Freaky dream left me stressed all day

Ok so I had a bad dream that woke me up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding. I haven't been able to totally shake off the stress feeling all day today, which is probably an excess of adrenalin as well as worrying about the dream.

I think I have part of it figured out but I feel I'm missing something. Here's the dream and how I interpret it so far.

First I was walking down the street and then I saw my ex (who I'm still friends with) and it was his birthday. We ran towards each other and hugged happily and I wished him happy birthday. Then I noticed at the all-girls' school further up the street, which is bounded by a round wooden fence, there was a hot air balloon inside the grounds and it was some kind of special display, so I said we should go and look at it. Inside the fence there were lots of people, and I was standing beside Mr Gem and the hot air balloon was being inflated bigger and bigger until there was hardly any room to move. And then it started spitting out electrical sparks and there was some exhaust. It seemed dangerous so I said to Mr Gem, "Let's get out of here... now" He recognised the danger too so we got out through the fence. I called out to my ex to come on, but he just stood there. So I called out "Goodbye"... and then some kind of explosion happened and I could see Mr Gem's daughter in there. We got a phone call and I took the phone from Mr Gem because I wanted to protect him, and it was a lady calling to confirm/identify the body of his daughter by describing her tattoos. And she issued a death certificate which was actually like a diagram of old fashioned surgical scissors or something. And that's when I woke up totally stressed and freaked out.

So what I get from the dream so far is that it represents my subconscious fears and anxieties about becoming pregnant in the future. The school and its rounded boundary (also being an all-female school) was like a womb and the inflating hot air balloon is both a growing pregnancy and an act of fertilisation (the electrical sparks, which in the dream are dangerous). And it was like if I was to become pregnant it would end something in my friendship with my ex, and with Mr Gem's daughter perhaps it means she would no longer be the baby (she is 20 this year). The part where she dies really freaked me out the worst though, so I'm wondering if actually she represented ME and my fears about something bad happening to me in childbirth - and maybe this is what the surgical scissors meant. I would really like to figure this out to know why the dream was so bad and hopefully it wasn't a premonition but only a reflection of my fears. Just before bed I was reading a book for my studies that was likening birth to the death of the mother and maybe this played on my mind.

Any thoughts?

Hi Gem Sweetie,

I posted this here BE-cause I thought at may Shine a different " LIGHT " on your dreams, and what you may get from a soul level.


Hope this helps abit


Dreaming the Secret Wishes of the Soul
by Robert Moss



One of the greatest gifts of dreaming is that it puts us in touch with soul. It takes us beyond the limited understanding of the everyday self and shows us who we are, what our soul’s purpose is in this life experience and what our heart truly yearns for. There is a word for this vital function of dreams in the language of the Huron, a dreaming people of North America. The word is ondinnonk, and it means a "secret wish of the soul", especially as revealed in dreams. This expression takes us to the heart of healing. By connecting with our dreams, and celebrating and acting on the information they gift to us, we bring the energy and magic of soul into our daily lives. As we allow our big dreams to take root in this world, we become whole and well, and start living our deeper story. As we help others to honor and celebrate their soul guidance, as revealed in dreams, we become healers and dreambringers.



Ancient dream healers understood that we are often out of touch, in our surface minds, with our deepest truths and our heart’s desires. Not knowing who we are, forgetting our soul’s purpose, we do terrible harm to ourselves and others. Dreams invite us to get back on the right track, the soul’s track. I learned about this many years ago when I asked for dream guidance in support of a narrow, ego-driven agenda. I wanted inspiration for a commercial potboiler, a thriller that would follow the formula of a successful previous novel I had published. In my dream, I found myself in a banquet hall where a lavish feast for hundreds of people was being prepared in my honor. But there was a problem. In the dream restaurant, the master chef had walked out in disgust because he was bored with my menu. The message, on waking, was clear. If I persisted in repeating myself – in using my creative gifts for a limited purpose – my deepest creative energy (the "master chef" of the dream) would bow out; the soul and its magic would be missing. I abandoned a major book project because that dream showed me it wasn’t "major" in the ways that serve the soul.

Dreaming not only renews our understanding of the soul’s purpose; it can literally bring the soul back home. From the shaman’s perspective, soul loss is the root cause of much illness and affliction in our lives. We suffer deep grief, heartbreak or abuse or trauma – and maybe then succumb to negative habits and addictions – and a part of our vital soul energy goes away. Chronic depression, lethargy, memory gaps, low resistance to illness and emotional numbness are among the most frequent symptoms of soul loss.

Our dreams can tell us which parts of ourselves may be missing, and when it is timely to bring them home. Recurring dreams in which we go back to a scene from our earlier lives may indicate that a part of us has remained there. Dreams in which we perceive a younger self as a separate individual may be nudging us to recognize and recover a part of ourselves we lost at that age. Sometimes we do not know who that beautiful child is – until we take a closer look. There is a marvelous story in my book Dreamgates about what happened when a woman went back into a dream of a beautiful five-year-old in a red coat, and found herself fusing at the heart, in a blaze of light, with the part of herself she had lost at age five through family trauma.



Unfortunately, a common effect of soul loss is dream loss. Indeed the absence of dream recall is often a primary symptom of soul loss – as if the part of the sufferer that knows how to dream and travel in deeper reality has gone away, out of pain or disgust. It is fascinating and deeply rewarding to observe what can happen when people who have forgotten how to dream start dreaming again. This can amount to spontaneous soul recovery.

A middle-aged woman approached me for help. She told me, "I feel I have lost the part of me that can give trust and know joy." As preparation for our meeting, I asked her to start a dream journal, although she had told me she had not remembered her dreams for many years. When she came to see me, she had succeeded in capturing just one tiny fragment from a dream.

She remembered that she was standing over a table, looking at three large-size "post-it" notes. Each had a typed message. But the ink had faded and she could not read the messages.

Slowly and carefully, I helped her to relax and encouraged her to try to go back inside her dream. Quite quickly, she found herself inside a room in the house where she had lived with her ex-husband prior to their divorce, almost twenty years before. Now she could read the typed messages. The first read in bold capitals, "YOU CAN DO IT." They were all about living with heart, and trusting life.

She realized that she had left her ability to love and to trust in that room for nearly twenty years. I asked her what she needed to do. She told me, "I need to bring my heart out of that room and put it back in my body." She gathered up the messages and made the motion of bringing them into her heart. As her hands crossed over the place of her heart, we both saw a sweet and gentle light shine out from her heart center. She trembled, eyes shining, and told me, "Something just came back. Something that was missing for twenty years."

In the most literal sense, dreaming can make us whole. It not only connects us with lost or buried aspects of ourselves. It connects us with our larger identity – our Higher Self – and our larger purpose.



Honoring the secret wishes of the soul, as involved in dreams, requires us to learn some simple and powerful strategies that are central to my dream workshops:

Opening to dream guidance

Start a dream journal, if you are not keeping one already, and resolve to catch your dreams and write up your dream reports, giving each dream a title. You’ll find it very rewarding to dream with intention. Before going to sleep, write down a question or issue on which you would like some guidance. This can be specific ("Should I change my job?") or general and open-hearted ("I open myself to the power of healing"). If you remember dreams from the night, se how they might relate back to your intention.


Learn simple steps to clarify dream messages

The all-important keys are (a) trust your feelings (b) run a reality check and (c) go back inside your dream to get more information. Your feelings, on first waking up, are an instant and usually impeccable guide to the general quality and urgency of the dream. Running a reality check means checking how elements in the dream relate to your waking life and – especially – checking to see whether the dream may be giving you a window into possible future events in waking reality. We dream future events quite often, though few of us pay attention and fewer still are alive to the interesting possibility that if you can see the (possible) future you may be able to take action to change the future for the better. (This is the theme of my recent book Dreaming True.) Finally, the best way to understand the full meaning of a dream is to learn to go back inside it, as you might step back into a room, take a good look around (while fully alert and conscious), and maybe talk to someone in the scene or dream the dream onward to healing or resolution.


Open a safe space to share and celebrate dreams with others

When we know that dreams show the wishes of the soul, we will surely want to support each other in honoring this guidance. Start sharing dreams with a friend, by email if necessary. Never presume to tell the other person what his or her dreams mean. Start by encouraging your partner to tell the dream as simply and clearly as possible, give it a title. Ask what the dreamer felt when she first woke up. Ask her to run a reality check to see whether there are messages about current situations in waking life, or possible future events. Then offer your own thoughts and associations in a gentle way by always saying "if it were my dream" rather than laying down the law. Finally, ask your partner what she can now do – in a practical, positive way – to honor the dream and act on its guidance. With a little practice, you’ll find safe ways to bring dream-sharing to larger groups and start building a dream community. An office that starts the day with dream-sharing is a vastly more lively and creative space!


Always do something with your dreams!

Real dreamwork is about energy – about bringing vital energy from a deeper reality into the daylight world. In my workshops, we turn our dreams into stories, drawings and songs; we stage spontaneous dream theatre; and we agree on action plans to work with the guidance of our dreams and the powers that speak to us in dreams. Sharing a dream with another person is already a step towards action. Writing yourself a personal motto inspired by a dream – a bumper sticker – is a further step. Buy the red shoes, make the phone call, plant those flowers, study the transformations of the Goddess or the Bear in myth and art, as your dreams may guide you, and you are taking a longer step on the road of soul, the only road to walk.



Robert Moss is a world-renowned dream explorer, a shamanic counselor, a bestselling novelist and a former professor of ancient history. His many books include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamgates, Dreaming True and the novel The Firekeeper. He has recorded the popular Sounds True audio course Dream Gates: A Journey into Active Dreaming. Born in Australia, he survived a series of near-death experiences in childhood. When he moved to upstate New York in the mid-1980s, he started dreaming in a language he did not know which proved to be an archaic form of the Mohawk language (which he subsequently studied to interpret his dreams). He teaches courses in Active Dreaming – his original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanic techniques – all over the world. He is leading a 5-day course, "The Temple of Dream Healing" at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, CA from September 16-21, and a weekend Shamanic Dreaming intensive in the San Francisco area from November 10-11.For further information, visit his website at www.mossdreams.com.

FROM ROBERT'S DREAM GATES BLOG AT BELIEFNET:

Dream Spiders as Disease Markers, and Possible Allies


A woman named Jennifer recently shared a vivid and very specific account of how the behavior of a black spider in a series of dreams has given her disease markers she has learned to take seriously. One of her examples: "I am standing in an open doorway. A black spider leaps from the frame onto my abdomen, scaring me badly. Three months later, I developed appendicitis in the same spot and had to be rushed to hospital for an emergency appendectomy." ... The spider in Jennifer's dreams is not the spider in your dreams, or mine. While we recognize common themes when we hear each other's dreams, every dreamer's experience is personal and unique to them. For some dreamers, the spider is an ally, offering the power to re-weave the web of possibility in life. [read more] http://www.blog.beliefnet.com/dreamgates/









Dream Gates

Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination
by Robert MossDream Gates


Thursday July 22, 2010
Categories: Active Dreaming, dream symbols, meaning of dreams
The spider in your dreams is not the spider in my dreams


The wonderful discussion generated by my last post on Dream Spiders brings home how we want to approach every dream as an experience unique to the dreamer, even while it evokes universal themes.

Suzette reports that when she is ill a spider climbs inside her torso and starts spinning a web. While this would be terrifying to many dreamers, and might suggest a chest infection, Suzette's dream spider is an ally who catches what is bugging her, rolls it up in a silk ball, and elegantly expels the possible complaint from her body.

By contrast, Wanda has found it necessary to eject spiders she felt were adversaries - possibly embodying a threatening disease - from her dream houses in various creative ways. In one of her examples, she managed to convert a large and menacing spider into a wind-up toy that could be put out into the street, like the trash.

I've had spider dreams of both kinds. I just rediscovered a dream report from two years ago in which I knew that I had to remove a large black spider - not a tarantula, and not furry, but about that size - from my dream kitchen. I tried to catch it in paper towels in order to carry it out without harming it, as I would probably try to do in regular life. However, the spider died as I struggled to contain it, and then promptly morphed into a set of plastic parts, like a broken child's toy, that I carried out and placed in the trash. I woke from this dream feeling a strong sense of wellness and resolution, and felt no need to interpret the dream. Moving with the energy from a dream is often more important than figuring out what the content means.

When it comes to the pursuit of meanings, let's remember that it's usually a good idea to study the nature, habits and habitats of the critters that turn up in dreams. There is a vast variety of spiders on this planet, most of them non-venomous but some incredibly deadly, so when we dream of spiders we may want to pause and attempt an identity check.

We also want to study the specific gifts of different kinds of spiders: what kind of webs they weave, for example, and the uses of those webs. The first dream catchers were spider webs. An Onondaga friend told me that when his son was very young, he hung spider webs above his sleeping head to catch and keep out bugs of both the physical and the psychic kind, in the old way. Don reminds us in a comment on my last post that spider webs are helpful in stopping bleeding.

Finally (for now) let's remember that in the shaman's way of dreaming, we can learn to get close to fierce and dangerous creatures with whom safe encounters in the physical are generally inadvisable. In my dreams of my native Australia, I am sometimes offered a funnelweb portal to enter the Dreaming of the Koori, the Aboriginal people. I remember being sternly lectured by my parents, as a small boy in Queensland, to check boots and shoes every morning in case a funnelweb spider had built inside one of them overnight, and to avoid or kill this type of highly venomous spider on sight. In the Dreaming, things work rather differently.

Atrax robustus, Australian funnelweb spider, in threat position



Read more: http://www.blog.beliefnet.com/dreamgates/#ixzz0uWFhcccS

Thanks Solane, very interesting reading. I'm still not exactly sure what my dream meant though. Another thought occured to me - maybe the death of Mr Gem's daughter in the dream indicates the end of my own girlhood? I guess if I lose my girlhood at age 35 I've done pretty well to extend it for that long... lol... And also I think I associate my ex with that extended girlhood as well. I was so young then and not so much shit had hit the fan. Just before, I was looking things up on Amazon.com and I added something to my wishlist (for when I'm rich!); I then clicked on my wishlist to view it and up came a whole list of stuff that my ex had added in 2004 and in 2002. And now I feel a bit sad, because we had a nice life together and seeing his wishlist reminded me of it. It's so weird that this would come up only days after my dream.

Ok I had another weird death dream last night. This time I was at the street where I mostly grew up, at the end of the street where there is a large-ish creek running past. A family who our family was friends with until we fell out with each other was there. We were looking over the concrete fence down the drop to the creek, and the two boys from the family had drowned. They were intellectually handicapped (in real life). There was a rescue operation to recover their bodies and a funeral was in the planning. In the dream, although in real life we didn't like each other anymore, I looked over at their mum and there was a tear running down her face so I asked if she was ok. I did genuinely care, even though we had a past of disliking each other. Anyway, it was strange I dreamed again about someone's children dying in an accident. This dream didn't freak me out like the last one though.