Tag: feet | In your dreams …

Best excuses

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

“Sorry I’m late, Miss. The budgie died.”

That’s the second best excuse I remember a student giving me when I was a high school teacher many years ago. I taught biology and general science for two years, which makes the best excuse I ever received quite interesting:

“Please excuse Mark for missing his lesson this week. He sprained his tendril.”

It was hard to keep a straight face when I read Mark’s Mum’s note, but I did. Mark hobbled a bit getting to his seat, whether for real or for show, so I’m guessing his Achilles tendon was the tendril in question.

I didn’t receive a note when another student missed classes for a few weeks because he was in court, accused of shooting his mate in the neck. Fortunately for his mate, the bullet just grazed the surface, destroying a butterfly tattoo but leaving the spinal cord and windpipe intact. The mate had wronged my student’s girlfriend in some way. “I went home and got my Dad’s gun and aimed at his heart,” my student reportedly said in court.

So much for my biology lessons then.

So much for my biology lessons then. Though no doubt my student felt his heart was very much in his throat that day.

This all came to mind when a dream client alerted me to The great Aussie sickie rort, a segment on A Current Affair (Australian television, Channel 9) this week. A sickie is Australian (Aussie) for a sick day off work, for which you sometimes need a medical certificate from a doctor stating that you are indeed sick and not fit for work that day. The segment claimed that Australians take more sick days off work than any other country in the world, and that people who are not genuinely sick – who just want a day off – often get certificates from doctors who sidestep their professional ethics in these circumstances.

Is “I had a bad dream last night” a valid excuse to take a day off work?

The segment showed journalists fitted out with hidden cameras fronting up to a number of doctors, asking for a medical certificate for a sickie. In some cases they said they were perfectly healthy and just wanted a day off. In other cases they gave what they regarded as lame excuses. One was, “I had a bad dream last night”. (Apart from one doctor who said it was unethical and that his practice would be at risk, the others all gave certificates.)

I’m not saying that having a bad dream is a valid excuse to take a sickie the next day, although a bad dream can be extremely distressing until you understand why you had it and how this insight can help you.

Dreams, once understood, help us to see beneath the surface excuses we often rely on to save us from facing our fears or accepting life’s invitations to evolve.

What excuses do you hear yourself give, either in speaking aloud to others, or in that tiny voice at the back of your mind?

What excuses do you hear yourself give, either in speaking aloud to others, or in that tiny voice at the back of your mind that says, “I can’t do that because ….”?

Make a list of your excuses – those you know about and those you notice over the next few days.

Then look to your dreams for deeper insight.

What lies beneath your excuses?

How can this deeper insight free you to move forward – with no excuses?

PS Kindle news

Kindle! I’ve launched my first Kindle ebook today! For all of you who have been asking for Kindle. More to come.

I’m delighted to announced my launch into Kindle.

So for those of you who have been asking for kindle editions of my ebooks, we started today with How to stop bad dreams and nightmares which you can purchase from Amazon here.

The rest will follow!

Consultation services

The goat and the cobweb

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

Here’s a puzzle. What’s the connection between a cobweb and a goat? If you’re already searching for an answer, you’re in the right frame of mind for interpreting a dream. I’ll give you some more clues:

Sandra phoned Loretta & Moyd’s Afternoon Show on Radio 4BC this afternoon to ask me about her dream featuring – you’ve got it – a cobweb and a goat. In her dream, she was going somewhere with her husband when she suddenly had to get a cab and go back home. In the cab, she looked down and saw that her feet were covered in cobwebs. She looked again, and saw an adorable little goat, sitting at her feet, with a blister on his nose. What does Sandra’s dream mean?

I’ll refine the puzzle: What’s the connection between feet covered in cobwebs, and a goat?

In case you’re not there yet, I’ll come at it from another angle:

What’s the connection between Sandra having her journey cut short (having to return home), and a goat?

Most dreams have a repeating theme, and if you can identify this, you’ve got a good starting point for interpretation. Since Sandra’s goat was adorable, it was most likely a pet goat, and pet goats are usually tethered to keep them close to home. Sandra’s feet were kind of tethered by the cobwebs or, at least, she must have walked through a potentially trapping spider’s web to have cobwebs clinging to her feet.

What’s the connection between a cobweb and a goat?

At first I thought Sandra’s cobwebs suggested she’d been standing still for too long in one place (metaphorically), long enough to gather cobwebs, and though this may also be true, the dream shows Sandra’s journey cut short by the need to take a cab home, as if she can only get so far because she’s tethered.

In the very short time that we have on radio to interpret a dream, and without being able to clarify aspects of the dream with the caller, looking for out-of-the-box connections that repeat in a dream can shine a light on the dreamer’s situation. At the time of her dream, Sandra probably felt restricted or tethered, especially around her direction. In the dream, her journey was cut short, so there’s a sense that she has direction – she knows where she wants to go – but she’s not getting there.

When goats aren’t tethered, they roam free and far. Goats can climb mountains and follow paths other animals, and humans, find difficult. Goats can journey a long way on very little. Sandra’s dreaming mind chose the symbol of a goat, no doubt because she does know, deep down, that she is capable of reaching her goal. (Is this word play, a tethered goal a dream goat?) So what’s holding her back?

What happens when you instinctively follow your nose?

Could it have anything to do with the blister on the goat’s nose? I wonder if Sandra had the feeling, in the day or two before her dream, that she had poked her nose into something she shouldn’t have. Or that she’d followed her intuition (followed her nose) and got burnt, either recently, or in the past, and this experience has held her back from setting out again.

What would you set as a dream alchemy practice here? I’d suggest the following visualisation if Sandra would like to achieve the goal she identifies with this dream: Sandra, see the blister on the goat’s nose vanishing, then look down to see the cobwebs gone and feel a wonderful, warm, dancing sensation seeping into your feet. Open the car door and dance wherever you wish, led by the adorable goat, sniffing the wind, following his nose which happens to lead you both to exactly where you’d like to be (picture where you’d like to be).

As with all dream alchemy, as we rewrite the story using our personal dream symbols, we simultaneously rewrite our unconscious mindset around the issue and the waking life outcome.

Consultation services

Dream interpretation: Black ants

Posted on November 30, 2010 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

Pete dreamed of hundreds of black ants streaming out from a hole in his foot. What do you think it means? He posted his dream to last week’s one day dream forum, run by Brisbane Times. I thought you’d enjoy this one:

Pete’s dream:

I was sitting on a log and then out of the blue, my foot was bitten. I didn’t know by what at first but eventually realised that it was a black ant. This black ant turned into hundreds but the initial bite opened up a hole in the middle of my foot and all the ants then came out of the hole.

My reply:

What do you see as the personality of a black ant? Symbols are always personal, so your response aids accuracy. Your dream paints a picture of an ant as insidious: one little apparently harmless insignificant ant suddenly turns into a mass of ants capable of damage. We see a couple of ants in the kitchen one moment, and there’s a massive invasion the next. Your dream suggests that something came ‘out of the blue’ (in the day or two before your dream) and suddenly turned into a problem.

If you see ants as busy, then busyness may have been the root cause; if you see ants as working for the community, then it may have been a community issue that suddenly erupted.

The foot symbolises contact with the ground, or perhaps your standing in life, how you move forward.

The foot symbolises contact with the ground, or perhaps your standing in life, so you perceive this issue as affecting your standing. It’s as if you feel undermined, as if it’s painful to stand the old ground.

I like the fact that the ants were released from your foot, as this suggests that something has ‘opened up’ within you as a result. It’s an opportunity to release an energy you associate with black ants, an energy that has insidiously been growing within you. Now that it’s out in the open, you can heal and move forward.

Read the other dreams posted on the forum, and my replies here.

Consultation services

Dream interpretation results: Suzanne’s news, episode 45

Posted on July 26, 2010 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

Suzanne had dreamed of a prickly cactus obstructing her way in her dream.

Here’s an update from Suzanne, my guest on podcast episode 45, The Dream Show.

Suzanne had dreamed of a prickly cactus obstructing her way in her dream. There was mud to one side, rocks to the other, and no shoes to protect her feet. We discussed her dream on the podcast. Suzanne now reports:

“At the time of the dream, a team mate at work was as prickly as a cactus, a real impediment to our progress, just like the cactus in the dream. Our work path felt prickly, muddy, rotting, murky, stormy and unclear.

He’s since left the team! It’s a 180 degree difference, and I learned after he left that he made EVERYONE on the team feel like we weren’t good enough.”

When you do alchemy, things shift, and for Suzanne, the energy at work shifted and the prickly team mate left.

When you do alchemy, things shift, and for Suzanne, the energy at work shifted – as well as the team mate. When your inner world shifts, your outer world reflects the change. I have often witnessed clients (and podcast guests) experiencing changes in personnel and team structures at work when they do alchemy.

As we become more conscious of challenges and conflicts they begin to resolve at a subtle level and everyone moves on. Back to Suzanne:

“I’m realizing, as you said in the podcast, that my being barefoot in the dream was a good thing. (I had thought it was a mistake – that I just needed better protective footwear.) You said that being barefoot was grounding, and I didn’t realize it but I was really in tune with something going on with this team mate, and it was when I was listening to the podcast again that all this fell into place.

Work had just stunk and I guess I didn’t want to admit to myself that it was so bad. Now that he’s gone and other people have talked about how good it was that he left, I can see it better. And now I can see so many little symbols in the dream that related to the ambivalence, impediment, and sorrow.

“What you said in the podcast about emotional debt – that someone does you a kindness and you end up paying a hundred times more – and how this is related to having no boundaries, well, the team is working directly on setting boundaries, knowing our worth and acting in accord with that.”

What you said in the podcast about emotional debt – that someone does you a kindness and you end up paying a hundred times more – and how this is related to having no boundaries, well, the team is working directly on setting boundaries, knowing our worth and acting in accord with that.

In the podcast we also talked about my ex. Well, he was not only not rigid like my father, but he was also muddy and ambivalent. I wasn’t sure if he really loved me or not. I never really knew where I stood with him. The same went for my cactus team mate.”

Now that Suzanne can see the similarities between her ex and her team mate, she is clearer about the way she used to respond around these energies, and is now freed to respond differently. As Suzanne put it:

“I was going about life at work feeling inadequate – like I did with the ex – basically paddling myself with the cactus paddles all the time because I was never good enough.”

In a recent dream, Suzanne found herself back in the same location as the cactus dream, but with positive changes, reflecting her progress with her alchemy:

“In the new dream I was up a level, in a stone room with a great view. I know I’m not at the final destination, but it’s better! And although I haven’t taken off yet in the plane (like my alchemy), I can really feel it’s possible and coming. I now know I’m just fine and worthy of a first class seat.”

You can listen to the original episode in which Suzanne and I discuss her dream here.

Consultation services

Back seat driver

Posted on April 15, 2010 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 0 Comments

He was driving the bus from a back seat

Some dreams are just meant to be shared, and here’s one with a universal message. One of my regular clients brought this dream to me for interpretation and alchemy, and kindly offered it to share with you all on this blog.

He dreamed he was a passenger on a gigantic bus, sitting near the back with his feet perched on a heavy metal bar. Suddenly he realised he wasn’t a passenger at all, he was the driver, driving the bus by pushing down on the bar with his feet. The mechanism was cumbersome, and he had to put a lot of pressure on the bar to keep the bus moving. He was too far back from the windscreen to see where he was heading, but he felt comfortably in control of the huge vehicle and knew he was driving safely. But to where?

Here’s the bottom line:

A dream with a universal message

The bar in the dream represented an obstacle (bar) in his life, and that obstacle had become the driving force of his life. He had lost touch with his vision, his plan for where he was heading (he was too far from the windscreen in the dream). Instead of making decisions based on his vision, he was making decisions based on the obstacle. By paying attention to the obstacle, applying pressure, keeping it under control, he ensured his safety and was able to keep things trundling along in a comfortable, if cumbersome, way.

But to where? We agreed he needed to get back in touch with his vision, otherwise he’d end up wherever ‘staying safe and in control’ was taking him.

Of course, we dug a little deeper. Everything in a dream represents something about the dreamer, so that bar represented a belief manifesting as an obstacle, and we did the work to explore and transform that belief. See? The way to deal effectively with what seems like an obstacle in life is to understand it, get new perspective on it, and transform it into a more helpful belief.

Are you being driven by what you see as the obstacles in your life, or are you driven by a vision of where you want to be?

Consultation services

Watch your feet

Posted on October 23, 2009 by Jane Teresa Anderson • 1 Comment

The path

“Just watch where you’re walking when you come home,” Kit said, “the dog does her business all over the lawn, so watch your feet.”

We’re looking after Kit’s dog and house while she’s on holiday for a few weeks. Much as we love living in the city, we’re enjoying the opportunity to live closer to the sea, and working so much online, we can do this easily.

If you’ve listened to the last two podcasts, you’ll have heard the dog snuffle, snort and woof her way into the recording. We promised to stick with her routine, so she also sleeps by our bed, snoring throughout the night.

Routines. How many routines do you go through, stick with, live by, each day?

Looking after someone else’s home – and dog – means changing routines, questioning the way you habitually do things, finding new ways.

Which brings me back to the poo-laden lawn. For three weeks we did exactly as we had been instructed. Whenever we came home, we parked the car, opened the garden gate, and stepped gingerly across the lawn. We put a torch in the car to help when we came back after dark. No matter how often we cleared up behind the dog, she randomly and abundantly deposited her little piles of poo to welcome us home.

We were so focussed on carrying out Kit’s instructions to the letter – following her lawn-tiptoeing routine every time we came home – that it was only yesterday that I saw the light: right by the car parking place there’s a little fence, so small that all we have to do is step over it onto the nice, clean, poo-clear brick pathway that leads all the way to the front door. No lawn, no watching our feet, no poo worries.

How easy is that?! The moral of this waking life story? We follow routines and focus on daily habits for the strangest reasons, many of which leave us blind to an easier way. Far from making our lives easier, routines can complicate matters, leading us the long way through … well, I’ll leave you to contemplate the metaphors while we enjoy more of that lovely sea air.

Consultation services

Tag Archives: feet

Best excuses

Related articles you might enjoy

The goat and the cobweb

Related articles you might enjoy

Dream interpretation: Black ants

Related articles you might enjoy

Dream interpretation results: Suzanne’s news, episode 45

Related articles you might enjoy

Back seat driver

Related articles you might enjoy

Watch your feet

Related articles you might enjoy