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    1. 16-01-17 “Road Trip to Iceland, with Steen and Dad”

      by , 01-17-2017 at 08:56 PM
      This dream was what I recalled this morning following the intention: My intention for tonight is first and foremost to wake up and remember my dreams. Secondly I feel like I am approaching a cross-roads and I feel uncertain about where to place my efforts, so I would be thrilled with some assistance from my dreams in this respect. But foremost I trust my dreams and want to remember whatever they bring. It feels as if it is relevant somehow and I will use it as an opportunity to practise both descriptive evocative writing as well as Jungian interpretation methods.

      I am pondering the idea of going to Mexico, which appears much as you perceive a fantasy or mnemonic ideation in the waking state – the incipient sense of an image, a map perhaps, appearing before my inner eye.

      I direct my attention outwards and find myself in the passenger seat in Steen's silver-grey car, although I am inside the car I can clearly see the matte nuance of the silver grey colour on the outside of the car. My dad is in the back seat, and he seems gleeful and excited though he doesn't say or do much during the dream. We are going on a trip, and my dad and Steen are there helping me out, as it is mainly me going on a mission.

      It is pouring down outside, it is clouded and grey, which produce a darkish hue. We are at a ticket office, which resembles a mixture between a gas station and a junk food drive in. There are two protruding window tills on our right hand side and above an almost square section of roofing is covering the pavement next to the windows, providing some cover for the rain outside.

      We drive slowly towards the first of the two window tills – one for ordering another for picking up the tickets – and as we do I feel something bump into the car towards the back, which also produce a mild audible thump. I look out the window and backwards to see if Steen has accidentally hit one of the massive concrete columns extending from the building. He is really close but I can't see any damage done to the car.

      I lean back in and Steen switches on the radio and the GPS system. The audio-scape is flooded with remnants of old mobile conversations, radio clatter and noise. I feel uneasy and a bit confused, as it is supposed to be a GPS system, providing guidance. Steen remains rather calm and composed and simply asks the GPS if it is there, and it dawns on me that it is a voice activated system.

      “I am here” a clear loud and direct female voice responds, which is a tremendous reassurance.

      Steen proceeds to drive forward and I wonder why I don't have to open the window to get the ticket. “It isn't necessary when you have one of these” he says and points to a rectangular electronic device, with an old school digital display in the bottom right corner of the front window, just in front of me as it would seem. It is essentially a device that registers that he has been here and automatically charges him for the ferry ride, which is what the ticket office is for.

      “So we are going to Iceland” he says, and I feel at first excited, but then a bit concerned because we will be sailing and we are supposed to go to either Mexico or the Faeroe Islands as well today and I am afraid we won't have time. I think about this only briefly before relinquishing the thought at aspiration to do all of these things.

      We look at a map and a black marker line appears that takes us from the ticket office “to Odden” which on the map is a full scale island, elongated and egg shaped except for a very pointed en on the right hand side. The black line takes us to the top and centre of the island, where the port town is based, from where we will board the ferry to Iceland.

      End of dream.

      In this interpretation I will start by breaking down the dream into its constituent motifs, and run free associations on them.

      There is a preceding map, an idea of a journey – which implies a plan and a set destination it also represents an overview of a trip, which can symbolise knowledge of where I am going in life. This is particularly salient as I am taken somewhere else than what I had “mapped out”, which excites me although the expectation of having to go somewhere specific within a given time frame becomes a source of frustration and tension/restlessness.

      The car is a solid and large station car, it is silver grey – the colour symbolising the silver grey snake-like pathway through space I frequently perceive in meditation, cannabis and psychedelic states also symbolising the spiritual cord often reported as seen in OBEs.

      The car is a symbol of my body, it is in good shape and the fact that my dad has been relegated to the back seat can be an expression of our recent confrontations and my insights on how he has dominated the development of my low self-esteem though his parenting style. He is now put in the back seat, representing that I still carry him with me and care for his approval and love, yet this aspect is no longer the driving motivating psychic energy for my aspirations for life – such as “save the world and become super famous”, which is simply a conditioned tendency I have developed as I felt under appreciated and unseen as a child.

      Steen is an old friend of the family, both my mum and dad – I associate to him that he recently helped me out with cheaply renting his summer house to me following an Ayahuasca journey where I wanted to stop smoking and I didn't feel for returning to my parents' house where I currently live right after. At this time he said to me that he sees how my dad communicates to people and told me that one would get insane living in that environment constantly, which felt extremely pleasant to hear as someone external with knowledge of my dad seemed to understand how hard it can be. Recently my mother expressed – in a sober state – that it can be extremely challenging for her to live in that and that friends of the family finds it a challenge to be around him as well. With Steen in the driver's seat I feel that I have taken a step towards taking control of my life and am grateful for the moral support of individuating myself from my dad, who has – without fault of his own or even consciously – dominated much of my life, through establishing uncertainty both with regards to a fragile self-esteem but also the messianic and grandiose drive to save the world to finally be worthy of his admiration and love. Steen represents a new found aspect of myself that is compassionate and understanding towards why I have turned out as I did as well as the drive to liberate myself from the clutches of my dad.

      The rain outside symbolise a torrential state of affairs with regards to my emotions – since my last Ayahuasca journey it is as if a lid has been removed and my libido is now coursing freely upwards, which result in more passionate responses and an easier time setting boundaries. It could also symbolise the fact that I am expending a lot of emotional energy in response to external uncontrollable aspects of the world, which is reminiscent of the saviour complex alluded to earlier.

      The ticket office could symbolise a public institution, such as the Health Authorities which I have recently been in contact with, with regards Ayahuasca. I might be approaching, or at least that is how I perceive it, a point where I am close to getting in trouble due to my enquiries, yet no harm is done yet. The whole point of issuing a ticket could represent my thinking on Ayahuasca's precarious legal status and potentially in the future thinking of a license model for practising, where the dream hints at that license is nothing that comes from the outside but an internal license, a calling (electronic ticket system).

      The GPS and radio system is particularly interesting to me. The clatter represents conditioned thinking and the attention I pay to outward clues for finding out how to direct my life. However when I look closely the “ancient mother” (female GPS voice) is there and is capable of taking me in the direction I need to go. The trick is to ask and learn to listen for what is coming from within and ignore restrictions I put on myself based on external sources of esteem and approval.

      The fact that I am concerned with the duration of the trip represents a problematic aspect of how I relate to life in an impatient way. I am lacking trust in life unfolding as it is supposed to. This is related again to the map I saw in the beginning of the dream, which representative of how I tend to construct expectations of how life SHOULD unfold and I am operating under an assumption that I need to go somewhere specific and I need to go there quickly. In essence this result in an escapist approach to life, where I am not allowing it to unfold on its own terms and cannot fully embrace and meet events in a curious, compassionate and open way.

      The end of the dream I see the ocean and the beach sort of imaginatively overlapped onto the map with the black line. I take it to symbolise that I am still in the process of letting go of my tendency to construct expectations and narrow definitions of success, but I will shortly arrive at a position where I let go and let Life overcome me and simply concede to the abrupt changes that are about to happen, with excited anticipation and joy in letting whatever happens happen. The fact that it is a sailing trip could represent a recognition of the potent force of the collective unconscious, and my submitting the stubborn fantasy that I am in control and surrendering to the collective collected wisdom of the evolution of Life itself.

      Reconstructing the meaning from associated and elaborated ideas.

      So a potential message from the dream could be that I am still constructing expectations of where and how life should take me. This becomes a source of frustration when I run into unexpected opportunities and twists of fate.

      My dad has been a source for grandiose and messianic ideation, due to his belittling and command-like style of communication, from where he will never explain why he commands, reminds, reprimands, but simply asserts himself in a supercilious tone of voice. Since we have widely different interests in life and he has proclaimed that he has no interest (or capacity) in trying to understand me I have since very early childhood developed these tendencies as a way to garner his approval, which is already there he has just never shown it in a way I could understand it when younger. The fact that he is relegated to the back seat symbolise that I am relegating the grandiose and very ambitious saviour identities – and associated expectancies – to a position where they are no longer “driving me”.

      The downpour contrasted with the comfortable, sturdy and undamaged quality of the silver grey car, can symbolise the progress I am making with meditation, where I have found an easier time dealing with painful emotions, as well as physical symptoms. They aren't allowed to penetrate to my core and when I continue the exercise I will strengthen my capacity to sift out the “radio clatter” (which can also signify the attribution of value to others' judgement of me) and listen to the voice of my heart, represented here by the Anima archetype, my deity in prayer – Mother Gaia.

      The ticket office close call could symbolise that I need to tone down my activities with certain authorities to avoid getting in trouble, especially because I already have an inner license to pursue my dreams.

      The trip to Iceland represents where I am headed next, which isn't a literal journey, although that might be fun also. In fact it might be very useful as it is Steen guiding me, which could mean a pointer to a place of safe haven, which he provided following my last Ayahuasca journey. However I have also recently considered reading up on mythology to get a better understanding of the empirical data that underpins the theory of the archetypes. This journey serves as a pointer towards examining Nordic mythology and shamanistic/divination cultural history.

      In short. With particular reference to the intention here I am being reminded that uncertainty is OK, cause if I try and envision or anticipate a direction I will form an expectation, which will lead to suffering when life takes me elsewhere. As long as I listen to my inner voice the direction is guaranteed, so I should just continue the work of being better at letting go of old ways of thinking and sharpen my attention on what matters instead of the clatter. Then a further dive into the Nordic mythology is in store.