Monica – It is the feelings in your dream that are important and help create the images we use in our dreams.
In our waking life a feeling slips by hardly noticed, but reaches our inner life like a bombshell causing such worrying dreams. Here is an example of it I dreamt in December 1966.
Example: I looked around for a stone to throw into the water for my dog Tramp to swim after, but could only find a tiny piece of bark. I threw it in, wondering in fact, whether Tramp would follow it – he leapt in. When the bark hit the water it looked as if the water had been hit by a bomb. The exploded impact area then turned into a whirlpool. Tramp was dragged beneath the surface by the current.
Your fear is I guess about ageing, but we often take it to mean we will lose our youthful looks, and maybe our teeth. But underneath all those feelings about our personality lies the fear of death.
Each of us are immersed in a ‘river’ of constant change. If you think about it you have been carried, pushed, impelled by this current as you were moved through babyhood, childhood, teenage and adulthood. And as we passed through these changes we died to our old self in order to change to the new. It is the current of Life. This current then carries us on through old age and through the gates of death. All the time we are faced by decisions, and each decision directs us on a different path, helping to create our future. And this is a force of growth and change; and is fought like hell by many as we are afraid of such changes, especially getting old and facing death.
I don’t know if what I want to say makes any difference to you, but personally I see the best way is to actually look in the mirror while awake and say to yourself, “Okay, I will get old and lose my good looks and maybe some teeth. That is what comes from living in a body that constantly changes and ages from the moment of birth. That is awful only if you are convinced that you are only your body. If that is so, take time to realise that you are the miracle of Life – the latest version of an ancient process. None of us was made from scratch. Every human being develops from the fusion of two cells, an egg and a sperm, that are the descendants of other cells. The lineage of cells that joins one generation to the next — called the germline — is, in a sense, immortal."
Sentience, awareness, consciousness is, as I see it, the very basis of being. The body is like a mushroom, which has been pushed up from a massive mycelium, a mass of threadlike growth underground. A 2,400-acre [970-hectare] site in eastern Oregon had a contiguous growth of mycelium before logging roads cut through it. Estimated at 1,665 football fields in size and 2,200 years old. The mycelium puts up a mushroom or toadstool to procreate. So it is a good analogy of human life which extrudes a body to procreate and to gather the experience we can only get through bodily life – and especially to experience limitations and its lessons and thereby develop and explore our massive potential. See
http://dreamhawk.com/inner-life/jesse-watkins-experience-of-enlightenment/ This Sentient self defines its own realm by feeding upon the higher experiences and realisations of the personality, through repeated earth lives. These past lives are not remembered easily because the new person that developed in the new body had no past connections because it has a new brain. The soul or personality is built from the local memories stored in the new brain. So memories of the past can only be attained by a deep awareness of the spirit. See
http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/ Tony