Jeane: My first dream seemed frustrating. It feels like I keep opening up computer files and all I see are numbers. It feels like they open up in batches and I keep looking for something that I can actually read and understand, but all I ever get are numbers.
John: Well, the theme of recent dreaming has been about energies that are either too expansive or too contractive. How do you work with energies that are too expansive and too contractive?
The feminine is contractive and the masculine is expansive. It’s interesting that in my dreams, I began with the contractive (the feminine) aspect first. Here, you are beginning with the expansive (masculine) aspect first.
So your first image is of batches of computer files opening up at once (expanding) and the information is more than you can grasp. Let’s see where you go next.
Jeane: Okay, so this next one I call my Prince of Persia dream. It’s kind of absurd. It feels like one of those musical comedies where the story is told through singing.
In this dream, I’m in what feels like an ancient, eastern country. A young man about my age comes to stay with my family and we realize that he’s the one who’s supposed to inherit the kingdom from the emperor, who has died.
He had been out wandering the land, but now he has come to us. We will help him claim the throne; it’s expected that he will succeed. Yet when my mother calls – I guess they have a telephone, even though it feels like ancient times – whoever is in charge of appointing the next emperor, instead of him automatically getting it, people are doing all kinds of shenanigans so that they can rule the empire.
They first tried to put a young child on the throne, and now they’re plotting to put someone else on as though this prince doesn’t exist. My family is working to get the people together who will allow the prince to be on the throne, but meanwhile he has this delay so he and I can spend some time together.
It seems like part of what he needs to do to gain the throne is to win a horse race, and beat them at poker, because it will show he has good strategy. He could even disguise himself and actually ride the horse. So, we’re playing around with those ideas and I know the family may also want to marry him off, which I’m not so keen about.
It feels like the people who are going to appoint the emperor have arrived and are having a meeting. The prince and I are in another room when suddenly two people come in, a man and a woman, who look a little like pirates.
I know they’ve been planning on marrying the prince off, but I think I’ve got my eye on him too. The woman pirate is attractive – she wears pants and she does have a little mustache, though. She starts talking with a British accent and I can tell she’s playing some kind of a spoof on us as she bursts into song.
I rush up and hug her. She’s somebody I know but haven’t seen for a long time. Then it feels like I go into a room where the prince is playing an electric guitar. He looks at me and says he doesn’t think he was well suited for the sitar. That’s where the dream ends.
John: Actually, the reason the dream is a little odd to you is because you’re reconciling something. But what’s missing in this dream is the other extreme.
In the first dream, everything was expansive, but you couldn’t make any sense of it. Either before or after that dream, you must have had a dream, that you’ve forgotten, that showed a contractive aspect, because what you’re doing with these images is trying to bring the whole back together.
So this dream has taken whatever it needed to learn from the contraction and then the expansion, and it shows you consolidating the overallness. You are trying to bring together what is appropriate – in the idea of installing the rightful prince on the throne.
There was no balance in the expansive dream and likely none in the contractive dream, yet here you are adding an element of balance to the events that are taking place. You have resolved this by bringing the two variables together, and formulating a change in tone – in terms of how something is being shaped into life.
It’s an interesting process. In my case, I had the contractive, then the expansive, and the two extremes required me to let go to enable a consolidation. In your case, you don’t need to let go. You’re able to anoint, or instate, something as a consequence of the two energetic variables.
Was there more in your dream?
Jeane: I just hoped I was going to get to marry the prince, like in any good fairy tale.
