Rain Dancer - Thank you for all that you send me of yourself. I send you a hug
Dreams can show our sense of self, our identity, either in the body or naked of it, as surrounded by a community of beings and objects separate from the dreamer, and frequently with a will of their own.
If we place our self in the centre of a circle and put all our dream characters, animals and objects around them, and if we transformed these objects and beings into the things they depicted, such as sexuality, thinking, will, emotions, intuition, social pressure, hormonal influences, fears, ideas and images from media or people, our instinctive drives etc., we would see what a diverse mass of influences we stand in the middle of.
It also becomes obvious that our ‘I’, our personality, sees these things as outside of us in nearly all dreams. Even our own internal urges to love or make love may be shown as external creatures, so we have a multitude of ways of relating to these aspects of self. Therefore, the depiction of self in dreams is not simple.
“The feeeeeeelllings were so intense and there has been a lot that got stirred up to process in the wake.” I don’t know if it helps, but if you begin to realise that the fundamental you is just pure consciousness, rather like a mirror, and the things you experience as the external world are reflected in the mirror, it sometimes helps to gain a new perspective. Otherwise our Self gets locked into experiencing everything in the raw and we are thrown around by it.
I know it sounds like mumbo-jumbo but if you can imagine yourself in the centre of the circle and consider the mass of impressions we face each day; it might become real.
Tony