Stories from Your Unconscious

: : : Projective Dreamwork Series : : :

- - Killing Seals - -

I had this distressing dream a few days ago…

Here it goes:

I am with a baby seal. We try to make our way forward without being seen. We hide in the shadows wherever we can. However, we could not avoid but confront some adult seals. I order the baby seal to fight the adult seal. I pummel the adult seals with my fist and I crush their skulls. All of a sudden, the baby seal turns against me and attacks me. My wrist is injured with the teeth marks from the baby seal. My aunt Terri and my cousin Tracy arrive at the house. There are dead seals on the floor. They don’t seem to see the dead seals, or maybe its that they don’t care about the bloody mess. Aunt Terri and my cousin Tracy talk about eating cakes instead. I feel a mix of horror, disgust and shame. I wake up.

The above is the entire dream. For background, the morning I awoke from the dream was the day I was supposed to meet with my daughter’s teacher about her academic struggles in school. These parent-teacher meetings about the “importance of grades” have always amused me if I am to frame my attitude about them in a positive way. This is because I do not agree with the aims or the methods of modern mainstream education. I feel strongly that the majority of young people and their potential are *not* served by the education systems I’ve seen in various parts of the world.

Therefore, when I worked on this dream, the first layer I looked at was its meaning in terms of education since my dream probably had something to say about the very imminent teacher-parent meeting that morning.

Coming to the interpretation of my dream, one way to understand animals in dreams is to see them as embodiments of pure nature or pure instinct. I might say that the baby seal represents children in general, as children usually express their feelings and thoughts without filter, and are mostly comfortable with their bodies until we teach them not to be.

The adult seals, on the other hand and in this dream in particular, represent the mature and developed instincts of human nature which is in alignment with the harmonious workings of mother nature. Because seals are both land and sea animals, I might also say that the adult seals in my dream represent the part of me that is at ease both on land (in the earthly money-driven daytime world) and in water (in the less tangible and graspable emotional and spiritual worlds).

In this dream, as I asked the baby seal to fight the adult seals, it is like asking our children to fight against who they are becoming. My crushing of the adult seals’ skulls is symbolic of my preemptive crushing of the foreseeable mature potential of the younger generation. This happens through my participation in a system that crushes our full-blown potential as human beings is regrettable and heart-wrenching. As I take this interpretation further, which is necessarily colored by my own view, the systematic crushing of “adult seals’ skulls” is the dominant system in education, agriculture, finance, and our toxic culture that seeks to globalize and spread everywhere. This is a system that conspires to debilitate and lay waste to not only our natural landscapes, but also our relational and psychological terrains.

Looking at the other part of this dream, my aunt Terri and my cousin Tracy are two of the nicest people you’d ever meet. Yet, in my dream, they don’t seem to care at all about what has happened in plain sight. It is more pleasant to talk about what we shall eat as dessert later. Both of them, in this dream, represent the part of me that are genuinely caring and good, but incapable of, or unwilling to face the dark side of what is happening in the world.

While I believe much of the “crushing of the adult seals’ skulls” is unconscious because it is often presented under the guise of “this is good for you”, such as our modern educational system, there are more and more of us who are painfully aware of its shortcomings and efficacy at cutting ourselves off from who we are.

There is no one to blame, yet just about all of us are involved in this system in one way or another. We are both the perpetrators and the victims. This explains the horror and disgust I felt about my actions in the dream.

My projective dreamwork teacher Jeremy Taylor, who was a Unitarian Universalist priest and an expert in Jungian psychology among other things, taught that our dreams never come to tell us there is nothing we can do about our problems. This gives me hope. So, the ball is in my court on what I might do with the unease and tension inside me which this dream has poked at.

Dreams sometimes challenge us to confront the part of ourselves that tend to remain passive because of feelings of powerlessness or attitudes of cynicism or just plain lack of courage.

What are your dreams trying to tell you these days? Pay attention to your nightly dreams and you might just get the message you need most !

Namaste,

Dean

p.s. I run projective dreamwork circles on a regular basis; they are online as well as in-person. Projective dreamwork is about coming together with others to draw from the wisdom of your individual (nightly) dreams. For more information, you can visit this page on my website: https://www.iamhdlee.com/offering/projective-dreamwork