Scene Transition To The Spiritual

Dear Nancy: I am an elderly widow living on a small income. In the past year I have been under stress because of health problems. I’m considering moving out of the area to live with my daughter and her family. This dream really perplexed me. - Sylvia

I am attending an affair in an attractive country home. It looks like a family home, but I learn that it belongs to a film company. An important film has just been completed and they are showing clips from it.

There are three famous women movie stars but I don’t recognize them. They are like fictional characters. One star wants to show me a deep drawer full of small items, mostly jewelry and cosmetics. These used items are slightly soiled and do not interest me. I turn away. I see they are showing film clips which are brilliant colors similar to abstract paintings.

Then the scene changes and I find myself in the movie. This time, everything is a tan color. I am at the foot of a bare mountain composed of rough, hard soil. I see many people on a path leading to an indentation in the mountain. I know they are going to worship a 2-foot-long feather kept on an altar in the hollow of the mountain.

Looking up, I can see the feather standing upright on the altar. This white feather is the only color in the otherwise tan hue of everything.

Dear Sylvia: Movies in dreams usually show the dreamer’s current thinking and attitudes about their life or depict problems to be solved. In your dream, you are not interested in the stars’ glamour or drawer of jewelry. Are you less concerned with the material aspect of life these days? That you are in the second movie shows you have moved into this new way of being. Everything is tan and the landscape is bare. All inessentials are stripped away leaving only the mountain and the altar feather.

Mountains dream symbols depict the meeting of heaven and Earth. Climbing a mountain can suggest leaving the material world behind to seek a spiritual plane. The white altar feather suggests further spiritual awareness. Altars are places where we honor God and the source of life. White is the color of purity, innocence and truth. The feather can be a symbol of transcendence and spiritual freedom because birds rise above the Earth, leaving material ties behind.

Perhaps your health problems are causing you to change your focus from the material world to the spiritual. This could be a great help at this time in your life. I wish you the best, Sylvia.

Tips for readers: Through our dreams, we can track our recovery from illness, divorce, the death of a loved one, and other major losses and difficulties in life. Dreams can show the dreamer if he is progressing through the stages of healthy recovery or if he is stuck in a pattern that seems to have no end.

Dreams filled with anger, fear and rejection are a normal part of healing if over time they show resolution of some kind. However, if your dreams continually portray you in unresolved situations, you are probably at an impasse in your recovery.

Working with these dreams by dialoguing with the dream images and using re-entry techniques can break through these impasses and allow resolution and healing to continue. Dreamwork can not only show you your healing progress , they can be a vehicle for profound inner work.

This column is intended as entertainment. But psychologists who work with clients’ dreams say that dreams can hold a tremendous amount of significance; a particularly disturbing or repetitive dream may indicate the need to see a therapist.

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