Dream #14: Daughter

Classification: Type II
Age: Twenty-five years old.

I am driving a ’77 Camero down a highway. I am driving recklessly and fast. I must find her; I must find my daughter.

I begin to notice that the engine is overheating. I ignore it and continue driving. The meter keeps going up, higher and higher, and I continue to ignore it. I stare at the road, press my foot down on the pedal, and go on. There is nothing more urgent than this.

Suddenly, I look down at the meter, and I am shocked. It is far above the safe zone. I shake my head and think to myself, “What are you doing?” I slow down and take the next exit. As I pull off onto the side of the road, I suddenly realize that I know this place. I have been here before. This place is the crossroads.

Many roads come here, and they all lead to a different life. I see the road that I came from as a child, the road that I took into my young adulthood, and I see that now I have returned from a different direction. I see the road that leads into the mountain. I chuckle to myself. Of course, it was inevitable, inevitable that I should return to this place.

I decide to have a cigarette while the engine cools. I get out of the driver’s seat, and walk around the back of the car. I light my cigarette, and begin walking away. Suddenly, a voice calls out to me. I turn. There, in the passenger seat, is the child’s mother. I think to myself, “How did she get there?” She calls out to me, saying I must come, that we will be late, that we must continue the search.

However, by this point I can barely hear her. The farther away I walk, the more distant it all becomes. My consciousness expands. Why was I doing this? I forget.

There is a sound, a rustling, a quite pulse of life that I have not heard in many years. How could I forget this sound? The business of the freeway, the noise, all that clamor--it has caused me to forget this quite, simple sound; this powerful sound--the beating of the heart of the earth. Now I forget entirely anything but this: the forest. I am within the forest. I am walking. I have no direction, no goal to attain, no history, no record of my path. I am a part of the forest. I listen to the plants growing around me. I think to myself, “They have no need of such useless struggles; they are free; they are justified in their own existence; look at them, how magnificent, how awe inspiring.”

This is where I belong. How could I ever forget? I do not need to struggle; I do not need to seek. Like a tree, I only need to exist, to grow, to be justified in my own existence. My purpose is to expand myself. My trunk must grow higher and reach the sky. My leaves must stretch out toward the heavens. I must become a vast and magnificent being of the forest. Then one day, perhaps, a child might stumble upon me, and I might spark that innocent wonder that only a child can feel; that feeling that long ago, I myself discovered in such a place as this.

It is settled. My mind melts away into the forest, into myself. Now, I can grow in peace.

Interpretation

The urgency of finding the daughter is a symbol of my emotional frustration at being separated from her. It is the question of what is the right thing to do from this point on. How shall I proceed? The knowledge that her mother, and the rest of her family do not desire me to be involved in my daughters life is the crux of this issue. This is the source of the primal rage symbolized by the overheating engine. As I attempt to suppress and repress this emotion, it wells up inside of me, until I suddenly realize that it has become too powerful for me to control by my conscious will alone. This dream is therefore both a warning arising from my unconscious psyche concerning the existence of this powerful emotion, and simultaneously a presentation of the wisdom of the unconscious psyche in the form of symbolic advice.

As I exit out of the vehicle, my psyche separates itself from this paradigm, assuming an external perspective. I am immediately calmed. As I look back into the vehicle, I discover that the child's mother is inside it. Her sudden appearance, and her plea to me to continue on my quest, is indicative of the fact that a great portion of my emotional turmoil and desire for reunion with my daughter is bound to my empathetic relationship with the mother. As I let go of this psychological relationship, these pleas instantly lose their power. I am free to perceive myself as a distinct entity. When I do so, I am able to once again find peace as I return to my own paradigms--those that I have constructed, those that I value, and not the assimilated and empathized paradigms of other people. The chaos caused by the conflict of these other paradigms and my own suddenly vanishes. Now I may proceed to seek a relationship with my daughter that is founded upon my own paradigms and not those of other people. This requires not that I act in accord with social norms, but rather that I proceed to grow and transform as an individual, in order that one day I may provide her with a wealth of knowledge and wisdom, in order that I may be to her a refuge, a pillar. This is the solution.