a classmate and friend from the year before.

      I play a few games with him and Kenny and Karen (neighbors, schoolmates, and friends in real life, though Lisa is not present), mainly with a Frisbee, and some other events take place related to the “giant” making a few odd mistakes in judgement (mostly regarding distance orientation). Near the end of my dream, there is an idea that it is foolish for people to call him a giant.

      During the clearest segment of my dream, I call over the fence to him, “hey” and his first name, saying “…Kindergarten starts tomorrow!” Of course, this is a “twist ending” and implies that he actually is a giant but only four or five years of age. I am almost laughing as I wake, being aware of the apparent “cleverness” of my dream.



      This dream has been used here for part 3 of my “Fence Autosymbolism” series. Here, the fence is a main feature of which does not exist in reality. However, in this case, there is a degree of correlation with waking life. It is important to understand that dreams are typically an ambiguous mix of literal factors and autosymbolic factors, sometimes with conscious self correlation.

      This dream was, on one level, temporarily making light of my conscious self’s discomfort and uncertainty over the idea of going to high school for the first time, as ninth grade was to start for me on the twenty-fifth of August (on the morning after this dream). My dream colored my mood from mostly negative to somewhat cheerful, at least during this day.

      The “giant” was not the preconscious factor in this dream (and not all dreams have a personified preconscious either), but my emergent consciousness. Again, it was making light of an upcoming transition, that for some, might instead have been rendered as a nightmare or at best an unpleasant dream. In reality, I was no longer in the lower grades. I was no longer a child. The fictitious fence appeared in my dream as both a liminal space divider (which was not present in later dreams) and because contact with our real neighbors was nearing an end as was the previous openness with Lisa as had existed in our childhood and early teenage years.

      This validates that some dream content comes from current (though liminal) deliberate conscious thought (while other content seems to have no recent source). This is important to understand, as fences which already existed, the ones in part 1 and part 2 of this series, were solely autosymbolic of the dream state and waking process only, and they did not imply creating a new fence in a real-life setting by way of liminal dream control (dream control without lucidity).


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