I have just eaten a bowl of the most glisteningly sweet and delicious blackberries, freshly gathered from my neighbour’s garden. ‘Pick your own,’ Gina messaged yesterday, when I was sitting waiting for an idea for today’s blog to drop. Although I only write a new blog about dreams or dream interpretation every six weeks, I sometimes wonder if I have already written everything there is to say on the subject. This is not true, of course, but on those ‘duty calls’ days when I see ‘write a blog’ in my diary, the thought of a blackberry-picking diversion is attractive.
Gina’s garden is lush with fruits. Mine offers lemons. Not a metaphor for failed harvests. My lemon tree produces an abundance of surprisingly sweet, almost honeyed, lemons. Gina forages them and turns them into culinary treats like lemon curd and salted lemons. If I were true to my English roots, I would gather Gina’s blackberries and bake a blackberry and apple pie. Instead, I tossed them with a handful of walnuts and a dash of yoghurt and ate them fresh while whipping up the idea for today’s blog.
Bear with me. This is a blog about how you can harvest your dreams to gather insight about things that may hold you back in life, but we must first return to Gina’s garden.
I had three ideas for today’s blog when I jumped over the hedge carrying my blackberry gathering bowl. I wasn’t particularly keen on any of them. I felt a deeper stirring to write fiction, but, hey, it was blog-writing day, and I knew a better idea than my so-so three would drop from the heavens if I was patient.
I reached out to pick the first blackberry, the partly blinding sun in my eyes. Whenever I pick blackberries, I am taken back to a memory from early childhood, when Mum, one of her friends, and my sister and I were picking wild blackberries in an English country lane for Mum to bake a blackberry and apple pie. All was peaceful until, “Aargh! I just picked a spider!” Mum screamed, flicking her hands in disgust. “I thought it was a blackberry!”
No big deal really, was it? I know now that there are no dangerous spiders in England, but as a small child, I was spooked. Creepy, crawly, sticky-webby, yucky. What if I had picked a spider and popped it into my mouth?
If Mum was still alive, my guess is that she would have no memory of her experience. I, however, have carried it my entire life. Hardly a trauma! But stand me in front of a blackberry bush and I’m instantly on spider alert. It always makes me laugh (while still on the lookout out for a curled-up spider mimicking a blackberry). It’s a 100% conscious association: I know the origin of the physical alert, and I can brush it aside. It doesn’t stand in the way of me gathering the berries and popping some of them into my mouth as I go.
Can you see where I’m going with this?
What if I had witnessed Mum pick the spider, and felt the yucky shudder through my body, but then forgotten the experience? What if something had happened to distract me: a fluffy-tailed rabbit bouncing by? Or picnic sandwiches hastily produced to take away the imagined bad taste? What if my body remembered the spider, but I erased it from my conscious memory? A yucky memory repressed, but alive deep in my unconscious mind.
As I mentioned, this is hardly a traumatic memory, but a small child’s perspective can seem massively out of proportion when viewed as an adult. We all carry myriad unconscious associations and beliefs from childhood. If this experience had slipped into my unconscious mind, I might experience it today as a vague sense of alert or foreboding or ‘ick’ whenever I think about picking blackberries. I wouldn’t understand the feeling. It might even deter me from picking blackberries: it might limit my full enjoyment of fruit picking. I might carry an unconscious limiting belief that blackberry-picking is a tad scary.
This is how the unconscious mind works. It can undermine the way we approach life to ‘protect’ us from being hurt.
I could give examples of the kinds of hurts we repress and the way these translate into limiting beliefs that hold us back in life, but I’ll let your imagination do that work. I want to keep this story simple to illustrate the point.
I don’t need a dream to tell me I associate blackberries with spiders. I know this already, and so it is not an issue for me.
Our dreams excel at revealing our unconscious associations, once you know how to interpret them. Our dreams can help us to see unconscious limiting beliefs that hold us back. They explain fears that seem irrational. They offer us the choice to integrate past experiences, see them through new eyes, and reprogram limiting beliefs.
Our dreams also offer us insights into our deeper magnificence, gifts and talents we might develop, opportunities we might be missing, unexplored potential, and so much more.
As you may know, I was born and raised in England, and now live in Tasmania, Australia. I have just searched for information about Australian spiders that can inhabit blackberry bushes. There are a few, including the rare and dangerously venomous Tasmanian funnel-web spider, Hadronyche venenata. I’ll add that to my conscious awareness next blackberry-picking season.
