Meg Evans

Several times in the past week I’ve had dreams in which I am walking along a hallway or up a staircase. Sometimes it is dark, but there is light ahead. I wake up with a clear spatial memory of the area and some visual details, but I have no idea of my destination.

I meant to write a dream-interpretation post over the weekend, about being on a journey with much to be discovered. That post never got written, though, because I wasn’t in the best mood on Sunday. I went to get groceries in the early afternoon, with a storm blowing in and the temperature rapidly dropping. I made it back to my car just as the rain was beginning to fall, which was all right, but the house felt kind of blah when I got home with howling winds outside. Soon afterward, past grudges and self-pitying thoughts crawled out of their subconscious lair, leaving me grumpy for the rest of the day.

On the way back from the supermarket, I had been listening to the old song “Poison” by Bell Biv DeVoe. Somehow it got into my sleep on Sunday night. I dreamed that I was a murderer who poisoned a young woman. Other people in the house hadn’t yet realized she was dead; they thought she was just sleeping later than usual. I was wondering if I ought to leave the house or if that would be too suspicious. Maybe it would be better to stay there and play innocent? I hadn’t yet decided when I woke up.

That one is harder to interpret, but I’m guessing that the murder victim is my poor pitiful younger self who disturbed me with memories of feeling like a powerless victim on Sunday. Rather than showing compassion for this past version of me, I probably had a subconscious wish to kill her off! As for wondering whether to leave the scene of the crime, maybe I felt conflicted about owning such feelings. Anyway, writing this all down might help me to sort through them.

I dreamed about living in an apartment complex where the management cut down some trees and shrubs, which left me unhappy. That seems easy enough to interpret. Apartment buildings in dreams generally represent the social environment, and I’d guess that the removal of landscaping has to do with how quickly the world has been changing. Even when we like something new, there is a sense of loss for what has been left behind, and often it is not within our control.

After I woke up, I had an old song by Jackson Browne running through my mind, in which he wishes that his audience could “stay just a little bit longer.”

Of course, I wouldn’t really want the world to stay the same forever. There are some pretty amazing discoveries being made in modern times, and I’m enjoying the adventure, for the most part. Still, every once in a while, some little sentimental item triggers those “just a little bit longer” feelings.

I’ve had some dreams recently about moving on with life. On Monday morning, I dreamed that I had moved out of a house and that the new owners changed everything around, so that it became almost unrecognizable. They planted ivy that grew to cover the walls.

Then I had the “first day in a new school” dream this morning. You know, the one where you’re walking through a big crowded hall just before the first class starts, and feeling like you’ll never find your way to the classroom and will be doomed to wander around forever like a ghost.

Dreams like that always have to do with getting used to change. We’ve all had to contend with far too many disorienting events over the past year, and there is no magic wand to put things back to normal. Instead, like a student at a new school or a homeowner who has moved to a different house, we just have to learn what we can, in the place where we are—however strange it feels.

Over the weekend, I had a dream that didn’t make much sense to me at first. I was in a supermarket with a cart full of groceries, but instead of going through the checkout line normally, I was standing at a small counter off to the side. My cart was somewhere behind me, and I was holding a pack of three steaks and arguing with an employee who said I couldn’t buy them. I got angry, threw the steaks down on the counter, and told the employee she could put all the groceries in my cart back on the shelf because I just wanted to leave. Then she said, in an apologetic tone, that she didn’t want me to feel I had to leave with nothing.

No incident like that ever happened to me in real life. Although the supermarkets were limiting their meat sales earlier this year because of the pandemic, my husband was doing almost all of the grocery shopping at that time, and he is enough of a carnivore to make sure we always had meat for dinner. And even if I had been caught trying to buy too much meat when supermarkets were rationing it, which did not happen, I certainly wouldn’t have been obnoxious enough to yell at an employee who was just doing her job by enforcing the rules.

So, I interpreted the steaks in the dream not as actual groceries, but as a symbol of keeping my family well fed and cared for (the steaks were in a family pack). But who, or what, was trying to interfere? I pondered that for some time and finally decided that the employee and the groceries represented this year’s disruptions. If my subconscious mind just wanted to put 2020 back on the shelf, I wouldn’t be the only person with such feelings! Sometimes it felt like an endless walk downward on steps leading nowhere.

But as I understand the dream’s ending, it had a more straightforward, literal meaning—that I shouldn’t feel I was leaving this year with nothing. This has been a year in which I’ve gained more appreciation for the simple comforts of home and family. Also, I feel much better grounded. Last year’s worries have mostly faded to insignificance. As the year comes to an end, I have many reasons to feel blessed.

For the past few weeks I’ve been saying an “infinite possibilities” mantra while working out on my rowing machine with video of a river or lake quietly going by. Also, I usually display peaceful landscapes on the digital art display in my dining room, like this image from Hausjärvi, Finland.

But I might have overdone it, just a bit, with all those possibilities. I dreamed that I had three boyfriends, all at the same time! Because this was a dream, they all knew about each other, had no problem with it, and treated me wonderfully.

In real life, figuring out how to deal with one husband always has been quite sufficient. I can say with assurance that I definitely have no secret longing for extra guys! So I’m interpreting the dream as a creative exercise by my subconscious in pushing the boundaries of possibility. The message (to the extent there is one) probably has to do with the world being full of abundance.

I had a dream on Tuesday that I found somewhat disturbing, so I decided to write it down and try to make some sense of it. In this dream, my husband and I were wealthy, and we lived on an estate with a lovely view and many large, majestic evergreen trees.

Some of the trees had grown so large that they were starting to encroach on a concrete parking area for visitors. I said something to my husband about needing to get that taken care of, and then I left for the day. When I returned, two trees nearest the parking area had been totally cut to the ground. There was nothing left of them but logs waiting to be hauled away. I was furious that my husband had decided to have the trees cut down, without even discussing it with me, when I only wanted to hire someone to trim a few branches. Then I woke up, still feeling angry.

In real life, we don’t have any large trees in our yard, and my husband doesn’t do much landscaping beyond mowing the lawn. He hasn’t gotten rid of anything around the house that I wanted to keep, either. So I am interpreting the trees not as referring to actual trees or things, but more generally as symbols of stability, being grounded, having strong roots, and so forth.

Apparently, there are some worries lurking in my subconscious mind that if I am not constantly on my guard, I’ll be undercut, and whatever I rely on to be grounded and rooted in my life might suddenly be taken away. The villain of the story wouldn’t necessarily be my husband or anyone in particular; I’m guessing that this dream was mainly a reaction to all the instability in the world this year. Perhaps being wealthy in the dream was a reminder that we still have many reasons to be thankful.