The following is a Dream by Anandh, and my interpretation, which highlights the concept that symbolic meaning is derived from three levels of association.

Anandh K • I want to share a dream I had about six years ago... I would like your comments.... 

THE DREAM 

I am walking along a winding pathway inside the gates of a premises, towards a building. I reach the building and ring the bell. The door opens and an usher smiles and invites me in. That usher is me too. 'Please sit down. He will see you in a few minutes.' he says. It is a large hall. At a corner of the hall is a spiral staircase. He climbs up and gets back within a minute and says. 'You may go to him now. he is waiting for you.' 
I climb up the stairs. As I reach the landing I see two doors. One door is plain. The other one has some poster stuck on it. I can hear the muffled noise of some loud music filtering through the closed door. The usher (me) guides me to the plain door. He softly knocks on the door and tells me, 'You may go in now.' 
I step in. It is a large, bright room. The wall facing the door is a large window. Outside the window is a big tree, with branch quite close to the window. The walls are white the furniture is white, the sofa is white and the person who rises from the sofa is wearing a white kurta and white pyjamas. The floor is covered by an off-white carpet. On the small, low tea table a vase holds fresh flowers. His face is serene, his eyes are deep like pools of silence. And it is me! He ever so gently extends his hands and holds mine. His touch is cool and soft. Silence pervaded the room. He made me sit beside him on the sofa. In a soft, low voice he started talking to me. He spoke very little. Then he pointed to the window. As I turned to the window I saw a kingfisher alight on the branch near the window. I could see the flourescent turqoise feathers under the wings. The branch gently swayed before it settled again. It sang for a short while and then flew away. The branch swayed again and it took longer to settle this time. He smiled at me. I could sense that the meeting was over. He placed his hand on my shoulder and smiled into my eyes. As I opened the door and was about to step out, he said, 'Now that you are here, meet my brother in the next room before you leave.' 
I knock on the other door. 'Hi, come on in,' shouts a voice above the din. As I push open the door the noise of loud music fills my ears with a shock. I enter the room. It ais of the same size as the other one, but the floor is strewn with books, CDs, papers, picture cards and posters of pop stars adorn the walls. It takes a moment for me to find him amongst all that. He too is me! He is waering a pair of faded blue jeans which is frayed at the bottom. He is wearing a tea shirt with loud colours. 'Hi, come, sit,' he shows me to a straight chair without arms. I go and sit down. 'So, you met him, didn't you? Ok, good. All who meet him meet me too. I like you. I want to show you something. Let me find it for you. he dashes here and there and from amidst the jumble of books and cds, he picks a CD. 'I am sure you would like this one,' he says and in a moment, the sound of a different kind of music fills the room; a kind of a folk melody. That somehow suits the atmosphere of the room. He talks to me about the recent trends in art and literature. I feel quite easy with him. After a while I get up and take leave of him. 'I am gald you came. do come again, he says. I think him and come out. As the door is shut there is a sudden silence. 
The usher waits for e at the foot of the spiral staircase. He walks along with me upto the door. ' I am sure both of them are gald that you came. So am I,' he says and close the door softly behind me. 

I woke up with the feeling that the kingfisher is the most important aspect of the dream.

On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 9:44 AM, John Brusseau <jn.brusseau@hotmail.com> wrote:
Anandh, please feel free to question me about any of this.THE DREAM 

I am walking along a winding pathway inside the gates of a premises, towards a building.
This is your path in life (whether it is current with the dream, or current with the interpretation isn’t clear.). You are following a winding spiritual path toward an unknown conscious existence (the building).
I reach the building and ring the bell.
You finally become conscious of this new conscious point of view (house) and seek to enter in-ring the bell (familiarize yourself with this new point of view).
The door opens and an usher smiles and invites me in. That usher is me too.
Within this new point of view, you find yourself at home (you usher yourself in).
Please sit down. He will see you in a few minutes.' he says.
You tell yourself to relax, and that you will soon find yourself.
 It is a large hall.
You are now in a place of transition (the hall).
At a corner of the hall is a spiral staircase.
In this place of transition there is spiritual growth spread out before you (the spiral staircase).

He climbs up and gets back within a minute and says. 'You may go to him now. he is waiting for you.' 
You soon come to the moment of asking yourself to experience this spiritual growth in order to find our self (ascend the stairs to meet you).

I climb up the stairs. As I reach the landing I see two doors.
In going on this spiritual quest, you come to see two options set before you.

One door is plain.
One option is simple, unadorned, perhaps not very appealing looking.

The other one has some poster stuck on it. I can hear the muffled noise of some loud music filtering through the closed door. {Is the noisy room the room behind the postered door?}
There is some culturally conceived embellishment recommending this option (the poster). Beyond this option you hear a lot of noise of busyness.

The usher (me) guides me to the plain door.
You guide yourself to the plain option.

He softly knocks on the door and tells me, 'You may go in now.' 
You peacefully ask entrance to this option, and then tell yourself it is okay to take this option now.

I step in. It is a large, bright room.
In taking this plain-looking option you find a frame of mind (room) that is full of enlightenment.

The wall facing the door is a large window.
You encounter a perspective on life (window) that is the source of the enlightenment.

Outside the window is a big tree, with branch quite close to the window.
Through this new perspective on life you can see a significant, big, truth/archetype (large tree), that is closely associated with this new perspective on life.

The walls are white the furniture is white, the sofa is white and the person who rises from the sofa is wearing a white kurta and white pyjamas. {Isn’t a kurta a kind of pajama? What is your cultural association with the kurta?}
Everything is righteous/harmonious (white), the conscious supports for this new point of view (walls), the trust you place in this new point of view (sofa), and the mentality (man) which you encounter there, is clothed in the garments of trust/rest (pajamas), and righteousness/harmony (white).[ I don’t yet understand your association with the kurta.]

The floor is covered by an off-white carpet. {What is your personal, and /or cultural association with this color?}
And the foundation of this new conscious point of view (the floor of the room/house) is also covered in a sense of righteousness/ harmony.

On the small, low tea table a vase holds fresh flowers.
There is a very intimate, personal kind of fellowship, that is humble, that holds pleasant associations for you (the small, low, tea table and the flowers).

His face is serene, his eyes are deep like pools of silence. And it is me!
You are surprised to find that you are able to feel serenity, and have a peaceful vision of life. It is implied that you wonder at yourself for having this wonderful spiritual experience.

He ever so gently extends his hands and holds mine.
This new righteous/harmonious mentality you have discovered within you now begins to extend to, and effect, your actions. (Actions = hands)

His touch is cool and soft.
The effect your new spiritual mentality is having upon your actions is soothing.

Silence pervaded the room.
Whereas the other option presented to you was full of noise, busyness, this spiritual option, where you have found to your pleasant surprise this spiritual mentality, is able to be comfortable with non-activity, with stillness.

He made me sit beside him on the sofa.
This new spiritual mentality prevailed upon you to trust/rest your relationship with him to him (sit beside him on the sofa).

In a soft, low voice he started talking to me. He spoke very little.
Then this spiritual aspect of you began to communicate concepts, and ideas, and thoughts to you in a very intimate/personal (not loud and clear) voice.

Then he pointed to the window.
Then the spiritual aspect of you pointed out the new perspective on life.

As I turned to the window I saw a kingfisher alight on the branch near the window.
As you began to use this new perspective on life, you began to notice an intuition of a time of peace between times of storm (the kingfisher). [according to Ovid and Hyginus, the kingfisher is the origin of the expression, ‘Halcyon days’the period of time in which the kingfisher laid her eggs was a time in which there would be no storms. {Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingfisher}  under the section, Relationship with Humans] 

 I could see the flourescent turqoise feathers under the wings.
You could see the ability of this intuition, to spread spiritual enlightenment.
Kingfishers iridescent colors are not actually iridescent colors (accept in American kingfishers), but are the result of the composition of their wings spreading the blue light in the spectrum. {Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingfisher}

The branch gently swayed before it settled again.
The idea (branch) you were getting from this intuition was gently moving in your mind.

It sang for a short while and then flew away.
This intuition lasted only a short time (as most intrusions do. They flit across our field of vision, and then are gone).

The branch swayed again and it took longer to settle this time.
The idea I got from this intuition resonated in my mind for while, and bit longer than when I first saw it, and then it passed.

He smiled at me. I could sense that the meeting was over.
This spiritual mentality you experienced signaled you that your interaction with it was pleasantly (smiled) at an end, for the time being.

He placed his hand on my shoulder and smiled into my eyes.
This spiritual mentality in you wanted to decisively communicate to you that you were acceptable.

As I opened the door and was about to step out, he said, 'Now that you are here, meet my brother in the next room before you leave.' 
As you were about to conclude your encounter with this spiritual mentality in you, you were directed to see that there is a related mentality waiting behind the other option.

I knock on the other door. 'Hi, come on in,' shouts a voice above the din. As I push open the door the noise of loud music fills my ears with a shock. I enter the room. It ais of the same size as the other one, but the floor is strewn with books, CDs, papers, picture cards and posters of pop stars adorn the walls.
The other option in your life, looks like this room. It is full of knowledge (books), artistic expression (CDs), developing intellectual ideas (papers), personal communications of concepts (postcards), and various concepts of what society celebrates (pop-star posters).

This room is like the room of a college student. I would guess that this symbol is a picture of the aspect of your life as a student of higher learning/higher intellectual pursuits (as in the quest for information related to psychology, sociology, and possibly anthropology.)

 

It takes a moment for me to find him amongst all that. He too is me! He is waering a pair of faded blue jeans which is frayed at the bottom. He is wearing a tea shirt with loud colours. 'Hi, come, sit,' he shows me to a straight chair without arms. I go and sit down. 'So, you met him, didn't you? Ok, good. All who meet him meet me too. I like you. I want to show you something. Let me find it for you. he dashes here and there and from amidst the jumble of books and cds, he picks a CD. 'I am sure you would like this one,' he says and in a moment, the sound of a different kind of music fills the room; a kind of a folk melody. That somehow suits the atmosphere of the room. He talks to me about the recent trends in art and literature. I feel quite easy with him. After a while I get up and take leave of him. 'I am gald you came. do come again, he says. I think him and come out. As the door is shut there is a sudden silence. 
The usher waits for e at the foot of the spiral staircase. He walks along with me upto the door. ' I am sure both of them are gald that you came. So am I,' he says and close the door softly behind me. 

I woke up with the feeling that the kingfisher is the most important aspect of the dream.
This section of your dream seems to be telling you that the part of you that can be still, which is the part of you that can receive intuitions that there will be periods of calm amidst the storms of life, is related to the aspect of you that can get very busy, and that you need both parts of you.

The kingfisher stands out to you, because it is not simply insight about life in general, as the rest of the dream is, but is specifically telling you what is going to happen in your life. There will be some halcyon days, in which you can attend to your own spiritual growth (eggs). And these halcyon days will not last forever, but are for the purpose of preparing you to reengage with your busy life of service to others.

It occurs to me that if you cannot place the circumstances presented in this dream in some specific past time frame, then it may be about to unfold in your life now. Dreams sometimes hold up these sorts of predictive dreams to us, years in advance, in order to highlight the spiritual nature of our life. Spiritual things are not limited to the time/space continuum.



John...In the period that has passed since I had that dream, so many things have come to pass. I was serving as an officer in the Govt of India for nearly thirty five years. I had been contemplating on a change of career for a few years. During the period after the dream I took voluntary retirement from govt service. I am now practicing as a therapist, which is deeply fulfilling and my clients think very highly of me. I started reading Jung when I was nineteen. Now I am sixty. when I decided to take voluntary retirement I did not have clear plans as to what I was going to do. And what I am doing now is the best thing that could have happened to me. 

I will share more as time goes by. 

love

anandh



On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 7:50 PM, John Brusseau <jn.brusseau@hotmail.com> wrote:
Yes, obviously your dream was pointing to a place in which you were going to be reintroduced to yourself, to aspects of you that you needed to become more conscious of. A change in vocation can give us the time to focus on different aspects of ourselves. Your change from working as an officer to working as a counselor definitely would have allowed you to focus upon the aspect of your soul that was a spiritual force (like the man in the plain room). The two doors are a classic symbolic expression of the existence of two options, or a dilemma.The officer, I would guess, is concerned with the management of a group of people. The counselor is concerned about people and their personal issues.  Both sides of you are connected in the dream, and I think that that is because the way our subconscious mind directs the development of our soul is by first giving us a vocation that is a symbolic representation of what we are ultimately going to be doing. So, perhaps the work you did as an officer, somehow developed in you the skills you were going to need as an officer.
So, it does perhaps look like the Kingfisher may have been a spiritual/intuitional sense of the ensuing period of transition (from one vocation to the other).
I have noticed that many of us who have read Jung extensively have tended to take Jung's interpretation of particular symbols as an exact one for one interpretation (my father tended to do this). Symbolic meaning does not lend itself to one for one interpretations however. Symbolic meaning is derived from our associations with things on three distinct levels of experience. Jung had not developed his understanding of symbolism this far, and so he did not know this (as far as I am currently aware).The Kingfisher,or birds in general, could adequately be interpreted to mean a spiritual force, in as much as in a more axiomatic sense it is a force that mediates between the spiritual and the psychical aspects of our human consciousness. What I am trying to say in this point is that a chair could mean different things to us on different levels of association. My personal experience with chairs comes to add a layer to what a chair means to me. My culture's experience with chairs would add a layer of meaning to the chair symbol for me (take for example of the difference in the way a Japanese person would interpret the meaning of chairs, and an Englishman's interpretation of the same symbol), and my universal human association with chairs, a chairs axiomatic definition, would add a foundational layer to what a chair means to me. Thus a Kingfisher could represent one thing to one person, who was required to apply a personal associative layer of meaning to the Kingfisher symbol, and another interpretation to a person who needed to apply a cultural layer of meaning to the symbol.  Universally speaking (or axiomatically) I currently see a bird to be a symbol of an intuition about something. It registers in our minds as a fleeting thought, as a bird flitting across our field of vision. The Kingfisher is a particular kind of bird,and thus it would represent a particular intuition. In this case, I simply looked up the Wikipedia entry on the Kingfisher, and extracted the essential elements of our human associations with this particular bird. Fortunately, the Kingfisher entry had sufficient historical, sociological, information on the bird to allow me to get a distillate of its meaning. [If you had had a personal association with the Kingfisher, this would then be built on top of its more universal, or cultural meaning.]Anandh, would you be comfortable with me posting this last little part of our discussion of your dream on the LI Jungian forum? I think it would add an important discussion to the group, on the interpretation of symbolic meaning. If you'd rather not, of course, feel free to tell me so. I could just as easily introduce this topic in another way that did not involve you.
 


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