a funny dream I had

[AccuTron]

True story, just for fun.  

Decades ago, before internet or cell phones.  

This is a dream I had while living in rural eastern USA mountains:

 

The dream:

 

I have a friend I’ll call John.  John is going on a long trip overseas, and wants to rent his house while he’s gone, a pleasant white wooden structure of a type common to the area.  

 

He doesn’t get anyone before he needs to leave, and asks me to stay at the house and take any telephone calls about rental.  John placed an ad in the newspaper telling about the house, how it was in lovely hilly surrounding, and “a good place for a personal retreat.”

 

One day a man calls.  He asks if this is the house for a personal retreat.  I say yes and further explain how lovely it is, and comment that not far away is a cemetery with splendid views.  The caller exclaims “Cemetery!  Heck, I wanted a retreat, not a surrender!”

 

End of dream.

[villagewisdom]

Hi, I'll give it a go. Since it was long ago, the information is not really relevant to today but interpretation is fun for me. 

 

The people in the dream are aspects of your own personality. You in the dream would be the one you most closely identify with or are most aware of in your daily activities. Going overseas would represent initiating life experiences that are foreign to you. Exploring and learning about you and your world. The house represents your mind. The newspaper and telephone represent communication. The cemetery would represent previous ideas you had about yourself that were put to rest so to speak. They are dead people or aspects of yourself you no longer use. Things you've known and learned about yourself and then changed. 

 

So to put it all together I might say something like this. At the point in your life that you had this dream, you were looking to expand your horizons and learn new stuff. That is the traveling overseas. The advertisement of your house or "mind" represents you communicating to others about yourself and looking to add new ideas about yourself -- looking for new aspects of yourself to occupy your mind. They become part of your mind or how you identify yourself. Your previous experiences have produced changes as you learned and grew -- the cemetery.

 

What was holding you up at that time was the idea that you actually have changed and desire change. I say this because the idea of the retreat would have allowed you to be introspective and at peace with yourself and to examine your thought processes and how you think about yourself, but there would be no change in that. You would emerge refreshed but unchanged. The cemetery offers the perspective or view of how you have changed or might consciously initiate change and appreciate change. The cemetery view offers perspective of how you were, where you have come from. 

 

What do you think?

[AccuTron]

Hmm.  Never thought of any of that, but wouldn't have known to at the time.  I just laughed in my sleep at the joke.  And cemeteries were part of the local landscape so I didn't really notice anything special.  But you're probably right on all of it.  Now I can look back and see all that.