I'm walking in a desert with my parents. My father is old and wears a dark overcoat and hat. My mother rides a horse. Suddenly I fall into a deep well, I look up and see my father peering down. There's no way I can climb out of the well. I'm thinking that it will take a crane or other equipment to lift me out but we're far away and this would take a long time and be very expensive. My mother goes off to get help. Then I see that I have a mobile phone and could call the Fire Dept. who will have ladders etc. But I can't figure out how to dial their number. All of a sudden I'm out of the well and standing by a food stall just up the road. I ask the woman to show me how to dial the Fire Dept. She does so and I explain that I've fallen down a well and need to be pulled out. As I say this, I realise that I'll have to jump back into the well so that when the Firemen arrive they can rescue me. I can't let them come for nothing.
16 comments:
I love it! Best falling-down-well story I've read. (The others were mostly parables told by Indian swamis based on ancient Chinese tales.)
And it's a kind of Aesop's fable with a moral, one which the dreamer or blog-reader must supply.
I should have said "read or heard".
Thanks, Vincent, it was a good dream/tale. Open to many interpretations!
I wonder what you'd make of it?
I would have worried about the snakes at the bottom of that old well.
No snakes in my dream, Bruce!
OK, I shall say simply what comes into my head, which is the best one can do when awake to overcome our conditioning into the world’s “logic”—that thing we call sanity which tends to assail us in the few seconds after awakening from a dream. I put “logic” in quotes because it is so dominant in our waking life that we allow it to override other forms of truth that lie within us.
Falling into a well is a stratagem devised by your unconscious self to escape your parents, who in any case have already established their independence from one another, as illustrated by the fact that your mother rides a horse and your father does not. She is the one who promises a path to rescue, yet you don’t believe in it. Nor do you don’t believe your father can help, because he’s old. Nor do you believe that your own ingenious solution of a crane will work. It is impractical
What you do have faith in is the fire service. Rescuing those who have fallen into wells is one of the things they are known and trusted to do. Unconsciously you fell into the well precisely in order to be rescued by the fire service, because they can do for you that which your parents cannot.
To escape your parents means to grow up. The dream experiences of sudden falling or going down in a lift, according to my late psychoanalyst Theodore Faithfull, always refer to the journey of bringing yourself into the present, or spiritually descending from the womb of becoming into the birth of being.
When you find yourself at the bottom of a well it symbolizes a dilemma which you cannot solve without help. In this instance, you quickly convinced yourself that your best help was the fire service. It became an idée fixe, so that even when circumstances have changed, and you are magically no longer in the well, you feel an obligation to the idea of being rescued by the fire service. The obligation must be honoured, because people who call the fire service mischievously without cause are liable to punishment.
So you must jump back into the well in order to stay legal, that is to say within the safety of the world’s morality. But the act would be so patently absurd and self-defeating that it woke you up.
This, then is the dream’s message: to examine and repudiate those idées fixes that keep you trapped. Only then can you be free.
Vincent, that's excellently perceptive and enlightening! Thank you very much. The dream-world's logic is so much more interesting and poetically useful than waking life logic. Last night I was jotting down my thoughts about this dream and the part about falling down the well to escape my parents is exactly what you intuited! All the rest of your interpretaion rings bells and rings true for me.
I have been copying my blog posts to Facebook for a while now and a couple of people have also interpreted this dream - have a look:
https://www.facebook.com/natdarb
it shows you have a very generous heart and are not afraid of heights or depths. You are one who does not need a ladder. ;)
Leah, your interpretation is wonderfully encouraging! Thank you.
Why get back in the well? Move on! ( :
Our parents really do a number on us, even if they don't mean to.
Hattie, in the dream I didn't go back down the well, I just thought I should! So as not to hoax the Fire Dept.
Natalie, you're not the only one who has images of self in a deep, dark well - but in mine: there's nobody there to help me out. Have to climb out by myself.
Well, Davoh, you've managed to communicate even though you're in that deep dark well,so all is not lost. Should I call the Fire Dept to pull you out?
Um, OK, the child in the well is voiceless. his mouth is open in a silence yell. So, No Fire Brigades or SES (State Emergency Service) volunteers. Yes Natalie, it used to be a 'dream' (or more of a 'nightmare') from my childhood. My father died during the Pacific war when i was 6 months old. My first 5 years were with my mother and her mother. Make of that as you will, however now, in retrospect at my age as a functioning male - am sort of curious as to why i didn't end up as a transgender "queen".
There is, or was, a joke floating around during the "nonPC" people -
Flouncy bloke in local pub bar; "O, my mother made me homosexual"
farmer bloke; "Yer,well. If i sold her the wool, would she make me one too".
[oops, what a difference one letter of the alphabet makes. My pedant tells me that there should be the letter 'a' on its own in that sentence. i.e
"O, my mother made me a homosexual".]
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