Recovery - Finding a way off or out of a difficult dream situation is a real test of the person intelligence and ability to experiment. The failure is usually because the dreamer has not realised the difference between the dream world/experience and the waking world. In the waking world one could get fatally injured, but in the dream world there is never any risk of injury. Of course one has to overcome ones fears based on waking world experience.
The same with the dogs growling near her. Whenever we dream its images are not like real life. because a dream is nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but is an image like on a cinema screen that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear. So all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind.
I had a dream that illustrates her difficulty.
The clearest part of this was of being in a maze. The walls of the maze were made of hedges, as the whole thing was outdoors. But I realised that I had purposely created the dream image of the maze as an experiment. The point of the experiment was that the maze was complicated enough to make it difficult for me to find my way out. So, confronted by the difficulty of finding my way out, because of the lucidity, I could understand that this was a self created image, and in doing so I simply realised I was only trapped in ideas and feelings created by images and my imagination, and not actually in a maze. Realising this I was thereby free of the maze. Recognising the feeling as being things I felt rather than reality, I could escape the trap.
I then experimented again and again with this, moving to exist beyond the images and beliefs I had been, or could be, lost in. This was such an extraordinary experience and realisation it is difficult to put into words with enough impact to communicate what I felt. What it led me to see was that all dreams, all thinking and beliefs, involve us in an environment or situation of one sort or another. Usually we feel them to be so real, and the feelings we experience because we are immersed in them, to also be real, that in a very genuine way we are trapped. But we are trapped in the feelings and ideas. So if we were in a prison cell in a dream, or if we trap ourselves in beliefs or thoughts, then there would be no way out of that cell without a key. However, realising oneself as being the awareness behind the feelings, thoughts and images means there is no prison; there is no entrapment; there are no walls to hold you.
Tony
