Question
Often I have a dream where I am at a Japanese steakhouse where they cook the
food right in front of our eyes. I only see the cook cooking shrimp behind
a flood of steam. All of a sudden, one of the shrimp jumps up and has very
long legs. He is really an ostrich! He hops out of view and I wake up. Am
I a freak?
Answer
Magical transformations (or transmogrification) can seem really freaky,
but are quite common in dreams. The early ideas on these transformations come
from Freud who felt that was just one of the ways the imagination worked to
fool us about what the dream was really about. But later analysts and
contemporary dreamworkers also see that these transformations are
opportunities to *join* the imagination in its quest to make our lives more
wonderful and profound.
For example:
If this were my dream I might ask myself what shrimpy ideas people are
trying to serve me when I really want to feast on some projects in life that
can really take off running like a ostrich. The meaning of your dream can
only be known by you, but if this were my dream, I would see the ostrich not
only as a bird who can run fast and stick its head in the ground, but can
really lay some big nourishing ideas and has a *view* of the underground that
others tend to miss. Others may see this as freaky, but I will be more
satisfied than if I kept quiet and just dined on shrimp.
2/20/98
Richard Wilkerson is general editor for The
Internet Dream E-zine, Electric Dreams, and director of DreamGate, the Internet
Communications and Dream Education Center. He writes the Cyberphile column for
the Association for the Study of Dreams Newsletter.
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