Hi there. (First part of your post)
I don't think you will be too much surprised by what I have to say, especially about the first part of the dream. The dream is offering you a "vacation", a break from the pain and difficulty you have already faced in your life. It then offers the now refreshed you a new start (the airport and/or train station) - even if you are returning to your life, you can return rested and refreshed. . . but you can't help yourself from panicking and grabbing all your old clothes and children's clothes. Clothes represent a few things. Someone with no clothes on is completely exposed, completely her/himself, not hiding anything. Your panic to get as many clothes as you can shows, on one level, how afraid you are to simply be yourself, to be exposed, to be vulnerable. Counter-intuitive as it is, it is also true that things that are familiar (even toxic things) can be less scary than new and unfamiliar things. So, although the clothes represent your old "baggage" (often represented in dreams by luggage), you panic and want to take it with you rather than leave it behind. Your children's baby clothes could represent a time in your life when you felt protected by being a "mother" and, having young babies, no more was required of you. Now, however, the spotlight is back on you, not as a mother, but you in your own right as an independent person, and you find that incredibly scary.
The dream is showing you how you keep wanting to "protect" yourself by carrying around all your old baggage so you can be that person, rather than casting it off and being the real you who is underneath all the horrible things that happened to you. To move forward, you need to leave the "baggage" behind, and you will keep having dreams like this until you do. I don't know if you have been in therapy - there is something you can do with the dream's help to try and get strong enough to move on without feeling the need to hide behind old "clothes" (personas and attitudes), and that is, while you are awake, to spend some time reimagining the dream and seeing yourself at the train station and seeing all those old clothes and actually getting on the train without them. If you can get to the stage, where you can calmly and happily leave that lot on the station behind you, I think you will find the dream will also move on. It is telling you very strongly that this is a major place where you are "stuck" in your life. If you do have a therapist, it might be worthwhile doing the "leaving the baggage behind" with her/him. If you do it by yourself, don't push yourself too hard, stop if it brings too much up, maybe just try leaving some (even one thing) behind to start with. Another thing you can try is to take something you own but no longer use or need and give it to a charity shop or throw it away. As you do, remember the dream and remind yourself that you are symbolically starting to clear the baggage out of your life.
Dreams have messages about how we can help ourselves heal and grow. Often they do that by offering choices. If you make the "wrong" choice in the dream (ie not the one that will help you move on), your dreams will just keep offering you the same choice until you reject it and choose something else, ie the choice which will help heal that issue. When that happens, you no longer need to be shown that choice anymore, and your dreams will move on to the next thing you need to heal and grow. This issue is very, very important to you which is why your dreams just keep offering you the opportunity to make a different choice, ie walk away from your old stuff. Until you do that (and I am not suggesting it is easy at all!), you will find it hard to move on and the dream will probably keep recurring.
|
|
Bookmarks