I explored my own dream - see
https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/exploring-a-dream-2/When I explored this dream I met with a few very strong feelings and impressions.
The Ashram I sensed as my life work, in other words the enormous energy and endeavour involved in helping other people to transform their lives, and of course my own efforts to transform my own life and being. Within that image also are involved too the great struggles, conflicts, pains of love, teaching, and emerging from my own past. It was also a stage upon which my relationship with Trish took place.
As Pete I are waking up to something taking place in my life here and now. It is as if I have missed seeing or recognising this up until this moment. I am also, as Pete, involved in each section of this dream in different ways. In the first I am waking up, or becoming aware of the situation. In the second I am seeking support and love. I want to be taken into Tony, integrated, held. As I explore this part of the dream I feel I am both Tony and Pete. As Pete I am needy and come from a difficult background with feelings of abandonment, just as Tony has. As Tony I feel slightly repulsed by that side of myself. I had tried to push it away; not hard, but certainly the feeling of not wanting to be completely involved in it. This reminds me that early part in my life I split into two distinct parts. One was the hurt, abandoned child, with all its needs and pains. The other was the outgoing active person started his own photographic studio, wrote books, gave talks to people and led groups.
Over the years these two have got closer together, but this dream suggests there is still a hesitation to fully accept and love that part of myself in my public life.
Some parts of this dream tie in very fully with an e-mail I wrote to Lisa. In the e-mail I said that I was always a participant in the groups I led. In the dream I am a participant. In the E-mail I was also tempted to say that I was an ordinary human being and yet I did not show my vulnerability.
When I explored Jung in the dream I experience a profound sense of him being a doorway to so much in my life. He demonstrated to me in his writings a wideness of vision, and inclusiveness, an ability to accept and understand the many dimensions of human life – everything from religion to science. The only thing he had never seemed to really express was the enormous pain involved in human life. But in the dream I felt he represented a tremendous wideness of sympathy and awareness I now experience in my life. It was very moving to experience. It was both humbling and beautiful to sense just how much I had grown in my lifetime.
With the fireplace that becomes an alcove, this probably links with thoughts I had yesterday about my recent new involvement with my old friend Dina Glouberman. I was thinking that contact has lit a fire of creativity in me, and now sparks were rising from it in creative ideas and new ways of looking at things. And the alcove is a new area of experience that has opened up, as it is doing in my life. This new area includes, or is including, both my inner wide range of sympathies and understanding, and also my vulnerability. (A serious Stroke I experienced at this time finished my work with Dina.
https://dreamhawk.com/interesting-people/tonys-experience-of-stroke/).
There was one feeling that was pronounced at the time but is now difficult to recall the details of. It was about the enormous journey made, the journey in gradually finding my way back to that tremendous vulnerability of a newborn baby, experiencing it, integrating it, and recognising it is the foundation of my present life. Ashram, the group of people, Steve, all represent this journey into myself. They depict to me by an almost indescribable amount I have learned from that journey and what it has done to me as a person.
Obviously, the journey is not over. There is still much to learn, and the end of the dream shows me ready to be involved in what comes next. I felt too as I saw these things, that the unplanned, the spontaneous, the synchronistic events of my life have been so kind to me in helping me learn, uncover, find support in this life.
One last thing. Trish sleeping on the mattress seems to me to be a vivid image of feelings I have had recently about her. It suggests that she is still letting what she learned in Ashram and in our marriage sleep. In other words she is not using it, developing it, giving it to other people. I feel that Life is going to call her into action fairly soon. The talents she has, the wisdom she has, life needs at this time. See
https://dreamhawk.com/pregnancy-childbirth/lumpkin-the-baby-who-became-tony/ Tony