Inner Life

Thursday, September 03, 2020

I awoke from a dream state with a sense of having narrowly escaped a situation of “almost being shanghaied”. What scenario did that come from, shanghaied? What might it have meant? All else that had composed my dream life was gone, disappeared into a thin membrane that’s at-the-ready to absorb “sleep realities”.

Such a curious sort of lingering memory encourages me to try and free associate to it, and try to understand to what it might refer. Curiously, shanghaied isn’t a typical verb in my lexicon. In fact, I cannot recall having used it, but my dream suggests that my inner life allows the word to live in a meaningful way.

I believe that dreams usually represent extensions of concerns that we’ve deemed not important, unwanted, and have tucked away. Meanwhile, our inner under-the-surface lives continue wrestling with them. As we awake and return to reality, our thoughts retain dream fragments.

This isn’t an introduction to some philosophical limb, but to assist in explaining a key outcome from my free associating. The immediate thought that popped into my brain relative to “being shanghaied” was the Blue elderberry bush–that formerly beautiful plant located on my forest horse trail. A couple days ago, I discovered that it’s been stripped clean, its branches now completely naked. Months before, on first coming across the unexpected and lovely plant, I made it a key point on my developing horse trail map, of “The Blue Elderberry Trail”.

Dear Friends: It’s a way of interpreting weird dream elements that often helps. Diana