Welcome to the downs, Saxony Tarn. I love your 'handle'.
No dream is silly. I read a huge and really good book on dreams last summer that really helped me understand mine. Here are a few basics I gleaned from it.
- the act of dreaming is your brain's efforts to sort out the day's experiences and connect them to all of your memories, including the memories of which you are no longer conscious.
- the dreaming brain employs symbols, mostly in the form of people you either know or don't know. These people usually represent aspects of your own personality. If you know them (family or friends or enemies) they probably also represent themselves.-
- the 'you' in your dreams (the observer) is your conscious awareness (Tolkien examples: Frodo, and Sam after Frodo becomes hard to relate to) known by Jung's followers as the consciousness.
- older people represent wizard or wise-woman types - these people connect you to the inherited depths of wisdom of the entire race, even before you were born (Tolkien example: Gandalf) Jung's wiseman.
- a sympathetic person of the opposite sex is perhaps your muse, also that aspect of yourself that carries good mystery (Tolkien example: Galadriel) Jung's anima.
- a fly-in-the-ointment, chaotic, untrustworthy person of the same gender as yourself, is those aspects of yourself you don't like, don't trust, and haven't yet incorporated into your own personality sufficiently yet (Tolkien example: Gollum) Jung's shadow.
- a dark person of the opposite gender that may represent death or destruction (Tolkien ex.: Shelob) Jung's dark anima.
Animals, vegetation, and geometric signs also have symbolic value in dreams. And transformations in dreams have symbolic value, too. For example, I dreamed once that a lion was chasing and caught me. Later I went back and had a waking dream in which I talked to the lion (which had a human face) and learned from it what it was, and it changed into a human being. What had happened was that a formerly unknown and poorly understood part of myself became known and integrated for me.
Of course, all this is just one well-developed "take" on dreams. Being a model, it's imperfect, but still can be quite helpful in making sense of your dreams.
It occurs to me that there are no transformations in LotR, except for Beorn. The only other ones I can think of are Gandalf, Galadriel, and Aragorn seeming to grow in stature and power and regality, respectively. Or Saruman being 'unwizarded'. All other transformations occur within the personality of the characters. Hobbits stay hobbits, Men stay men, Elves remain elves. And Tolkien loses nothing by refraining from these transformations. Oh, there's Elwing turned into a gull (swan?) and Luthien turns into some kind of animal, doesn't she?
Tolkien's exceptions, where he allows transformations, increase the significance of this for me. I guess I'm writing about this because I had determined that one of the most powerful things in fantasy is transformation. The symbolic value alone is tremendous. I think I need to start a new thread...
[ May 04, 2002: Message edited by: littlemanpoet ]
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