 | | The Key
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| | I am standing outside with my mom and dad. It's a bright, sunny day. My sister is sitting in a car off in the distance. My dad hands me a large gold key, and then walks off carrying his briefcase through a doorway, down some stairs, and disappears into a bright light. I feel sad and anxious.
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Lynette worked on this dream on the plane while flying to her father's funeral. She had always looked to her father for guidance and respected his advice. Now she experienced him taking his wisdom (in the briefcase) with him into heaven (the light). She felt anxious but saw her father passing her the key as a statement of his confidence and trust in her to carry on without him. "I need not stay in the background like the sister part of me," Lynette says now, "and wait to be driven or guided around by my father or anyone else any longer." To solidify this insight, she drew a picture of the dream depicting the passing of the key. This image stayed with her through the funeral, and she still remembers and thinks about it to this day.
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Dream-inspired creative expression: Drawing a picture of your dream, as Lynette did, can reinforce and add to what you learn from the dream. It was in making the picture, in fact, that Lynette first came to realize the symbolic significance of the key, which had greater and greater prominence as she drew it. Creative expressions, such as Lynette's drawing or Phyllis's poem "Just Wait," often flow naturally out of doing dreamwork. Dream thought is similar to creative thought; it occurs relatively free of inhibition or the fear of judgment. Further examples and instruction about dream-inspired creativity are included in chapter 10.
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Re-dreaming: Another way to add something to your dream experience is to finish or change the dream in waking fantasy.
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