Dreamtime – Telephone messages from Mary is almost definitely your intuition communicating with you. Telephones are always a way of commutating indirectly and so often represent intuition. Also the name Mary has often been described as ‘stella maris’ – star of the sea – which links the conch shells. So that part of the dream suggests you have had important communications from within. Them the dream begins to describe what the messages are.
Mary and Leah are two sides of the same coin, and are about your deepest aspects of womanhood. Which are shown as conch shells linked together with one damaged.
I guess you know that Life began in the seas and at first was single celled creatures, but after immense passage of time and tremendous Earth changes became man celled creatures. The conch shell in Eastern cultures represents life as it has come out of life-giving waters. So it is an expression of Life itself, shaped with immense art and beauty, and as a shell is the imprint or beauty of a life that has left it ‘shell’ behind and travelled through many lives leaving its shells behind. So it may be a wonderful picture of the many lives that you, still living in a shell, has left as imprints on Life’s memory.
The shifting of the form of the artefact is simple as far as dreams are concerned. You shifted from Mary to Leah to the conch shells – all shifts to show you different sides or aspects of the one theme the dream is showing you. It is like someone telling you not in words but in imagery and drama. So if it were in words it would have had to use different sentences to describe what is being shown you.
The conch shell sequence was showing a break and so is the piece about the whale – all about something your past that was hurt and needs attention. So a whale is a massive Life process that lives in us unconsciously but can come to the surface – and often links with the search for the deeps in you. See
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/archetype-of-the-night-journey-the-search-for-self/So it seems important that you meet the whale half way and help in the mending of a past experience. So try being the whale. As I explained to a friend recently you do not even have to have a clear image of the whale, simple think of it as seen in your dream and then watch any thoughts or feeling that might arise – as if listening for a quiet voice – but give it a minute or so.
Tony