This is a big dream and you should keep it because you might want to return to it in the future; it’s both very personal but there are also collective images as well, so called archetypal images. Personally I don’t get any particular feeling what it is about, what it “means”, but I will share some thoughts.
The setting is real life like and you note that it is “a sunny day, all conditions normal”; the starting point is in other words at an inner room you are conscious of and that the story that follows is relevant to your everyday life. That is one of the reasons the dream is powerful, because often we dream either about everyday life – work, spouse, home – or the dream is a plunge into the unintelligible world of the unconscious, and you have difficulty relating to it at all. But this dream goes from your everyday life, down into areas of your psychology which is partly personal and partly archetypal, and so the experience feels very important.
So we start in everyday life and walk into the unknown with an peculiar awareness that allows us to describe the adventure in detail afterward. This is probably the reason why the dream chose your coming trip as the setting, because that trip is a journey into the wild untouched by civilization – a good image for the unconscious, our inner world which we by definition are not aware of and we cannot control. So, the journey is not necessarily a symbol for your relationship with your girlfriend, even though it might be that too. Dream images are often several things at the same time, which makes dream interpretation difficult because our rational consciousness is not very comfortable with paradoxes and want to sort things out, and in the process loses the content of the symbol. A dream is often about this and that, not either-or. It makes dream interpretation time consuming and exhausting, unfortunately.
Anyways, you feel adventurous and go into the unknown. From this dream I get the feeling that you are a fairly uncomplicated guy if you don’t mind me saying so, and your relationship with your girlfriend is quite sound. No issues here, so to speak, at least not in this dream, and at least not of the kind you are unaware of (with a little saving close at the end of this text). The canal is a stream of water that leads to a central point where several canals are coming together. This is a important place in your inner self, it is a center. The canals is a symbol for unconscious streams leading to the center. This place can be interpreted as the self, as Jung described it:
“The self is not only the center, but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the center of this totality, just as the ego is the center of consciousness.”
[Collected Works 12, par. 44.]
Note that you first says 3-4 canals, and then 8. Those are all numbers of wholeness, and seen from above the place may very well take the form of a mandala, a universal symbol of the totality, of the self. You have no map for this place, naturally, but you are not bothered with it either. I guess you are quite comfortable with your self, you are not a person who is afraid to be alone, be with yourself. An inner journey of this kind is not frightening to you. At this point in time though, the center is a unwelcoming place, a marsh, where one does not thread easily, but you don’t have to do that either so no bother.
As you are about the walk into the building there comes a father figure with two children, just above the age you were in when you stopped taking these trips with your father figures in real life. It is significant that they arrive just as you are about to enter the building; if this character wouldn’t have arrived at this point in time, you would have walked into the building; but because he came right now, you didn’t enter the building. Therefore, one would like to speculate, he came because you were about to enter the building. This is in my experience how dreams often work: A and C seem unrelated, but often you see that C happened because of A. We don’t recognize the B, the bridge between the A and C, and this is one of the reason we find dreams fragmented. So the hero, the father figure, saves you from entering the building.
He carries the energy of youth, the good energy which follows a presumably good father complex. (He is a father, and he comes with children, the future which springs from the past.) The new maps are useless here, because they are depicting the life as seen now, but the now that you see is not the reality. The psychological reality of now is much more than that, it is based on the past, for instance. So the old map, from the time of your birth or even before that, depicts the canals which are inner psychological streams of energy and everything it carries with it. We are born with these canals, we are not born tabula rasa. In this dream we are down in our collective unconscious, and the maps of these regions are not drawn today, they were drawn a long time ago, before we were born even.
Then the contents in this inner room changes; the good father is about to leave, and when that energy is leaving it makes room for another, more troubled energy or complex: The couple who is lost, and they come with rain, bad whether, and they follow you into the building which the hero stopped you from entering. (I think, it is not clear which one is “the man”, but my interpretation of the text would follow a logic.) So the inside of the building belongs to the couple’s energy, to that part of your inner self.
The house is a place where raw material is transformed to something useful, something you can use for building. It is not used for that right now, because the energies here are unconscious, but one day in the future it might be a lot of activity here. The young man shows you this, perhaps because he is your shadow, and if you make him conscious, the building can begin.
Then you are discussing whether you should stay or leave, and the father/hero decides to leave. I think that it is because his presence is incompatible with the couple’s. “He would rather camp in the woods than be here” with the couple and “their” house. Those are two parts of you, two energies which you cannot integrate right now. The hero will be fine, but he cannot be in the same room as the couple, and if I read the text properly, they are actually never in the same scene, which would emphasize this condition. This is the crux of the dream – the couple is the crux or the key. But what do they represent? I don’t know.
I do not think that they represent you and your girlfriend, because, why would it be so? If the dream is a reflection of your relationship, why wouldn’t it be you two – why another couple? I’m certainly no expert on dreams, but in my experience, at least how I interpret it so far, is that when my dreams are commenting on my factual relationships, it is me and the other in the dream – never another couple. Figures in dreams are never me (as such), but rather – for lack of better words – parts of me. My longing, my complex, my background, my wishes, my anger, my instincts, and so forth – but not me. If it is me who is depicted, this person that I am, then it is me in the dream too.
Another thing which raises my concern with this interpretation of the couple is that then you would in principle not dream about something you are not conscious of. Miscarriage is a real, conscious fear you would have rational reasons to have, if you and your girlfriend would expecting (which might be in a few years, as the couple in the dream is a few years older than you.) Why all the drama in the dream, the very powerful archetypal imagery, the thunder, the drowning of the “prince”, and so forth, regarding a natural and conscious concern that a woman may have miscarriages like her mother did? I can’t get that into my understanding of dreams, and my experience. This is my thoughts only, I wouldn’t confuse it with some objective truth.
I think the dream is using the miscarriage as a symbol, that is, it is representing something the dreamer is unconscious about. When the dream is creating symbols (which by definition is content we are unconscious about) it mostly uses images we know, like canoe, house, and so forth, but we need to interpret them to find out their true meaning because the dream is speaking the language of the unconscious, not of the conscious: This is a trip into the wild, it represents a journey into the unconscious; this is a canal, it represents inner streams of energy; this is a father, it represents the father complex; this is a miscarriage, it represents – a miscarriage? Of course it can be so, but considering the highly symbolical setting, I don’t think so in this case. It represents something else.
The dreamer avoids the house, the residence, as if he has an intuition regarding what’s going on there and he doesn’t want to know. He stays out on the porch with his girlfriend even when the young man has invited him inside; that is irrational behaviour which indicate something is not quite right. But the dreamer gets to choose. So far the dreamer has been on top of things, but now he falls asleep and then he is not anymore. Sleeping is a difficult symbol for me which I have been pondering some, but let’s just say that when you are asleep you are unconscious; so the dreamer gives in for the weight of the unconsciousness which dominates the place when the hero is gone, and the man invites him again – and now he goes.
There is thunder and lightning, that which is taken place now is of cosmic dimensions; the inner cosmos is in an uproar. And why not – what could be more upsetting than the death of a child, and it is not just any child either, but the future king. So there is a highly symbolical meaning in this and the setting is mythological. It doesn’t seem to be a miscarriage, rather a killing, and that is very important. A miscarriage of course is involuntary, a “natural” event which might happen; a murder on the other hand, is by choice and “unnatural”, and therefore the powers are in anger. Then there is a sign: “A proposal”. And at the end of the other part of the dream, there is a factual proposal. A proposal and a child could be seen as different aspects of the same symbol.
A proposal is about a particular future. The marriage is a important symbol, “it points to the union of opposites and the birth of new possibilities” (Sharp). So the child and the proposal are of the same image: Both are promises of the future – and both are “killed” by the woman. In the first part she rejects the child, in the second, the man. But who is she, and what future is killed? I have no idea, but perhaps the dreamer can relate to this fact. Perhaps even something happened in the dreamers life the day before the dream, or days before the dream, that triggered the complexes that built this dream? If that is so, it might be a key to unlock the couple. I have no access to the keys needed.
Another thing you could do as the dreamer, is close in on the sadness. The sadness you experience in the dream, I think, does not belong to this dream only. I believe that you carry that sadness within you and I think that you can realize what that sadness is, where it comes from. The sadness is coupled to the rejection, perhaps. I think, if you want to understand this dream, that the sadness is an emotional gateway into its meaning. When you carefully climb down into this sadness, what do you see?
I would like to point out one more thing which can be important, namely that your girlfriend does not know what you are talking about at the end (and I think that she is not present when the child dies, so she has no relation to the central point of the dream). That might be a reflection of your real relationship, that these inner matters of yours are not accessible to her. It might be good or bad, dreams are not judging, but it might be a consideration. But it can also strengthen my theory, that the dream is subjective, it does not talk about objective, outer reality, where your girlfriend lives, so to speak. This is your inner life (which is tightly coupled to you outer life, naturally), rather, and it is difficult for other people to understand. At least, this is one way of looking at it. There are others too.
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