The Context

The Dream

I am attending some kind of festival at a big open-air arena. It is in the country in PA (possibly Lehigh county). There is a country vibe and I think the music is country or folk music. I'm aware of local people who are related to (sons of) the organizer standing on a hill overlooking the arena. I talk to them but can't remember what’s said. I sense that they and their mother are not good people and there is a vague sense of danger. 

Now I am dancing with the crowd in the arena. I am wearing a red dress. There are a lot of people but with space between them—not packed in like at a concert. No one else is wearing red and I know I stand out in the crowd. We are dancing away from the festival and out of the arena. There are numerous vendors, but I don’t recall any specifics.

The arena is part of a business compound with other buildings (possibly a welcome center and shop) between the arena and the road, all owned by the same family. I remember that an old school friend attended the festival in a previous year. 

I am supposed to drive home and pick up my younger sons James and Andrew so they can attend the event too, so I have to hurry. There is a downpour. A hard steady rain. I get wet but am relieved to think the festival will be cancelled and I don’t have to drive to pick up my sons and bring them back. Then the sky clears and I realize I still have to go get them.

I leave the venue. I’m in a car and there is an elderly man (I would say 80s or older) with me. He is tall w gray thinning hair. I have previously agreed to give him a ride home. I have a newer car, possibly silver, and have borrowed from someone (I think James). The elderly man insists on driving, saying he knows the way. We leave together.

The car is an automatic with a console shift. The man is shifting it like it is a standard, using all three forward gears. It is annoying. I tell him he doesn't have to shift like that, that he can just leave the car in Drive and he makes fun of that manner of driving. He is a bad driver in other ways too, having trouble handling the car in general. We go up a hill, left through a business district and then left again, going back in the direction we came from. We then pull into a gas station. 

I know we have come back close to where we started. I'm upset because I can actually see the venue, which is a short way down what appears to be a state highway. I am stressed about being late to pick up James and Andrew. Especially Andrew, who really wants to attend the event. I am stressed about the amount of driving (1 or 2 hours each way) I still have to do.

I point out the venue to the elderly man and tell him we have wasted an hour going in a circuit. He is unpleasant. We are out of the car. I tell him to take his things and get his own ride home. He has lots of stuff in the trunk of the car (shopping bags, containers, etc). I pile it all up on a bench. Then I see that he is having an issue with balance and cognition. I end up taking his arm to help him walk.

The man and his things are back in my car. I am at the edge of the gas station parking lot now trying to talk a group of people into taking the man where he needs to go. They seem judgmental about my lack of compassion for the elderly, but I feel if they knew him, they would think otherwise. A woman gracious woman with a southern accent is talking to the man sweetly, but after a while I sense she is getting exasperated too.

My Take Away

My Weaknesses

My Strengths

Outcome

I had three dreams about stone walls in 2024. While the dreams were far apart, I believe they were episodes in a single dream series. In a dream series, each dream is connected by a common but developing theme.

These dreams, or this series of dreams. began last year around Easter, so I decided to share the final dream now. You can find a link to the first two stone wall dreams at the bottom of this post.

The Dream Wall Dream

In the dream, I was at a house in my old neighborhood in suburban Michigan. The development changed a lot over the ten years we lived there but in this dream is was a lot like I remembered it in the beginning.

The homes were scattered across a large track of old growth forest. Most had large lots that were entirely wooded in the back and you could walk for a long way then without seeing any manmade structures at all.

I was in a part of the development near the home of a childhood friend. There were two houses. One belonged to an unnamed and unseen dream friend who was about to get married. I was inside a second house, very close by the first. Both houses were ranch-style homes.

I understood that the friend about to be married had dreamt a dream he felt was important. I knew that I needed to interpret it but I was not supposed to leave. This was a problem because there was someone I had to talk to about the interpretation. I had a sense that dream interpretation (or possibly seeing the person who would help with that interpretation) was actually illegal and I had to sneak out the back without being seen and walk quickly into the woods to find him.

It was winter, and the sky was gray, and the ground was covered with snow. The trees were just as I remembered them, tall and thin with bare black trunks. It felt like evening or maybe early morning and I set out in the direction I would have taken to our old house.

I saw that there was a wall built through the woods, or rather several adjoining walls because they were all different. I guessed that each wall was the back of a different property and, as is the case with houses, some were better maintained than others.

At one place, the wall was built out of crumbling cement blocks. It was quite low, but I could see that the wall for the next property was high and well built out of carefully laid fieldstone. There was a young man there who seemed to be a sort of guard or gatekeeper, and he confirmed that I was in the right place.

So I climbed over the low next door wall and cut over toward the house that went with the high, well-built wall.

The house was a mansion, and the occupant was renowned for his ability to interpret dreams. I was invited in. The interpreter of dreams was an older man sitting on the floor of a large, carpeted (possibly unfurnished) room. He was holding a mysterious scroll which he did not explain.

I told him about my friend's dream and shared my own awkward interpretation. I don't know if he provided feedback or additional insights. If he did, I can’t remember. And I don't remember my own interpretation or what the dream was about either.

The Synchronicities

I had the first and second wall and gate dreams around Easter of last year. Those dreams made me wonder if dream interpretation and the Catholic faith were compatible. The first and second dreams came at a difficult time when I was struggling with my writing and a group I belonged to then.

The third dream came when I was struggling to reconcile my faith with the Jungian perspective on dreams and consciousness.

A few days after the dream, I talked to our parish priest about my interest in dreamwork. He seemed to have a healthy interest in dreams and saw no harm in recording them or reflecting on them. He even shared a dream of his own.

When I got home from Mass that day I decided to listen to a Murray Stein video.

Murray Stein is the Jungian analyst who convinced me (via the This Jungian Life podcast) that Jung's approach to dreams was the right approach for me. What was especially interesting about the video I watched that day was that it mentioned that Murray Stein was a Christian.

Who would have thought?

Not me, certainly. But I couldn’t help feeling that there was a connection and that it all circled back to the dream.

The Dream Wall Revisited

I think it's relevant that I wanted to interpret a friend's dream (in dream 3) and felt that it was not allowed. I think this speaks to my uncertainty about the Church’s position on dream interpretation which was something that was on my mind at the time of all three stone wall dreams.

In the third dream, I had to sneak away to find the dream master. When I did, I encountered a wall. It was made of stone, just like the wall in the dreams I had at Easter 2024. It was not the same wall, but it was a similar sort of barrier. In dreams one and two the barrier stopped me. In dream three, it did not.

The wise old man and the mysterious scroll were important elements in dream three. The scroll may represent “learning, knowledge; the unfolding of life and knowledge; the scroll of…destiny.” To Christians it is “The Book of Life,” also associated with St. James the Great, Isaiah and the prophets. The Greeks considered the scroll to be an attribute of Aesculapius. The Egyptians associated it with knowledge. (Cooper, J.C.)

To me the old man and the scroll represent ancient knowledge and a mystical perspective. My own awkward interpretation of the dream reminds me that there is still a lot to learn.

The synchronicity of talking to my parish priest and learning that a Jungian analyst I greatly admire was Christian helped resolve much of the confusion I had with the first stone wall dreams. The priest’s open and accepting attitude was a sharp contrast to that of others I was dealing with at the time.

The Dream Series Theme

I am in a different place, now, than I was in 2024, and had to be, I think, to begin to understand the series as a whole.

The common elements were the walls themselves and the mysteries beyond them—the volkknot and illegible letters in dreams one and two and the unread scroll in dream three. The various walls in the third dream may represent different or incorrect approaches to the mystery.

Most importantly, I think the wall in each of these dreams represents the “passage from outer profane space to inner and sacred space; also symbolic of the sacred enclosure, which is both a protection and a limitation.” (Cooper, J.C.)

I was concerned about going through the door in the walls in dreams one and two. In the last dream I recognized that my concerns came from an external source (an expectation or law). Once I was in the forest I forgot these concerns and easily found a way around the high wall.

There is a lot that can be said about the elements in dream three—especially the mysterious dream master and the journey through the forest. To me, however, the theme is about barriers—both real and imagined—and how they may be overcome.

About Dream Series

Dream series are more common than a lot of people realize. I talk a bit about them in this video:

On the other hand, I lost hope and a dream saved me, and I feel called to tell that story.

I honestly don't know at this point if I'll be sharing that story here in the blog or in a long-form format but here is the intro:

In 2008, at the lowest point in my life, I had a dream I couldn’t explain.

Unlike the murky, sepia colored dreams I was used to, this dream was sharp and bright and saturated with color. A spectrum of blue, unlike anything I’d ever seen. Vivid reds. Shining white light. A beautiful woman with deep-water blue eyes, radiating love.

Filled with sparkling gemstones and mysterious beings, the dream told the story of a journey to and from an amazing location, and it told that story coherently.

As the woman in blue guided me from one dream experience to another, separate themes played out, like story-lines in a movie. When the dream finally ended, each loose end came together in a memorable and emotional conclusion.

I woke up convinced that my mysterious dream guide was someone special. I knew that the things that she showed me meant something. And even though I had no idea who she was or what she was trying to tell me, I was determined to find out.

This was the beginning of a spiritual journey that carried me through the New Age, in and out of Spiritualism and Wicca, halfway across the world, on pilgrimage to Israel, back to Christianity, through parapsychology, and onto the doorstep of Carl Gustav Jung.

And it all began with the dream, I would come to call the Spirit Dream. It was the initiation to the mystery and, ultimately, the key to deciphering it. The journey itself, however, was a process. 

For me, this process was a breadcrumb path of spiritual experience, odd synchronicities, and a host of lesser dreams. These smaller events guided me from one spiritual realization to another, like stepping through the dark—and I would have been off the path and well into the weeds without them. 

And so in the pages that follow, I have shared them all.

In the rest of this chapter, I talk about the life events that set the stage for the dream. In chapter two, I share the dream itself.

About the Video

Chatting about books, dream series, how dreams may explain each other and what's new on the Mystic Review. Also, a bit about Jungian Dream School and my plans for the channel in 2025. Happy New Year everyone! 

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