Jeane: I felt like I had two dreams that were overlapping and then a third dream that explained what was going on, but I lost that one.
In the first dream I live in New York. I’m visiting a couple I know who are very successful – he’s a mystery writer and she’s an artist. Then I visit the apartment of a movie producer and his wife. What I seem to be aware of is the way these people have an inner life and quietness in spite of their success. Many people live a life that is overly busy, but these people have somehow managed to keep a quietness and privacy within their life.
Then in the next dream, I’m feeling the need to disappear a little, because I get on a plane under an anonymous name and I’m flying to Florida. Once I arrive I will rent a car under a fictitious name as well. While I’m in Florida I’ll have to live in a communal building where we take meals together. Other people have also arrived with luggage and things that they are moving in with, but I have some tricky luggage.
For some reason one of the black bags that I’m carrying has an octopus in it, so I want to be really careful when and where I let the octopus out. I feel like I know how to handle it, but I have got a number of bags and I am not sure anymore which bag the octopus is in. I question some people who are going back to the communal area about which bags they can take.
I open up one bag; it has three small kittens in it. One of the kittens gets out; the other two I’m able to hold onto. I want to take them all back because I know the person to whom they belong. The bag has some clothes in it and the kittens, but the owner lives at the communal setting so we can get those two kittens back to him, but the other kitten has gotten away and I don’t know what to do about that. I’m still not sure which bag has the octopus in it.
I don’t remember the dream that explained why I was going from one place to another. That was the dream I lost.
John: Well what you are doing in this second dream is running away from yourself. You are going to the south, which is into life (the outer life), instead of to the north (the inner life). By doing so, you are taking on all kinds of complexities. The octopus implies entanglements and the kittens represent a kind of frenetic energy. You’re extending a frenetic vibration into your surroundings and you’re maintaining a complexity, a tangled nature.
So you have essentially run away. In flying, you left a particular state and quality that you admired in which there was an inner quietness and a flow. But apparently so much was happening that you couldn’t sustain it, or you had to run from it and hide it, so none of that could show. The activity in the outer got very convoluted. This is not a dream that indicates that something good is in flow. It indicates that one is struggling to maintain a quiet inner state while under a type of pressure.
The dream (that you lost) would indicate why this is happening. It would probably go something like this: On a psychological level you have certain things that you’re reacting to, which you are dramatizing. When you do that, it creates entanglements, it creates complexities. It fractures your wholeness. It causes you to lose a sense of balance in terms of your inner process, which leads to you grasping more in the outer. You’re not going to find any answers that way, or be able to hold onto what’s important (the inner quiet). Kittens are getting lost and you’re not sure where the octopus is.
That was an interesting dream, and it depicted something about an outward demeanor that you are adopting that’s taking you away from a quietness inside, so you find yourself more and more entangled by the outer world.
