John: In this dream I must take on a situation in which I have no chance of succeeding. Actually, it’s difficult to imagine that I can make any meaningful difference, either.
This dynamic is symbolically presented to me in the imagery of a golf game. There’s a person I must play against who is an expert golfer. He knows the ins and outs of the game, while I’m just a novice.
I agree, however, to settle an issue between us on the outcome of playing a single hole. We’re not playing the whole game, just one par four to determine a situation that’s very important to the inner and outer life.
I know going into this challenge that I’m going to have to rely upon Fate, because my opponent is too good for me to beat him by myself. He’s so confident, I can already feel him lording it over Creation.
It seems that as the game plays out, the mistakes I make have grace connected to them. I don’t know how else to explain it. When my opponent makes a slight mistake in his second shot, I’m required to hit the ball over a deep ravine (I’m playing every other ball or something strange like that).
I know if it was his shot, he would be able to clear the ravine with ease, but for me this is a problem. My shot is so pitiful that I might just as well have kicked the golf ball because it falls right into this deep ravine trap.
My opponent thinks I did this on purpose, but he’s just messing with me because normally he could get out of this predicament with ease. He steps in and hits the ball. Just like in a sand trap, he has to swing underneath it to get it up in the air. But it goes so high it flies out of sight.
As near as I can tell, it goes above a high building that seemingly should have blocked the ball’s flight. I hadn’t even noticed the building before. As a consequence, though, he can’t find the ball.
My opponent cries foul! He had done everything right, but couldn’t find the ball – he was looking for leniency. He whines so much that I offer him a three-stroke penalty that he begrudgingly accepts.
This makes it so I can now pull off what had seemed outwardly impossible – I can win the hole. However, I’m never given the chance to see how the game actually ends. What I do know is that my opponent decided that he had to change the rules of the game in order to prevail.
When it was his turn, he hit the ball as far away from the hole as possible. Instead of playing it straight on, he shot the ball out of the game. There was no ending because the game could no longer flow.
This is a type of message dream. The imagery is showing that there is a grace that is accessible, even in the dense outer conditions of life. My mistakes are taken into account if I’m able to accept them and, in so doing, what appears to be a problem can be transformed into a flow that has Fate on its side.
Accessing this grace is part of finding, within myself, compassion, which can heal all wounds. The outer denseness is apt to choose annihilation or self-destruction, in the sense that it resists the flow of the inner and, therefore, the purposes of Creation.
This is a destruction of the need to make a shift; it prevents a shift from happening. Even though I understand this as an issue, the dream’s portrayal doesn’t reveal what ultimately transpires. Nevertheless, I feel certainty within. I carry an inner certainty as a thread. It is my belief that this thread is meant to reach wholeness between the inner and the outer.
So the dream is saying that I’m at a crossroads in the path, where I must deal with catalytic conditions. Creation has an order that must be maintained, even though it is wounded by the history of masculine energy – it’s power and control – that will resort to anything to keep from having to surrender.
The masculine energy, which needs the essence of the feminine in order to let go, sees such surrender as an unacceptable defeat to be avoided at all costs (the ball was hit out of the game). Yet I realize that the sabotaging of Creation as an option needs to change: I can’t get in the way of what wants to be properly configured.
