Dawn71 - I get a clear impression about the two dreams. The dream process is not random although it may seem so. It is no more random than the healing process when we cut ourselves. At first a mass of cells rush to the site to fight infection, and then it attempts to stop the bleeding and slowly build cell to heal the wound. The process behind dreaming also is working toward healing our emotions, hurts or toward growth of our awareness. It NEVER gives up trying, but of course we may not understand what it is doing.
Quoting from Mind and Movement, "Something else many people say is, “But it might not make sense!” or “I don’t know what to do.” This suggests a sense of needing to have ready made ideas about what to do. During classes in which the people were asked to explore body movements, most people gave up after one minute or so. Some of these classes were ones in which the people had been exercising with ‘given movements' weekly for many months. Yet after a class in which they were asked to discover their own spontaneous movements, several of the class dropped out and never returned. This I take to be an expression of an apprehension about anything new emerging into the person’s life. Also, there is an element of these people not believing in their own power of discrimination to sort out what is useful for them. For myself, I have never found the unconscious to lie, but of course we can fool ourselves in projecting beliefs or hopes onto what it presents."
So your dream was working on a theme that you interrupted which was a necessary part of healing an aspect of you. You were distressed because dreams and their work are important and you left it unfinished. But of course dreams images are like icons on a computer screen - you have to ‘click’ on your dream images to make them come alive. Thinking about them doesn’t work. You need to open yourself to the magic of them.
You can do this using
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/acting-on-your-dream/#BeingPersonTo quote from Marie von Franz, "Thus our dream life creates a meandering pattern in which, individual strands or tendencies become visible, then vanish, then return again. If one watches this meandering design over a long period of time, one can observe a sort of hidden regulating or directing tendency at work, creating a slow, imperceptible process of psychic growth - the process of individuation.
Gradually a wider and more mature personality emerges and, by degrees becomes effective and even visible to others. Since this psychic growth cannot be brought about by conscious effort of will power, but happens involuntarily and naturally, it is in dreams frequently symbolised by the tree whose slow, powerful, involuntary growth fulfils a definite pattern."
Tony