John: Ordinarily I’m inclined to toss a dream like this one, but because I’m wrestling with something that was bothering me last night, I have to realize that dreams that seem insignificant can have a depth.
I’ve been experiencing a shutting-down quality, or a type of pain in myself and, as your psychic friend indicated, I have a really deep quality of pain inside me. I don’t know whether it comes from this lifetime or from a prior lifetime, but to her it’s obvious that I carry this, or have this in my psyche.
When we carry something like this, it becomes like a shadow quality that can be triggered by events or emotions in our lives. But it doesn’t serve any useful purpose for us. And in my dream, I’m shown that I can’t shut myself away from this sort of thing. There is the recognition of an imbalance, caused by this pain, which limits the container quality (a feminine aspect) in me, whereby something more can open up.
In this dream, I feel entrenched in a situation that I’m trying to overcome. If I am unable to do so, I will be allowing the expectations, or habituations, of my lower self prevent me from attaining something more.
In front of me is a huge salad bowl. It seems that the waitress is someone who serves people at her discretion. She dips smaller bowls into the huge salad and distributes them to her customers. She’s busy helping others, looking at me and smiling, but in a way that tells me she won’t serve me until last. She knows that I’ll put up with it, because I’m a pushover in this dream.
It feels hurtful to me because I’m not asserting myself. I’m not being attentive to what I need. So I feel the need to challenge the situation – to not stay entrenched – because I know that freezing up like this is detrimental to my wellbeing. I know it will cause me suffering.
The waitress continues to serve others, who assert their needs. I know that in due time she’ll get to me, but she may run out of salad by then.
I see this as a big problem. To right the situation, I take my bowl and dip it into the salad, right in front of her. It looks like a huge bowl of iceberg lettuce, but I dip my bowl so deep that I pull up from the bottom more than just iceberg lettuce.
I find myself filling my bowl with goodies I didn’t realize were there, deep down. I’m a little taken aback by what I see because I didn’t get any iceberg lettuce, which is common and typical of what you’d expect on a salad. I’m getting things from down deep that have more nutrients in them. This even surprises the waitress.
I take a spoon and I do the same thing: I dip it down deep, getting the nutrients at the bottom.
The meaning is: when feeling pressure or distress, failure to act, or freezing up, is to remain out of sequence with the flow. This can lead to self-abuse in the sense that it causes a shut down, and the sense of resignation that it will all work out in the end, even though deep down we know it’s not true.
Just hoping for the best isn’t conscious living: the salad is going to run out. To maintain clarity, we need to remain fluid and open to deeper awareness (the nutritious food hidden in the bottom of the bowl).
When we overcome the ways in which we hold ourselves back, we reveal, through the higher self, an even more profound meaningfulness. All of life benefits when this occurs. However, if our reaction comes from spite – if we have a personal attitude or agenda instead of a connection to a natural flow – nothing is really learned. Thus, the issue is apt to continue to be repeated because there has been no real breakthrough.
It hurts the heart if we stay entrenched and hope for the best and endure the anxiety. When we do that we shut ourselves down and lose dexterity. Then our greater being continues to skim the surface, extracting, just as the dream indicates, only the iceberg lettuce – only the “food” with the least nutritional value. And we also fail to discover that there’s something down deep inside, of much greater nutritional value, to be found.
So if we continue a pattern of stepping back and hoping for something, we’re ordering, every day, iceberg lettuce from the menu of waking life. And, ultimately, what value will we get from that?
