Beverley – There are so many questions I would like answers too. Maybe that you have typed it before, but in your forgotten dreams, for an expert on dreams said that we dream everything that we later do in waking.
But I wonder whether your mother had a drinking habit? Because a great deal of our own responses are picked up from parents and often need revising. See
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/the-conjuring-trick/ If so this would add another level to your understanding of the old woman and man. We all have an inner mother equally as powerful as an external mother. You have taken in millions of bits of memory, lessons learnt, life experiences along with all the feelings or problems met by loving and living with your mother, and they are a major influence in your early life, and in a few cases the child never becomes independent from its mother at any age. This is true even if your mother was never there for you – you still have all the memories of her not being there for you filed under ‘Mother’. The memories and experience we gather unconsciously change us and are not lost. It is part of you and is symbolised in dreams as a person or event. Such an inner mother can appear in dreams because you are still deeply influenced by what you hold within you.
So, if this is true you are not only learning how to be gentle with your own inner reactions that you needed to let die, but also your mother and father’s influence.
In any case, you are certainly letting go of parts of your nature that has been or could be irritating. You loving nature can have an enormous influence in healing yourself.
Tony