Question
In my dream I am on a train and then these guys on horses come up to the
train and I go with them. They leave me off at a town and I find a phone
booth and call a woman I am supposed to get a hold of. But the woman that
answers the phone is me! I panic and wake up.
Do you have any idea what this could mean?
Answer
Coming into contact with yourself in a dream can be quite a shock.
Fortunately, it's a shock from which we can move deeply into self discovery.
While the specific meaning of your dream can only be found and known by you,
there are some interesting common metaphors that seem to leap out.
If this were my dream....
In my dream I am on a train, or a track that is well worn and taken by many.
One might say a collective path that many go down. But the wild horsemen,
those wild parts of myself, are accessible to me and I can take off with
them. If horses are like drives and impulses, the horsemen would be those
drives in me that still have some human direction. Following this path seems
to lead me on a date with destiny. I need to get in contact with -- who?
Myself. My conscious plan was to contact someone else, as when in life I want
to contact someone to do something for me and expect them to do it. But when
that person turns out to be me, I am shocked! Now that I have had the dream,
(borrowed as it is) I can become aware of getting in touch with myself
without it being such a jolt. Perhaps if I planned what I would like to say to
myself were I to contact myself on the phone.
Jung often speaks of our destiny as getting in contact with the
transpersonal Self, and this may also be indicated in the dream. In this
sense, my little self, who I think I am, gets in contact with a part of me
that when I experience it, is far more than I had every imagined. Now that's
the kind of shock I would really like!
If this were my dream, I would have a "play" telephone conversation with
myself and maybe even write this down like a play. I wouldn't decide
beforehand what would happen or be said, just pick up the phone, say hello,
and see what happens, writing down everything that came into my mind.
2/19/98
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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