The Rusty Key Dream: Making Sense of Symbols and Synchronicities

This has been a tough week for a couple of different reasons. Chief among them, was the confusion I was feeling over a creative project. Luckily for me, a dream, a couple of synchronicities and some good friends helped me make sense of things.

This post is about where I was at, the dream that came at just the right time and the synchronicities and good advice that followed.

Where I was at

I had been struggling with the memoir I sometimes mention for some time. 

You've heard me mention it before. Depending on how I'm feeling about it on any given week, I might consider it a spiritual memoir or autism memoir or both. This is only part of the conflict.

I had decided to include a 2012 dream I believe to be a visitation dream in the memoir and had started to think that I should also write about the relationship it referenced. This turned into an entire chapter on a very difficult time in my life. By the time I was done with the chapter, I saw the full impact this relationship had for the first time. 

It was a lot to process and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue with the project, at all. I talked about this in my autism podcast which I'll add below.

What I didn't talk about in the podcast were all the associations with the divine feminine I'd been making all through the memoir writing process. Anyway, almost two weeks ago, now, I was feeling good about that, thinking that maybe that it the major theme. 

I had even started re-reading When God Was a Woman and had a couple of relevant insights I put into the manuscript. I started to get that feeling I get sometimes, thinking that maybe I'm getting to the bottom of things, that maybe this is what my life experience (and by extension the memoir) is really about.

The more I thought about failed relationship chapter, however, the more I second-guessed. Eventually, I took most of the divine feminine insights out and resolved to focus on autism and brokeness and eventual wholeness as seen through an autistic (instead of a spiritual) lens.    

For some people this wouldn't have been a big deal. Project change direction. But this is a thing for me. I build stuff creatively and then I tear it apart. I have come to think of this building-shredding process as a form of self-sabotage 

Then as sometimes happens, I had a dream.

I called it the Rusty Key Dream and I couldn't help noticing how it referenced a 2012 visitation dream, now expanded to share a fuller account of relevant dream events. You can find the expanded account here on the blog at Lost and Found.

Anyway, that was the situation. Here is the dream:

The Rusty Key Dream (9/6/2025)

Scene 1. I have a booth at an indoor flea market. There is an outdoor sort of fair, then the building where I have my booth. I think the building is masonry painted white with a large opening (like a concession or covered veranda) where a woman sits behind a counter or long table in the shade. She is probably in her 60s. She owns the business and is responsible for the leases. She has a rough voice like a smoker and short dark hair. I think she might have dark cat’s-eye sort of glasses. Either way there is something kind of 1940s or 50s about her. She seems harsh or abrasive. I tell her I am not renewing my rental agreement for the next month. It is summer and I have a sense of sun and greenery behind me as we talk.

Scene 2. I have just attended some kind of event at our local mall and people are filing out of the venue. I have the sense that the fair / flea market is on the second floor. I am leaving with a man and a child (possibly ten or eleven). I have a vague sense of them but recall no detail. I remember that I have the rented booth upstairs and that I will need to get my things out before the lease is up. I have a table, my mother’s cash or strong box and a green crocheted tablecloth (I own this tablecloth in real life) still in the booth. I am worried I won’t get these items back once the agreement lapses. I wonder if I can get the table down by myself but then decide I can manage.

“Go get the car,” I say to the man. “I canceled my booth and need to get my table before they throw it out.”

“I thought the key didn't work,” he says. 

I pull out the key. [I recall it very clearly.] It is a little like a strongbox key with a round head and simple geometric grooves. It’s made of lighter weight metal than a house key but is around the same size. The key looks old and is spotted w rust (in random circular  areas where some kind of coating might have come off), not rusted overall.

Scene 3. I go back upstairs, I think by escalator. The woman is gone. I go down a white corridor maybe 15 ft long. It is a little shabby with closed doors on either side. Then I come to the door of my shop / booth. I put the key in the door and have trouble getting it to open. I’m not positive I get the door open but I remember seeing strong box and that the inside of the room being bare except for the items I came for so I guess I got in.

Possible Interpretations

I wasn’t sure about this dream but it seemed likely to me that the man and child mirrored the 2012 visitation dream. There had been a child with him when he walked me back along the boardwalk and there was a child now. I remembered very little about the child in the visitation dream and even less now. And the man I'd connected to the 2012 dream was vague.

Then, the Dream School I attended offered a special workshop on dream art. As the panelists discussed the value of drawing your dreams I drew the Rusty Key Dream (below).

As I drew, I found myself drawing the man too dark (as you can see in the head and neck area). He was gray, I realized, not black. Immediately, I thought of a computer and how sometimes certain unavailable options are grayed out. When that happens, you can’t select them, at least not then. I wondered if that was the message. The past could be processed but it could not be chosen.

I also started to think about the strongbox and wonder if it my meant to be my earthly mother’s strongbox or something else. Thinking about the items I was to retrieve—the table, the tablecloth, the locked box—I was reminded of an altar, a Catholic altar, complete with altar cloth. I remembered that the tabernacle is locked and that Mary is often thought of as the tabernacle (that holds the host/Jesus) in Catholic thought. 

So there was an altar (which is my personal association with tables) and a locked box but the box didn’t contain the host. It belonged to my mother—but maybe not my earthly mother. Maybe it was another mother, the one I’d been reading about in When God was a Woman.

Maybe I was being called back to the goddess I had left behind. Ishtar, whose many epithets include Goddess of the Storehouse. Or maybe it was some other goddess or maybe I was completely wrong.

I decided to turn the dream over to my small dream group. All the feedback was wonderful and I still have to unpack some of it. 

One member suggested that conversation about the key could reflect where I was at in terms of the individuation process in the past and where I'm at now (i.e. unable to unlock things vs. being in possession of a working key). It took a couple days for this to sink in for me but I love the idea of it.

Another member suggested that  I count back ten or eleven years and look at what I was doing at the time. So I did. I actually counted back here on the blog. And I found the Goddess Dream.

The Next Synchronicity

So that was all cool and resonant but I was already halfway through the shredding my work process and not ready to stop. I did the podcast below around that time.

But while I was happy with the podcast, I was not happy overall. I wasn't sure what I was doing with the memoir or what I should do with the past.

I knew something was off about all of it. The intuition was strong and felt really dark. I knew I was sabotaging myself but I wasn't sure if I was right or wrong. I thought maybe other women interested in the divine feminine might have a helpful take on some of this.

So I started poking around online and found the following:

I loved how Jungian it was, using the same language used in the Dream School I attend. What if this is true, I thought. What if we aren't really divided against ourselves? What if we're not actually sabotaging? What if we are dealing with outlawed wisdom?

What if, instead shredding, we're supposed to listen?

Where This Leaves Me

I haven't resolved everything but I am paying attention.

I get hung up on language. I think it's probably a pattern-recognition related thing. I'm detail oriented. I put things together in weird ways and can be very critical of the result.

But maybe there's wisdom in that. Maybe I need to look at that critical faculty as a friend instead of an enemy.

I can't say for sure what's happening with the memoir but I think I'm getting some sense of the general direction. How it will turn out exactly is anyone's guess. There is a lot of work left to do, and it isn't all about writing.

__________

Read the dream that kicked this whole dream thing off here: The Spirit Dream