What’s the connection between running and green apples?
I was dreaming of both when my morning alarm pierced the action and jolted me awake before my dream came to its natural conclusion. The dream fragment teased and tantalised me. I had no full dream storyline to work with, and very little recall of what happened before the green apples scene, but it demanded my attention.
How much insight can a dream fragment deliver?
Do you play the New York Times game Connections? It’s a daily puzzle that lists sixteen words that look, at first glance, entirely random. Your job is to find the connections between the words, and sort them into four themes. In yesterday’s puzzle, for example, the words ‘deliberate, muse, noodle, reflect’ connect because they all mean ponder, while ‘cranium, cronut, lunar, pufnstuf’ connect because each word starts with a bird homophone. “Well yes, of course,” you might nod, but these connections are easy to see in hindsight, and the puzzles are always cleverly spiked with red herrings.
My daily platter of word games currently consists of Connections, Strands, and Wordle. I like the fact that you can only play each game once a day. That’s just enough to warm up my brain without tempting me to do more.
Which brings me back to the connection between running and green apples.
Let’s start with my dream fragment:
I was in a house visiting three different people in three different rooms. I think I was helping them or training them. Someone knocked on the front door, and when I opened it there was a small bag of green apples sitting on the doorstep. Who had left me this gift? I looked along the street. A friend from parkrun was jogging away.
Yes, it was a relatively boring dream, but those green apples were enticingly puzzling. They stood out to me, bright green, almost larger than life.
You can’t take a dream dictionary approach to interpreting a dream. Our dream symbols are born of our personal experiences, conscious and unconscious.
I closed my eyes and asked the green apples to speak to me. Straight away the words from a poem I knew well in childhood came up:
Eat no green apples or you’ll droop
Be careful not to catch the croup
Avoid the chickenpox and such
And don’t fall out the windows much.
– Advice to small children, Edward Anthony (1895-1971)
One of my primary school teachers wrote the poem in my autograph book, and I always thought it was funny.
That same teacher organised an impromptu run on a lazy summer school-day afternoon. We had to run to a tree, run around it, and run back to the start line. It was about fifty metres there and back. We were six or seven years old. I circled the tree, as instructed, and couldn’t understand why at least half the class stopped short of the tree and turned back. I don’t remember being upset by this, just puzzled.
I go to parkrun most Saturday mornings. Parkrun is a Saturday morning community 5k run, jog, or walk event that takes place in more than 2,000 locations in 23 countries across five continents. It’s a volunteer-led free event, so most people also volunteer from time to time. It started in London, England in 2004, and is continually expanding.
Our local parkrun takes us uphill along a bluff, around a tree at the halfway point, then back to the start. Yes, we run around a tree. (I hadn’t made the connection to my school tree story until I started writing this paragraph.) No-one cheats, why would they? In any case, there’s a volunteer marshal stationed at the tree to point out the route.
At the end of my run – jog, really – it’s all I can do to reach the finish line. One step further feels impossible. I’m all done in. I literally droop, bent over, body limp, momentarily exhausted. Two minutes later, I feel fantastic and energised.
Let’s gather some threads:
The woman who left the green apples for me in my dream is a friend from parkrun. She runs faster than me. Recently she has been training, running longer distances several times a week, and this is showing up in her parkrun results. I only run once a week, at parkrun, and I’ve probably reached my personal best. To run faster or further I would need to run more than once a week. There’s a part of me (represented by my parkrun friend in the dream) that is primed to take on the extra challenge, to do more, to train and reach a new personal best. It’s in my nature to take challenges seriously, to not sell myself short, to always run around the tree.
But there’s only room for so many challenges in life.
In my dream I was helping or training three different people in three different rooms. In this season of my life, I do yoga, strength training, and walking, each several times a week. Three different types of physical training. When a running opportunity knocks at the door, well, how could I possibly fit that in beyond my casual weekly parkrun?
The dream offered me a clear warning. I may be tempted (oh look, another apple reference, like Eve tempted by the apple?) to go running more than once a week, to train, to get better, faster, but the ‘gift’ in that would be a green apple droop. Exhaustion. I imagine there were probably five green apples in that dream bag, a temptation to add five runs a week to my routine. Major exhaustion!
Know thyself.
Dreams help you to know yourself, to see yourself and your situation more clearly, to understand what drives you, often unconsciously, and why. Such insight invites self-compassion and opens the way for good decision-making and positive change.
I drew many insights from my dream fragment and have only shared a snippet here to keep the blog short.
You can learn more about how to interpret your dreams (and how to work with dream fragments) here at The Dream Academy, beginning with How to interpret your dreams step-by-step.
Or you can book a dream consultation so you and I can explore your dream together, relate it to your life, and discover the insights and opportunities it offers.
I’m going to post this blog then eat that sweet, juicy, red apple I can see in my fruit bowl. I might even go outside and eat it sitting under a tree.
