M - The tree is your life as it unfolds - with all its strengths and weaknesses. It is certainly stability - luck in love? To see that you have been looking at trash because people make up things without experiencing them. Love is a word thrown about to get people feel their need for love - it is not the meaning of tree.
The dream shows you at the top of the tree - the point of growth, but also the point of tenderness because the new growth can be your highest self but it can be torn apart because it hasn't hardened. Your dream shows this as your uncertainty.
The guide is shown at the foot of the tree in the dark showing that he has no experience of your growth, has not been able to climb the tree, meanning he has no experience of your inner personal growth and your urge to grow.
Your dream is your truth, shown as the guide who is insecure. After my searching for external help from many guides for 50 years, I found that the greatest guide who knows every part of you from babyhood through teenage, and on through your future is within you. That is what I was trying to help you find, the inner energy of your personal highest self. For within each of us lies a radiance that enriches us if we can meet it. This radiance, from its vastness using things we might understand, says that we too must reach beyond our often pitiful understanding to move toward and touch the wonder of Life within us.
As for hope - T. S Elliot sees the truth of that:
I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So, the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Tony