On the interpretation of a dream

For many years, I have studied dreams. And, as a part of that ongoing study, I have recorded my own dreams and “worked” them. That is, I have pondered the symbolic elements of the dream to use as a guide to my understanding of the events in my waking life.

To be certain, dreams are a fantastical world, where the realities of life are surreal, where the laws of physics, of cause and effect, are not merely suspended, but are often elastic or even absent.

As a Christian, I remain fully convinced that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob still speaks to His people by and through their dreams. The reader will recall that the magi, whom came to worship the infant Jesus, were “warned in a dream to go back by another way,” and thus they “departed into their own country another way.” Musician, singer, songwriter James Taylor also sang of that event in his song, “Home By Another Way.”

As well, in that next verse we are told that Joseph, the stepfather of Jesus, was was also similarly warned when “an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream,” and instructed him to flee – with Mary & Jesus – for their lives into Egypt.

Sometimes, others have asked me, “What does my dream mean?”

I wish that like the great prophet Daniel, or patriarch Joseph, I could with certainty tell the interpretation of a dream. However, I cannot. Our dreams are unique to us, to our individual lives and events. I can only provide broad guidelines to assist in the interpretation of dreams.

Again, while I’m no expert on the interpretation of dreams, it would seem reasonable to me that someone having a dream wherein they see themselves push a short, nubby pencil with no eraser fully into someone’s head would be symbolic of something otherwise impermanent or temporary being unable to be forgotten.

The one doing the pencil pushing is writing something that cannot be erased – they’re also writing it in the head, the point of memory and recollection. But the very nature of pencils is that the things they write can, and are meant to be erased. Who purposely uses a pencil with no eraser?