As you start to pay attention to dreams about your family members, you will notice that your parents, siblings, or children may not always appear literally as themselves. Often they will appear in some symbolic form, as a stranger, casual acquaintance, animal, distinctive object, or archetypal figure such as a wizard, witch, clown, king, or queen. Such was the case for one young woman, Marilyn, who had just learned that her mother had contracted a serious illness. She was alerted to the need to deal with her feelings about it by the following dream.
|
 | | The Onions and the Shoes
|
| | I'm buying some shoes. A friendly woman waits on me. I notice someone trading in an old pair of shoes for a new pair. I ask the saleswoman about that, and she tells me that I can make a trade-in, but I have to put an onion in each shoe. I decide to do that and return the pair I just bought. I feel very sad as I leave the store.
|
Marilyn's mother loved shoes, and she often bought several pairs for herself and her daughter. After having this dream, Marilyn realized that the shoes pointed to her feelings about her mother's mortality that she really had never faced before. ''I would need to deal with these issues like peeling an onion," she said, "a layer at a time. I would have to 'trade in' the old pair of shoes, that is, my old image of my mother as immortal, for a new onean image that included her illness and mortality." Marilyn also saw that the onion in the dream pointed to the need to let herself cry (as when cutting an onion) and release the tension and sadness she felt about her mother's medical condition, something she had not yet done.
|
As "The Onions and the Shoes" dream shows, the feelings that come up during or at the end of a dream can be the main clue to the associations you make. When you have an intense
|
|
