Just to add that the dramatic events of the giant moon and stars etc. along with the “warping” of the Earth point to this being an “archetypal” dream.
Such a dream usually comes from the very deep layers of the psyche at times of transition which seems to fit your situation as you described it.
The aim of this type of impressive dream is to provide an objective view of the dreamer’s current situation and to provide advice on how to proceed, albeit in a usually very complex symbolic language based on analogy and metaphor. This advice is meant to help the dreamer reach his or her overall potential in the long run.
The background information which you provided is very helpful because it describes the overall context out of which the dream emerged, allowing for a better interpretation although dream websites by their nature aren’t really the ideal place to properly explore dreams.
So the following should be viewed as consisting only of a few tentative ideas about what your very important dream may mean.
For example, another approach to the image of the picnic in your dream could be that your attitude towards finding out about the nature of reality and so on needs to be balanced out in some way.
This balancing out of the ego’s outlook is a chief goal of dreams, and given what happens at the picnic in seeing the stunning vistas of the moon and stars might be expressing the idea that your attitude isn’t quite correctly attuned, and that actually exploring “reality” is in effect the opposite, i.e. it’s “no picnic” at all but can be a very challenging, lengthy and even frightening process.
The young, pretty African-American woman likely symbolizes such things as your emotions, values, relationships and feeling life in general, and because she is presumably in some way “different”, “foreign” and outside of your usual circle, this would point to the idea that this area of yourself is not probably a very large part of your everyday awareness.
You likely found the outer woman attractive partly because she somehow reflected the nature of this largely unconscious side of your life.
While the unknown guys can represent unconscious aspects of yourself, in addition, they can perhaps symbolize an attitude that is generally common in society but whose effect on yourself you don’t fully recognize.
For instance, 19th Century Scientific Materialism tends to underpin “modern” approaches to every scientific endeavour, including physics.
This of course is a big topic but in a nutshell, science most often excludes the “symbolic” and deals only with the “mechanical”.
Another way of expressing this idea is that science views the universe from the outside whereas the psyche looks at it from the inside.
So perhaps you’ve picked up from the zeitgeist a kind of underestimation of the power of the objective psyche and part of the dream’s intent is to balance out any such attitude by showing stunning images of “what it can do” as it were; e.g. in a symbolic sense, it can totally reverse “normal” and “habitual” views of the world and everyday matters at the drop of a hat, potentially causing all sorts of problems.
As you know, the moon, the heavens, the stars and the planets etc. were viewed in the past as being gods, goddesses and other semi-divine beings etc.
Science of course has relegated these views to the realm of childish remnants of human understanding but in reality, these figures always have and still do mostly represent timeless energies inside the human psyche which are reflected, for instance, in eternal outer cycles and typical events etc.
Since you’re with the African-American girl and the appearance of the giant moon happens soon after, this appears to be the dream’s way of saying “You have to look at the feminine part of yourself very close up” in order to become more aware of its current state.
Unfortunately, perhaps this side of you is too often “dry” and “barren”, e.g. you apparently see the “moon” from a scientific point of view which is generally too literal and since others in the scene are also greatly affected by the giant moon, it looks like this is a very common situation in our global society.
So to sum up, the moon is usually connected with goddess Artemis and such “feminine” aspects as the body, the “earthy”, the always changing, the intuitive, the indirect, along with various instinctive natural reactions and our emotional and relationship life in general.
These symbolical attributes are in contrast with the sun’s which are generally connected with the god Apollo, the sky and air, the fixed, the rational, opinions, the piercing intellect and with thinking in general.
Such traditional ideas, mythologies and beliefs etc. regularly appear in dreams because their source is the same one as dreams, namely, the psyche itself.
Lately, you’ve apparently felt in influx of the “Lunar” part of yourself, e.g. in listening to your instincts and gut feelings.
The dream could be hinting that seeing this part of yourself and acknowledging it might tend to be a fleeting experience (e.g. you urge the girl to quickly take a picture and compare it with the fleeting light, i.e. consciousness, of a sunset).
Also, the connection of the event with photographs, Facebook and newscasts, along with the reactions of those around you, could be hinting that it’s important to avoid looking at the phenomenon of the objective unconscious from the currently collective “news bite” point of view and one which involves, for example, hundreds of millions of photographs, few of which are created by “focus” and careful “composition”.
This could relate to the feeling that something terrible was going to happen because you then notice that the earth has changed its shape in a drastic way but you don’t take this as being real.
But then the ocean is above you, symbolizing the entirety of your unconscious mind which unfortunately could potentially come crashing down and “drown” you in a worst-case scenario.
If that happened, the normally helpful dolphins would be viewed as a negative symbol because what they symbolize could possibly “overwhelm” you.
All such symbols tend to be very complex and contradictory in nature, but some ideas linked to the dolphin include the fact that the Greek for dolphin is “delphis”, similar to “delphys” which means womb.
Therefore the word “delphys” moves us away from the other symbolic connections to dolphins that are more masculine (e.g. the god Apollo was also related to the images of dolphins) to the more feminine connections and therefore, to the earlier image of the moon in your dream.
Other feminine connections with a dolphin include the Greek goddess Demeter who had the dolphin as one of her symbols (likely because of the womb idea).
She was a goddess representing Mother Earth, wheat, growth, seasons, and birth among other things. Demeter became “Ceres” among the Romans.
In England, dolphins are connected with the sea and with wells, that is, with the “deeply feminine” but as mentioned, in your dream, they “aren’t where they’re supposed to be”, i.e. below you in a stable, “normal” ocean environment.
The dream then appears to advise obtaining a reliable method (the ship) of moving through a needed encounter with the feminine-within which apparently could be very “stormy”.
It looks like you need to rely on a generally unknown and “foreign” part of yourself to help you in this endeavour (the Asian man and his missing brother) which could possibly consist on a very embodied and emotional dedication (the man is seized with the need to rescue the others without any thought for himself).
Perhaps tellingly, you don’t offer to help the man in his very difficult task but instead, you want to “escape” to the “upper” or intellectual pursuit of “safety” via the model city which is like a Beijing or Shanghai.
Given the rampant growth of these Chinese cities, the ship-city could symbolize a kind of hyper drive approach which relies on the intellect, science and commerce as a method of escaping reality as it is (i.e. the Feminine) even more drastically than Western societies are indulged in.
This “reality” according to the dream appears to be a global revolt of the unconscious against mankind in general (e.g. the giant frightening moon and planets, the ocean being in the sky etc.) because mankind is trying ever more energetically to dispense with genuine feminine values which are a vital component of feeling meaningful as a person.
As you’re aware of, a basic fact of outer nature is that it constantly seeks “balance” and because we are products of nature, this appears in the human psyche as well.
As humans, in order to grasp something, we need to react emotionally as well as intellectually, so inner factors that are related to “control” and “balance” etc. were spontaneously pictured by the psyche in primeval times as being powerful “gods” and “goddesses”.
Your dream appears to be warning you that it’s important to separate yourself reasonably well from any such obsessive-compulsive zeitgeist which values only sensation-reality and the intellect because the “gods” and “goddesses” have been aroused and could “drown the world” with compulsion, angst, violence and any number of other problems (e.g. as symbolically expressed, for example, in the story of Noah’s Ark).
It might seem odd, but using etymology can help to support this approach overall (If you continue to explore how to interpret dreams, you’ll find how etymology can be a key component in deciphering a dream).
To follow along with this approach, the dream could be saying that you’re trying to explore matter in an outside sense through physics but you’re also apparently in danger of being caught up by the materialistic approach of society in general (e.g. to desire to produce great wealth for some while ignoring impacts on the environment (“Earth”) created by extracting oil, spewing chemicals and pollution into the air and water as well as by the harsh exploitation of hundreds of millions of people).
The linguistic roots of both “matter” and “materialism” are “mater”, that is, “mother”, so it’s in effect possible that it’s the goddess “The Great Mother” or “Gaia” who feels “offended” and who could therefore “drown” people through the psychological use of compulsive “materialism” and its devastating effects because her values are being largely ignored by businesses, governments and the individuals who make them up.
This is probably the “eerie”, “terrible thing” hinted at by the dream which you should try to avoid both inside and outside.
Anyway, I hope that these ideas weren’t too confusing and that they can be helpful in some way. If you want to look into your dreams in an ongoing way, a couple of valuable starter books are “Inner Work” by analyst Robert Johnson and “Jungian Dream Interpretation” by analyst James Hall.
And if you feel that you’re basically a quiet, mostly inward looking person and that this won’t change too much as you have more experiences in relationships, then you might like to read “The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World” by Marti Olsen Laney, Psy.D.
Please feel free to ask any questions or to make any comments about this way of looking at your very important dream.
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