In my dream I was coming down a hill and for some reason I was pushing my bicycle instead of riding it. I had traveled this road before, but this time there was somthing very different about it. I looked farther down the hill and as far as my eye could see it was beautiful; mountains were covered with snow, cherry trees were in full bloom, and the greenest, most inviting grass was everywhere. It was indescribable; I've never seen anything so full of color.
As I proceeded down the hill I noticed a fantastic-looking brick building. It was built in a very old style of architecture, but the bricks looked as if they had been laid only yesterday. As I got closer to the building I noticed that the mortar was gold. I kept saying to myself that this must be the home of someone very important—why else would gold have been used as mortar?
I walked up the front steps and through the double doors that were open. As I walked into the house I noticed I was the only one around and I started to feel frightened. Then I decided to walk down a long, dark hallway that was to my right. I came to a door that had my name on it, so of course I went in. The minute I entered I recognized the place: it was the coliseum at the Seattle World's Fair.
Down in the center of the coliseum was a revolving stage. On it were three screens and each one came into full view as the stage revolved. On the first screen was a very modern psychadelic poster that seemed to spin the longer I looked at it. The second screen had a large painting on it and I could read the title and the artist on the plate. It was Marc Chagall. The stage revolved and on the third screen a movie was being shown.
This is the first truly significant dream that I've recorded since beginning my dream diary. It is significant because I can find more than a superficial meaning to it. It took me a great while to come to an understanding of it because I initially regarded it as one of those "nonesense" dreams and did not try to uncover its hidden meaning.
I now see my coming down the hill as my journey toward my unconscious that I must make by myself without the aid of anyone or anything else, hence pushing, not riding, my bicycle. This journey toward my unconscious has probably taken place many times before but until now I had never realized how beautiful an undertaking it was. Everything about it seemed beautiful, new, and inviting.
As I'm approaching the end of my journey, I come upon what at first appears to be an old building but yet in ways appears to be very new. My unconscious is very old but for me it is new because I have just seen it for the firt time and am finally able to appreciate it. The bricks seems to be the "building blocks" of the knowledge that makes up my unsconscious. The gold mortar is that precious element that holds the bricks together. The gold mortar is something that holds together the knowledge I have in my unconscious, which too is very precious.
The doors to the unconscious are open and I am allowed to enter but first I must travel a little farther to get to the "heart" of it. I walk down the hall and come to the door with my name on it. This is the door that leads directly into the unconscious—in this case, my unconscious.
I enter and it is huge, unbelievably so. My unconscious then seems to be revealing to me, by means of a revolving stage, different conscious ways that the unconscious can be revealed, or "made visible," to other people. One way is through color, deep, vibrant color, the kind one experiences only in dreams. In the psychedeic poster those colors are painted for others to see and feel on a conscious level. Painting can also convey the beauty of the unconscious or dreams. I learned that Marc Chagall believed in painting the "dream reality" and though I didn't realize it at the time, this was probably why I was so extrenely impressed with his works when we studied them in Humanities class last year. Thus, the second screen contained one of his "dream paintings."
On the third screen was an example of a very modern attempt to visualize the unconscious, cinematography. It tries to show us what is going on in the mind, the part of a person that cannot be seen externally. Films today try to make the unconscious visible in order to show what makes a character and what the character is even when the character is completely unaware of it.
This dream was very important in that it gave me my first symbolic view of something that up till now I would never have recognized—my own unconscious mind. It has made me more aware of other symbols in other dreams and has enabled me to dig deeper into my previously "nonsense" dreams to figure out their deeper sense might be.
— Deborah Boza
© Copyright 2002 by Robert J. R. Rockwood. All rights reserved.