Christine – Thank you for telling me the special features connected with your dream. It gives me so much more to build into what I can gather of your situation and dream.
In this dream you are back in the influences that are still active in you from your parenting. And your father coming to you dressed in white is a wonderful drama working out in you. For whatever your relationship may have been in your waking life, here in your dreams is something that is showing a great change.
Your father represents all the values, attitudes and emotional or social responses you have absorbed from him; the acceptance or tensions we feel in relationship with contact with him; the support or pain we feel. From our father we learn most of the positive and negative patterns of relationship and attitudes towards living and dealing with male relationships, which we then carry into daily events.
But in your dream you are not meeting your actual father but all the memories and habits of feeling you carry in you that are linked by the image of him – your inner father in fact. In fact a tall abstract figure, indistinct because we cannot easily see all of what we carry in us.
You lift your head to receive the gift being given, a sign that you accept what is coming from your inner father. We hear a lot about our inner child, but almost nothing about our inner parents.
The necklace is an acknowledgement of the qualities that can now be yours, but black because they are still unconscious and need to be consciously allowed into your life. You can do this by looking at yourself in the mirror and say something like, “Dad, I know we have had bad dealings, but I now accept all that you gave me. To do otherwise would be to deny all that is in me as myself, my memories, and all I learned. If I accept you I realise that there are very positive things to learn from even the hurts, but the positive only emerges as I accept.”
You had been holding back a major part of you that is now available to claim and live. You are naked because you are vulnerable and ready to be seen as you really are. And if you look at yourself in this way, with all the marks of life on you, you will see how beautiful you are.
Tony