Dreams

Whether you believe all the implications of the interpretation of dreams that Freud and his followers have espoused, it is hard to deny that they do represent the mind's activity when we rest. In my experience, they often take the symbols of your thoughts and combine them in interesting ways with your emotions. Sometimes associating to the symbols in the dreams and commenting on what those symbols mean to you, the dreamer, can suggest some interesting things about what is going on in your mind and probably in your life.

The reason this subject comes up for me this morning is that last night around 3:00 AM I awoke with a vague recollection of the dream I was having. It was an interesting and enjoyable dream that impressed me enough that I got a pad and pen and tried to write as much of it as I could recall. The characters in it were the people that will be attending the Vernine and Associates reunion on August 24th and the major part of the dream was a series of adventures we had together as a group. Unfortunately, I don't recall all the components of those events very vividly, but I do recall they involved struggle, threat and our successful survival of them. The part I recall most is that I was able to pull the group together after the events and present a "book" I'd written and a discussion of it to them. The book was about 200 pages in length. Each member of the group was deeply affected by the contents of that book and our discussion of it, but all were in various ways reluctant to get the point. Some were incredulous that the point could be as good as it was and others were skeptical because they feared it might be some kind of attempt to present a high pressure sales pitch to them. One lady said, in a somewhat supportive way, to another lady that she had read the book already and it was good -- to which I replied that the book was only the first chapter and that the remainder of the book was left for them to write. To the person who was skeptical that I might be making a high pressure sales pitch, I commented that I wasn't selling the book but rather was giving it away for free. It was one of those dreams that I enjoyed and wanted to recall. Try as I might however I could only remember this much.

I'll have to wait until later to comment on my associating to what all this might mean. Time doesn't permit me the leisure of doing that this morning.

A few days later

Two things from my dream seem significant to me.

The first relates to the point that the "book" I had written was only the first chapter and the rest of the book was up to the group to write. One can envision his life, in one sense, as a story he is writing. Any particular event is but a chapter, but each chapter makes a choice that affects how other chapters can be written. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that we are the author and that what we write influences what comes next. Back in 1997 I wrote this poem that addresses the issue, I think.

The second point in my dream that seemed significant to me was that I was giving the "book" away for free. Though it's true that we (Vernine and Associates) charged for our services to the companies for whom we worked, we shared our perspective with the participants in our group freely in the hope that somehow our way of seeing things might make a difference in their lives. Some people acknowledged even at the time that their point of view was affected by our presentation. I recall one particular supervisory training group at Oklahoma Gas and Electric where my contact warned me that one of the participants was extremely reluctant to come to the session and that I was probably going to have problems with him during the session. I suggested that I would be aware of that but that we'd just have to see how things turned out. At the close of the session that individual voluntarily asked to make a point as we were wrapping up. He said he wished he had had the training many years earlier in his career because he felt that the point of view that we had shared made more sense than any other training he had ever received as a supervisor. As the Persian farmer said, "You never know."
- posted by Perry @ 6:13 AM