In our weekly Mindful Dreams column, Aneta Baranek of the School of Metaphysics is offering free dream interpretations to The Mindful Word readers, as well as articles on dreams in general.
If you’ve ever been curious about deciphering the cryptic contents of your subconscious mind, here’s your chance! If you would like Aneta to interpret your dream, fill out this form. She will respond with your dream interpretation through this column, published every Thursday. Aneta would love to receive more comments for the dreams interpreted. If you can relate to a dream posted here or have any insights to add, you can post them as comments to the interpretation, or email her at aneta@themindfulword.org.
DREAM
Hi Aneta,
I moved to Seattle from Chicago for five years during my early twenties and loved it so much. However, I moved to Arizona for a relationship about six years ago and have had a recurring dream every few months for much of that time.
In it, I still live in Arizona, but find myself visiting Seattle. Upon arriving, I realize that I still have the keys to the first (and favourite) apartment I lived in by myself. Each time, I visit the apartment and see that it holds some of my long-forgotten belongings in varying states of moving out that had simply stopped at some point.
I feel a sense of nostalgia, longing, guilt and confusion about why I still have the keys, whether I’ve been paying rent on this apartment without realizing it, or if I haven’t been paying and therefore shouldn’t still have access to it.
I also feel anxious about living so far away from what appears to still be my residence, and realizing that I’ve been abandoning the upkeep of the apartment and my belongings. The dream is familiar enough by now that I go right into it knowing I’ll find my keys, which provides an excitement that I’ll have a place to stay during my trip, but I still feel all of those other conflicted emotions that never get resolved.
I particularly had these dreams while splitting my time between my current boyfriend’s house and my apartment in Arizona, so figured the dream could apply to my actual home that I wasn’t spending a lot of time in. But the dreams started before we met, and have continued since moving in together, so I’ve been trying to understand what they could mean?
sveiks17
DREAMER: Female, 35, U.S.
MAIN SYMBOLS:
Apartment – dreamer’s state of mind
Key – a tool to “unlock” an understanding or a different perspective
Belongings – items that hold value to dreamer
INTERPRETATION
Hello sveiks17,
Thank you for sharing your dream! It’s a very apt example of a dream where emotions come to the forefront. Oftentimes during waking life we might not be fully present to all the emotional states that we experience. Dreams allow us to see more clearly and fully the spectrum of emotions that we go through during our waking time.
Your dream is not really about a physical state of being (Seattle), but rather about a mental state of being that you experienced while living in your apartment in Seattle. There was an attitude of being that you fostered back then and this is what the dream is calling your attention to (as you said you loved living there in your twenties).
Finding the keys in your dream signifies that you do have access to a tool that unlocks that “past” state of being where you experienced much contentment.
I would be interested to find out what exactly are those belongings that are in the apartment. Are those clothes or pots and pans? This would give us more details as to what to focus on with regard to that past state of being: clothes would relate to your expression and pots and pans to processing of knowledge. This is to illustrate how seemingly small details in a dream provide significant guidance to the dreamer.
APPLICATION
If it were my dream, I would take some time to reflect on what was happening within me back in Seattle. Your dream is giving you guidance to unlock (keys) those attitudes, this way of being. This might be related to being hopeful and experiencing a sense of exploration since you moved there when you were in your twenties. Whatever occurred back then is what you can still return to right now and it is not through moving back to Seattle, but accessing the state of mind, the attitudes, from back when you were living there.
Through the emotional states present in the dream your Higher Self is directing you towards the need to revisit and reconnect with your mindset from the past. There’s a need to incorporate that state of mind into your present. Nothing is permanently lost or abandoned. You can revisit the ways of being from that time and incorporate those into your current way of life in Arizona.
I would suggest you journal about your experiences and thoughts when you were living in Seattle. What were your plans and dreams? How were you approaching life back then? Answers to these and similar questions will give you clues as to what your mental attitudes back then would benefit you in the now.
May your dreams illuminate the inner you…
