“I watched the news about Neil the Seal yesterday,” Lily said, squinting in the cold winter sunshine of another blue-skied Hobart morning. “I guess that’s why I had a dream about a giant penguin last night! Kind of easy to interpret that one, wouldn’t you say?”
Let’s hit the pause button on my reply for a moment while I fill you in on Neil the Seal.
Five-year-old Neil is a one tonne elephant seal who has visited our Tasmanian shores for the past four winters since he was born. Neil doesn’t stop at our beaches though. He sleeps on our roads, stops traffic, nestles up against cars and garden fences, crushes road bollards, and generally causes a mix of havoc and loving Insta attention. He’s been profiled by CNN and outlets around the world, not to mention his own Instagram account with 187k followers.
Elephant seals return to their birthplace to moult, rest, and breed, and to congregate with others of their species. There are huge colonies on the subantarctic islands south of Tasmania, but Neil is on his lonely-only here in the southernmost state of Australia without a colony of his own. Experts suggest his mother may have been young and missed finding the ideal breeding spot to birth him. So he returns, year after year, seeking his tribe, doing his adolescent play-fighting with bollards, snuggling up to land rovers and fences looking for warmth and companionship.
Yes, Neil is the talk of the town, which is why Lily mentioned him this morning. Lily – not her real name – gave me permission to share her story.
Let’s return to Lily’s dream.
Did she ‘only’ dream of a giant penguin because she watched the news about the giant Neil the Seal before bed?
“What did the giant penguin do in your dream?” I asked.
“We were on a plane, flying somewhere, and there were birds on top of the plane. The giant penguin was one of them. I didn’t know if he’d fall off.”
This was a chatty conversation amongst a group of friends, not time for a dedicated dream exploration.
“I could explore this with you for ages,” I said, “but I would like to say one thing. A plane has wings and can fly. A penguin has wings but can’t fly. There’s a conflict between spreading your wings and flying and not being able to do this.”
Lily’s eyes brimmed with tears.
“That’s my life now. How come I didn’t know what the dream was about, and you just see it right away?”
Lily filled me in on her situation, and I’ll keep those details confidential.
“What you could do,” I suggested, “is imagine that giant penguin getting smaller and lighter and discovering that it does have wings and it can fly. It’s a dream symbol so we can do whatever we want: dream penguins can fly!”
This is a process called dream alchemy. It’s a way of engaging with a dream symbol (or a dream narrative) to transform it. There’s more to the process than I have described here, but you get the picture. There’s a part of Lily that feels she cannot fly, that feels weighed down (in a giant way). Her unconscious mind expressed the feeling in her dream as a giant penguin. By transforming the giant penguin symbol in her imagination, Lily invites this part of herself to change. In this example, if she repeats this visualisation, she may find, in the days to come, that something shifts within her inner world and presents her with a way to resolve the conflict, or a new way of looking at the conflict that feels surprisingly manageable and helpful.
There’s another layer, which was not appropriate for our chatty conversation this morning: because Lily thought there was a connection between the giant penguin and Neil the Seal, there probably was. Neil the Seal’s story somehow resonated with her own situation and may have triggered the dream.
Lily’s story may linger in your mind, just as Neil’s will. Stories can prompt recognition, resonance, empathy, and change.
You might think of dreams as stories narrated by your unconscious mind. There’s wisdom to be gained by exploring the framing of your dream story, deep emotional connection to be found with your dream symbols, and a smorgasbord of elements to work with through dream alchemy to resolve conflicts and create desired change.
I wonder where Neil the Seal will lay his heavy head tonight? And what he’ll dream. On land, elephant seals enjoy plenty of REM dreaming sleep, while at sea they only dream for a few minutes a day. But that’s a story for another time.
