Sorting

Ur-Spo, a “shrink” who writes on the wonderful blog, Spo-Reflections, recently posted about dream analysis. I was happy to read his professional opinion: not all of our dreams are meant for study. Shewww! (Wiping brow). Most of my dreams bewilder me and defy any attempts at decoding.

But this morning’s dream echoed some familiar fairy tale symbolism and has given me (much needed) reassurance.

But first, a little backstory.

Life’s been great lately but…..I’ve found myself increasingly tired and crabby. Why???? I’m about to go on the trip of a lifetime (8 fabulous days, escaping the Midwestern icebox on a cruise) with my entire family. I’ve started a fascinating new job, I’m loving the blogging…. Why so grouchy/tired?

I’ve also been sleeping a lot! This week I went to bed (feeling tired) and slept for 12 hours! Yikes. This is not typical and leads to feelings of guilt (hubby doing more of the housework) and anger (what is wrong with me?).

This morning I dreamt of collecting bushels of paper clips (and thumb tacks—provocative!). Then I poured them into a computer. You could see them through the screen--like looking into an x-ray image. A young Latin kid working as a janitor was standing nearby. “That’s A LOT of clips," he said.

I woke up feeling terrific.

In many fairy tales, the hero/ine is given an impossible task—to sort sand from poppy seeds, or millet from another tiny grain. MLVF (my new acronym for Marie Louise Von Franz--hyperlinked in several posts below) says that this represents learning discrimination—to separate out one’s feelings and desires and to learn to develop intuition. Many times the hero is saved during the night by little minions of some kind--they do the work for him (more often her). When we dream, unknown parts of ourselves are often working out the mishmash of our lives.

My dream reassured me that I’m gathering lots of material right now (in my job, in this blog, in my other musings). It makes sense to be tired. It makes sense to be needing extra sleep. Seems that I’m working overtime in that realm right now.