Gayle Delaney presented this series of six dreams by her friend Tanya in her classic Living Your Dreams, to demonstrate how shared themes help you interpret even bizarre material. I think she proves her point.

The first three were spontaneous, the later three incubated--Tanya asked them to evaluate her troubled marriage to Ian.

--Chris Wayan

1: HAIR
(Jan 1971? 6 months after marrying)

My hair has been cut upon my request. It is set. I am uneasy about how it will look. It looks quite nice set; it has a good shape! Then I say to Ian, "How about if I comb it out before we go to bed just to see how it looks?" I take the rollers out and brush my hair. It looks horrible, hanging around my neck like a limp, unexciting pageboy. I decide it looks better in rollers. The feelings of distress at cutting my hair were very intense and awoke me with a start. My beautiful hair, why did I cut it off?

I asked her what she thought it might mean, and she replied that it was just a nonsense dream. "Doesn't it remind you of anything?" I asked.

"Just of Samson and Delilah; only I'm Samson," she answered.

2: EGYPTIAN EXECUTIONS
(Feb. 1972? A bit over a year later)

An Egyptian Pharaoh (of pre-high civilization Egypt) is about to be executed by the new, more developed people now in power. He is lying on his back in the desert under a bright afternoon sun. His chest is bare, sweaty, and golden-toned as he is being prepared for the execution. I kneel beside him to the right of his feet. I am his partner or co-leader in the spiritual and political life of the people. My loyalties are with him, not the new rulers; therefore, I too must be beheaded. An unseen narrator says, "It's too bad. She was their last hope as a leader." My skin is the color of Egyptian gold, and, as I kneel, a beautiful white dress flows about me. A pillow of many fascinating colors is placed before me. I am to place my head on it to have it cut off. The time has come. I look to the king, then to God, and place my head upon the pillow.

Tanya was ready to change the subject, and I did not pursue it... Without being able to interview her, since she was a friend, not a client... [here followed two pages of Delaney theorizing. Only the final paragraph had any input from Tanya herself:]

I was puzzled by the image of the vividly colored pillow. A few months after she had this dream, Tanya told me that the fascinating pillow of many colors was her dreams, or rather her attitude toward dreams. At the time of the dream, as she later realized, she seemed easily distracted by the sumptuousness and fascination of dream imagery. Though she loved to discuss the exotic, mythological, and archetypal elements of dreams, she failed to recognize the fact that most of her dreams were dealing with very concrete issues. In this case they were signaling her self-imposed execution.

Ian momentarily had control of a geyser that Tanya herself owned. It seemed to the public that Ian owned it. An entrepreneur offered Ian a great deal of money for it. Ian wanted Tanya to sell her geyser to him so that he could sell it and make a good profit. Tanya was angered and told Ian that she would not sell it to him, that it belonged to her, as would any profit derived from its sale. As the dream ended, she felt very guilty for being so selfish toward her husband.

About three weeks later, Tanya... incubated a dream, asking for help in overcoming her discontent with her marriage.

Isadora Duncan was telling her that Ian was the wrong man for her and that her husband was just too different from her for them ever to find a compromise in lifestyle that would satisfy both their needs.

Isadora then took Tanya to Carl Jung himself and said, "Carl, will you please make her understand that these two personalities will always be in opposition?"

Tanya kept refusing to accept either's prognosis of her marriage. She insisted that their love would overcome their differences, and besides, she only needed to grow up a bit to recognize how superficial most of her extraversion was.

Tanya responded to this dream by redoubling her efforts to find some way she could feel free to do the things she loved without feeling she was abandoning her husband...

Their relationship began to change, if just a little bit...

Tanya...was less and less willing to live a life without running and dancing and meeting exciting people [but] Tanya knew how Ian hurt inside when she would go off without him for a day of tennis and folk dancing. She said she felt stifled and selfish. Tanya was confused. She appreciated Ian more than ever, yet she had never been more miserably conflicted in her life.

Two months after the Isadora Duncan dream she incubated another, this time asking for a progress report on the work she and Ian had done to make their marriage a more mature one.

5: THE GODS IN A WHIRLWIND
(May 1972; two months later)

I am walking down a path in the desert. Ian is a small boy whose hand I hold. There is a breeze, and suddenly the gods come down to me in a whirlwind and say in many echoing voices, "If you do not separate from Ian, you will die." I tell the gods to stop trying to push me around and that I am going to stay with Ian forever, no matter what. We'll manage.

The next thing I know, I am in a sort of hospital-jail, awaiting my execution. Ian visits and brings me flowers, but he cannot help me. At dawn, I know I must walk outside to my execution. There is no way out. The gods have won.

This dream was unbelievably vivid. It tells me that things have not changed that much after all, I am heading for a DEAD end. Ian as a small boy? How much of my love for Ian is a desire to mother him, to give him the confidence he lacks that he is OK just as he is? Maybe I see him that way because I need so badly to feel needed and loved myself. A child will never walk out on me as a grown, confident man might. Ian was not in prison, I was. I was the sick one in the hospital, not he.

Oh my. So that's why I refuse to listen to the gods. I am so afraid of being alone that I've chosen a man I feel safe and secure with and who would never leave me, as my father divorced my mother. I chose a good man, a wonderful man, but one I was bound to have a very difficult time living with. I have criticized him for just being the way he is. I tell myself that he is shy and introverted because he is emotionally immature or because he doesn't know any better so that I can mother him. I feel ashamed that I have not realized earlier how much my need for emotional security motivated me to marry Ian.

But I also love him; even when I realize all that, I love him. He is such a fine person. What now?

A few weeks passed. Ian was invited to Europe for a series of conferences on international law. Tanya decided not to leave her work to accompany him on the six-week tour. She wanted to see what it would be like to live alone for a while.

As Ian's departure date approached, Tanya would burst into tears at the thought of the upcoming separation. Ian encouraged her to accompany him, but she refused, saying that she knew she had to convince herself that she could survive on her own for at least six weeks.

The morning he left, Ian was sad to be going without his wife, but Tanya was far more upset. She later wrote in her journal, "It felt as though my heart had been torn out of my chest and that all that would remain after Ian was gone would be an unbearably heavy black hole. Even as I felt this, I told myself how foolish I was being to make so much of a six-week separation. But that didn't diminish the real anguish in my whole being."

After what was a very painful early morning parting, Tanya went back to bed and prayed for a dream that would help her understand why she was so terribly upset, as if she might never see Ian again.

A group of us are having lunch in a lovely garden outdoors. Someone tells me that the "cowhorse" behind me is suffering terribly because he is having to eat a lamb. Without turning to look at the cowhorse, I say, "But he must eat lamb to survive. There is nothing intrinsically terrible about that. Though I guess it must be hard to actually do. Yet don't forget, the cowhorse must have been doing it all its life."

I then turn around to look at the part cow, part horse, animal which is in anguish at having to kill and eat a lamb that lies, nearly all eaten, on the ground. Someone says, "Yes, but this is the first time it has had to do it consciously'' (i.e., kill and skin the lamb instead of receiving it in a bowl from a can). Then the cowhorse and I tune into each other, recognizing that we share the same suffering--I from Ian's and my separation, and the cowhorse from its having to eat a little lamb to survive.

The cowhorse, mostly horse now, snuggles up to me and comforts me. The anguish leaves my heart completely. I begin to feel a new energy and sense of well-being. How wonderful! I awake, feeling healed of my sadness and with a sense of strength and energy I only now realize I have been missing for the past two years of my life.

By following through with my determination to survive without Ian for six weeks, I am eating the sheepish, overly dependent part of myself. It is hard, but if I am to survive as a whole person, there is no choice.

Even the confusion about the cowhorse makes sense. It is both a cow and a horse. The cow is like a gentle, receptive female, the horse an energetic male. I haven't been expressing both these sides of my being, because I didn't dare sacrifice the security of a sheeplike need to be secure and dependent.

Life should be more exciting than that. My cowhorse has tremendous energy, because it went ahead and ate the lamb. I am filled with that energy and realize that the last time I felt this way was before I became very attached to Ian. I feel really alive after not even realizing I have been giving up my sense of strength and independence for one of security.

I could not bear ever to give up so much of myself again. Now I see how I was executing myself.

What a price I've been willing to pay for security! I feel like a very different person this morning. Will Ian and I stay together? I don't know, but if not, I know we will both survive. I wasn't at all sure of that before now.

As things turned out, not only did Tanya find new strength and happiness during those six weeks apart, but Ian, to his great surprise, felt a great surge of strength and independence as well. When he returned from his trip, Ian and Tanya compared notes and discovered that they had been playing the same security-at-any-cost game, which had been draining them both of a lot of energy.

They tried to recreate their marriage on a new basis. Yet now more than ever, their temperamental differences were so marked that it soon became clear that they were mismatched. They divorced, and eventually each remarried. Ian found a partner who was more like him and who enjoyed the things he did without feeling she was giving up the chance to do something else more exciting in the name of compromise. Tanya married a man who enthusiastically shared many of her interests. Their relationship felt more like a merger than a compromise to her...

Her dream producer had to work to get the message across to her, but when she finally got it, she knew what to do with it.

EDITOR'S NOTE

Delaney spends a whole chapter exposing Senoi dreamwork as bogus, especially its teaching that you should fight and kill threatening figures in dreams. She'd rather have you talk with them. And I agree--generally.

But Tanya's cowhorse has to kill sheep to live, and this, as Tanya interprets it, doesn't mean she needs to ingest sheepishness, incorporate docility; it's not Jungian personality integration at all. The cowhorse must kill this timid side of her clinging to a bad marriage--or she'll starve.

Extreme? She's in extremis! Sometimes dialogue, compromise and delay are fatal. Ask Hamlet.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: Living Your Dreams by Gayle Delaney (1996 ed p.125-134, plus '81 ed. p.85-93).