A woman discovers that her arm is covered with skin colored adhesive plasters she had not remembered were there.
She is trying to pull one off, but feels as if she is pulling off her own skin.
This dream seems to me to picture beliefs that were so much part of me that I simply could not see them. When something like the previous snowdrift dream led me to wake up and take notice — I still could not free myself from them. Since they seemed to be me myself, how could I remove them? How could it be possible to divest myself of this prejudice or that fear, this tendency to infatuation, that shame or this excesssive expectation?
I needed to learn skills and develop confidence, and to love myself enough to risk this difficult enterprise. I see the dream as a step along the road of my discovery that I can in fact differentiate myself from all the ”plasters , all that is not truly me. Perhaps I put them on long ago for protection, a useful tool in a child’s ego survival kit, but they are self destructive delusions for the adult. This dream helps me to recognize this situation honestly and without blame, and to begin to peel off these ”plasters with compassion.
Returning to the image of the previous dream of being stuck in a snowdrift, legs waving in the air, going nowhere…The first essential step was to recognize and admit that I was upside down, and to ask myself what was upside down in my life? What view of life would a person have, upside down and split between being frozen and frantically up-in-the-air ? What feelings came up and what was the experience of non-feeling, of being frozen, numb?
Then, when fear, for example, was the issue I was dealing with, the next step was to experience fear thoroughly in my body, with particular attention to the specific part of my body where I felt it most strongly. Along with this I allowed a natural release of whatever sounds, movements and memories arose in me.
In this way the ”plasters fall off and one eventually topples out of the ”snow , landing right side up on to solid ground, having reclaimed more of oneself.
What is also interesting about these two dreams, unlike all the others in this series, is that I myself did not dream them. They were reported by members of one of my dream groups and illustrate the commonality of our dreams. Every member of the group aslo felt these might easily have been their own dreams. It is often the case that you resonate with some element in another person’s dream and find your own life illuminated.
Alissa Goldring, Photographer
February 1997
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