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Long White Car

I am aware that tools are being asked for, in a demanding tone, to fix a car. I have the sense that it is my mother’s car. I bring a few tools and give them to a woman (Sheila?) in the garage. One of the tools is like a pliers, but the jaws are odd, not fashioned like regular pliers. She is acting impatiently, frustrated, as though the tools were not brought soon enough. Next, I see a nice, clean white truck in the garage, and ask, “Is this your new vehicle?” But my attention is redirected to look at a vehicle parked outside in the alley. It is also white, and long, like an extended limousine. Like a convertible, there is no top on the vehicle. The main, driving compartment sits at the end of the vehicle instead of the front, and is elevated. My mother is there. I understand this to be her and my father’s repaired car. This feels to be a space of my childhood and I feel as if it shows a part of me stuck somewhere between the woman I am and the child I was.

My initial thoughts: It may show how I can be very demanding on myself when I feel/find there is something that needs attention and repair in my life. Even if that be a healing issue. The driving mechanism of this comes from the inner mother that developed in me as a child. In the mind of the child I was, mother was someone that I could never please. The length of the car may be an exaggeration, meant to capture my attention. That the main compartment of mother and father sits elevated may show the esteemed position that I put my parents in as a child. White generally represents purity and innocence, but in this dreaming instance I am inclined to think it shows how the child I was held mother and father to be blameless, beyond fault. That it is an open top, I think, reflects a revealing of something...

I don’t talk with my parents very often, but I did speak with them over the phone for a brief time yesterday. I generally don’t like talking with them, as they very negative. Looking at self-pity has been on my plate recently, wanting to weed it out of my life story … and I’ll be durned if this was not most of what I heard while on the phone with them. A “nobody cares, nobody wants to help” attitude. I was glad to be off the phone. And realized that the self-pity was, in part, inherited from them, from their own thinking/mindset. Other factors of neglect as a child deepened the self-pity. Like many parents, they want others (and their children) to be responsible for them. And I, as a child, was very much "the responsible one."

The other item that is up is that of beginning to write my story … which is the prime reason why I feel a need to weed out self-pity/self-importance. My analyst had reminded how taking up such a task is like stealing fire from the Gods (not her own words) … and how that it will anger some Gods (her words). May this dream, already, be showing an angry God (mother)? That would not want me to sully the nice, long, white car?

Coming back to "edit" this in. Sheila was someone I knew as a teenager. She was (then) a young homosexual woman, about 10 years older than myself. She worked on cars, didn't mind getting her hands dirty. Odd to me that she appears in this role in my dream. I knew her through my sister. Sheila was "in love" with my sister. She was someone who was angry and she could be demanding. I find it amazing how so many characters from our life come back to appear in our dreams, trying to communicate they influence they were, even if they only played a seemingly small part in our waking life.

Kristi

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 43, Kansas

Have You Posted Before? Date of Last Post {Use Search and Your Post Name to Help Find Last Post} Female

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Re: Long White Car

Kristi,
Not a lot of time to respond to your dream this morning so a quick look and observation. I know you have provided your own observations but i want to explain how Jungian psyche works when looking at a dream. Your dream provides a good stage to do so.

The opening of the dream sets the tone of the probable message the dream is trying to provide.

From the Myths-Dreams-Symbols page A Simple Guide to Dreams:

In first phase, which can be regarded as the exposition, the initial situation (setting) is represented – already pointing at central conflict expressed in dream.
Example: The dream starts out, "I'm in my mother's house". Or "I am riding on an out of control train".


Having to fix a car, your mother's car, suggests there is a need to fix some aspect of the relationship with your mother. Or the lesser possibility that the mother is you and there is a need to fix some aspect there. It could be both.
You are aware of the emotional tools' needed in this important aspect and the unconscious, if not conscious mind is calling for more attention to it.

Shelia! As you know named or known people in a dream often suggests qualities and feelings of those people that you desire for yourself. Is there a note of procrastination, is Shelia the type who puts off things instead of taking them on as needed? Is this something you have done yourself in the relationship with the 'mother' in your dream?
Or is it the frustration that Shelia may represent? The obvious is not always the only prime emotion a dream addresses. Related activities also must be considered especially if there are qualities both you and 'Shelia' share.

The new vehicle. A vehicle that possibly carries a big load {truck} would be a 'new' part of you. A healing aspect? But your attention is focused on the vehicle 'parked outside'. Is this an ego centered aspect at play?
Limousines carried many people, many aspects of self. No top may suggest there are 'no limits' to the emotional baggage this 'mother' aspect creates. This aspect is now being elevated in your current waking life. And your father. Family issues, from childhood on?

Your observations fit neatly with Jungian psyche. Perhaps you dreams have incorporated this Jungian style of dream psyche. Or could it be Jung's observations are correct, his method of dream interpretations are exactly how a dream functions. The former could be true but I am willing to bet the later is also.

"The other item that is up is that of beginning to write my story … which is the prime reason why I feel a need to weed out self-pity/self-importance".

If nothing else, posting a dream for interpretation, and discussion, is therapeutic in itself. Talking about it relieves those built up anxieties and 'let's the cat' out of the bag {metaphorical speak for the animus-feminine emotional qualities we all possess}. Plus it is a dialog with yourself, about yourself. What better way for the unconscious to communicate with the conscious self? Through dreams.

Jerry

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 59 Murfreesboro, Tn

Have You Posted Before? Date of Last Post {Use Search and Your Post Name to Help Find Last Post} Male

Re: Long White Car

This is great, Jerry. Thank you. I am out of time this morning, but will come back to explore this more this evening in light of what you've shared. Yes, very therapeutic to just let it all hang out - let the cat out of the bag.

Kristi

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 43, Kansas

Have You Posted Before? Date of Last Post {Use Search and Your Post Name to Help Find Last Post} Female

How Did You Find the Dream Forum? Yes

Re: Long White Car

This is long, so grab a tea or coffee :)

Using the dream structure as outlined at the link you provided, here is how I play it back, now:

The persona I am dreaming from appears to be me at a younger period of my life, my middle teen years. To place a time of day in which the dream occurs, I would say it is afternoon. I am in what feels my parent’s house (however, not the home of my childhood and also not their current home). There is at first, “awareness” of my mother (and father, though he feels somehow secondary, in the background) and tools being requested. Then, Sheila, and myself. The plot is the repairing of a vehicle, to make it like new. I simply see myself handing Sheila the tools in the garage and do not observe any actual work being performed. Following the outline, this would be the essential change of the 2nd Phase. The repairing of a vehicle. When I saw the first vehicle and asked “Is this your new vehicle,” (this, the new, repaired vehicle(s) would be the 3rd phase, the culmination) it was as if asking if it was my mother’s. I am not sure who or what directed my attention to the limousine-long vehicle parked outside. I step out, see it, and my mother, standing near the far end where the elevated main compartment sits. My father is as if in the background, somehow. This is the end of the dream, the closure. Seeing my parents with this large white vehicle and their feeling happy about it.

Looking at it again, I can see how the dream could speak to many levels, for I just thought of my parents’ wish to have had a more positive legacy to leave behind, a more positive history to reflect on in their final years. I may have felt this (at least unconsciously) when speaking with them over the weekend. They feel there is little to show/validate the meaning of their lives.

I did not know Sheila well enough to know if she may have been (or became) a procrastinator. I saw her as strong and determined, and, like I said, not afraid to get her hands dirty. She was very masculine oriented, the butch role in a lesbian relationship. Despite an outwardly tough appearance, I do know she was a sensitive young woman that had a great depth of heart. Also, that she was not afraid to show this. She cared for me much like a little sister. As I said, she loved my sister (the one who spent most of her adult life incarcerated and later died due to AIDS). Sheila (as well as I) lost contact with Kim when Kim again went deep into drugs and the streets and prostitution. She would come to call on me sometimes (for she knew how dearly Kim and I loved one another) and we would drive, combing the streets of Chicago, looking for Kim, sometimes finding her cold and hungry. Sheila would try to call Kim away from that life, but Kim could not come, could not trust a love near to true love, for allowing the love would mean breaking the dam to let out all that was held inside. A part of me resonated with Sheila, for I too took on a very masculine persona, had to be strong, and so I admired the strength that Sheila appeared to me to possess. And I liked that she truly cared for my sister. There were so few in her life that genuinely cared for her, and she could not trust the opening of her heart to them.

The dream may well be suggesting both the need to fix the mother within me (this is very clear to me, now) and the actual relationship with my mother (this is not very clear to me now, at least not to my conscious ego self, as I currently find myself. It is only in the last year that I truly began to deal with my mother issues. It was too hard for me to get near to earlier. For the child I was needed to hold out hope that at least one parent was okay, so I’d never allowed myself the righteous anger that was due. Despite my knowledge of her own abuse as a child, she did stand-by and allow me and my sisters to be molested by my father … and only vehemently blamed and attacked us when help was called for. My empathy for her, which preceded my anger, did not allow me to vent the indignation and deep (DEEP) pain her emotional absence and feigned blind eye created in my soul. But I must say, now, in the moment of this writing, I feel an understanding, a compassion for her that I have not felt before. It seems to me that such a feeling state of forgiveness cannot be pretended simply because our higher thinking believes it to be the right thing. This is what I did before, I think many do this. But it cannot come from the mind alone, especially when other feelings are welling beneath. It must be dealt with…we must honor ourselves/our feelings, even when they are so called “ugly,” as in rage and anger … and the understanding must ultimately come from the heart.

And, Jerry, of the emotional tool(s) needed in this area… After reading over my dream again this morning, and your note, I realized that I knew that odd-jawed, pliers-like tool. A few years ago, I was moving through an enormous amount of crazy, murderous-like rage and I dreamed: I have assumed shift duties in the maximum security area of the prison. The off going officer hands me the clipboard indicating which inmates are next to receive recreation. I walk down the tier to ask two inmates if they would like to take their recreation. The first cell I stop at is Inmate Curtis’. When I ask him, I have the feeling that he is somewhat surprised “I” would come to offer him recreation. He accepts. As I walk away, toward the next inmate, he calls me back and asks, “Did your mother not love you as a child?” I don’t answer, but feel completely “on the spot,” astonished that he knows I feel this way. My feelings, of feeling unloved by my mother, come greatly into my awareness – and I wonder over the transparency of these feelings. He tells me that it shows all over my face and in the moment I know that it does. I feel vulnerable, my feelings exposed. Scene changes. Myself and another man are in a work shop with Curtis while he completes a work project. Curtis is sawing through what is like a large sheet of thick steel. As he finishes the first sheet, I stand on it, to sever the last layer of threads still holding it loosely together. It breaks and falls open, apart. He saws through another sheet, working very hard. Again, at the end, I stand on the sheet to break it apart, as I tell him what a good job he has done, that “he has done it!” Cleaning up, I help him to put various tools away into the cabinet. Putting one tool away, the other man asks of it, what it is or is used for. Curtis tells him, “I have told her,” with that, I know that it used for removing metal burs.” Curtis was incarcerated for murder, a death sentence. He too was abused as a child, as are many who grow to be murderers. Those pliers that I gave Sheila are the same pliers that Curtis gave to me. And, goodness, may there be any significance?... I dreamed this tool dream on the same date, three years later than the Curtis dream. Wow, in the dream, that tool was put into a cabinet, and now, it comes to me again. All I can say right now, is “thank you, Ronnie Curtis,” for being in my life, for coming to my dream, for helping me to see myself in you, for recognizing yourself in me.” You can’t know the tears of thankfulness and release I cried, knowing I too could have sat behind bars in this life, promising that somehow, someway, someday, I would give back, I would help others.

It may be relevant for me to look at an earlier instance of Sheila in my dreams: I see Sheila. I am to go and stay in her home. She tells me that she knows why I went through such a time of spiritual vicissitudes when I was young.. that it is because God was pleased with me.. that I was pregnant with the divine.. that such pregnancy is very sacred (that dream was 2005). And this may be a stretch, but I wonder also over the word/name play in “Sheila,” if it may related to my earlier dream vision of the Goddess in the aspect of “Sheela”-Na-Gig.

And I am just now thinking perhaps that it was not so much frustration that Sheila was expressing (my dream ego was interpreting) as it may have been a matter of haste, urging of action with the tool… And who better to take charge and do it than this Sheila aspect of me.

Jerry, much of my ego-centeredness is coming into my awareness as of late, and my dream ego’s response, as well as my waking ego (likewise, of course) is surely at play.

Kristi

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 43, Kansas

Have You Posted Before? Date of Last Post {Use Search and Your Post Name to Help Find Last Post} Female

How Did You Find the Dream Forum? Yes

Re: Long White Car

The seeming time of day of the dream matches the time of day I spoke with my parents. Despite my (ego) wanting to get off the phone with them, I was aware of the presence of the Divine Mother abiding with me during those moments...of knowing the error of my ego, though my ego did not want to admit this. I went through a good degree of psychological and emotional pain yesterday, and finally surrender, feeling myself corrected whilst my ego was putting up a fight.

Kristi

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 43, Kansas

Have You Posted Before? Date of Last Post {Use Search and Your Post Name to Help Find Last Post} Female

How Did You Find the Dream Forum? Yes

Re: Long White Car

Kristi,
The more we analyze a dream the more we learn about it, and ourselves. It is difficult to fit everything within a dream with waking actions/experiences/emotions but just the fact we pay attention is usually enough to learn valuable information from a dream. As in a myth each dream is an adventure, and if we look at the dream on the level of a myth, in particular in the light of the hero journey, we realize the dream is addressing the individual path and all that makes up of the life. We all become heroes when we look inward because we are confronting the darkest, deepest, aspects of the psyche. We learn about the different and often unknown unconscious aspects as well expand on the known conscious aspects. And whereas the ego centered self is focused on the outer self that pleases primarily the body, the inner search discovers all there is to the person, personality, the whole self. Self discovery is true enlightenment. And an enlighten soul is the a gift that keeps on giving.

We can never too much. But we can always learn more.

Jerry

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 59 Murfreesboro, Tn

Have You Posted Before? Date of Last Post {Use Search and Your Post Name to Help Find Last Post} Male

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Re: Long White Car

You've said it very well, Jerry. So often on the journey, we want only to see all the bright and beautiful, preferring not to go to the darker corners where we are pained, or where the least amount of consciousness (light/awareness) has touched. But it is ALL a part of the beauty of wholeness.

And, yes, there is so much to be learned from any one dream. I have recently been going back (again) and reading over my dream journal, and am finding so very much more being revealed to me. Going back like this can show us what we might not have been ready or able to see in earlier points of our journey. As our wholeness grows, so does our understanding. It becomes broader, wider, as does our heart, more able to be open to a greater number of possibilities.

Kristi

Age & Gender & Location {Required}: 43, Kansas

Have You Posted Before? Date of Last Post {Use Search and Your Post Name to Help Find Last Post} Female

How Did You Find the Dream Forum? Yes


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