(Pascal - man, age 40)
Dream:
"I am in a park with two of my friends. A man came to us and asked if we wanted to play a football game with him and two of his friends. There were two teams of three people and I insisted we should mix the teams because our team would be too strong and it wouldn't be fun if we played this way.
"One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go." - Sigmund Freud
While we discussed the teams and struggled to decide who plays in which team, the park got crowded with a lot of people and there was no space to play anymore. So I decided to go down the hill from the park into a forest. There I saw a horse galloping very fast towards me, and I hid behind a tree and the horse galloped past me. I decided to go back and I thought about a story which I was once told. The story was about a man who could understand the language of horses. One time, a horse had told him that while he (the horse) was travelling, he was always looking for somebody to pretend to be his dad, so he could warm up next to him and go back travelling again. I woke up."
Dream interpretation:
Deciding on the teams for the game in the park resonates with archetypal energy of the collective Animus in the dreamer's psyche. Through the football game he discovers a part of himself which he sees as weak and intends to develop through a revaluation of his own inner masculine features on the unconscious level. In the end the game does not take place as it takes too long to decide the teams. This may suggest an inability to take a strong stance or make a decision about something in reality. A trip down the hill and into the forest symbolises going down into the vastness of his Self. In the encounter with the galloping horse he gets in touch with the force so strong that he needs to hide behind the tree when the horse passes him. The galloping horse embodies his own primal and instinctive drive that he cannot control and therefore he rejects; he hides behind the tree as he fears the inability to control its (his own) strength. On his way back he recalls the story about a man who understood the language of horses. The dreamer regularly uses dream interpretations and in that context we may assume that understanding an animal language is a symbolic way to unfold understanding his own dreams. In other words the story about the horse unfolds his own myth. An inner conflict and self rejection, in which the horse represents the inner strength that he denies because of a deep fear of its true nature. In the story about the horse, the dreamer is the father who is not able to embrace his own primal spirit (the horse) which is doomed to be rejected and wander alone. This sets the unconscious foundations for longing to be acknowledged and recognised for (paradoxically) something repressed in the dreamer’s Self. This fragmentation results in feelings of loneliness. And an immense longing for warmth that as a result of fragmentation must be found in the other people that he meets in his life. It is also looking for an inner affirmation of the dreamer's individuation.
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