A man is stuck head first in a snowdrift, legs flailing in the air.
What this dream gives me is a laughable picture of an absurd yet familiar condition. It is so easy to go on habitually in an intellectual mode, out of touch with feelings, sensation and intuition, until a dream like this one takes the abstract idea of being cold, rigid and stuck and makes it visible and real. At the same time the dream shows how I want to get unfrozen and reach wildly for solid ground. A variation of the ” ostrich with head stuck in the sand . . .
I see my past mirrored in this dream — and my urgent need to function as one whole, to be present, in touch with reality. When I recognize myself in a sense caricatured in this vivid image, I have to stop and smile and take it in. The picture stays with me as mere words never can, making the phrase ”frozen needs a reality.
This dream reminds me of the way Hopi ”clowns mock a person whose ego has gotten out of hand. They may walk behind and imitate in an exaggerated way his pomposity or other failings. Aren’t dreams often our built in personal tricksters or jesters, alerting us to self-destructive tendencies which we have taken for granted?
Alissa Goldring, Artist
February 1997
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