I seem to recall somewhere reading that Carl Jung kept a notepad on his night table to record his dreams each morning. I recently have tried to make notes on some of mine—don’t know why because, unlike Jung, I can’t make any sense of any of them. Besides that I usually don’t get around to recording them until I can no longer remember what they were about. That’s the strange part about dreams. I can lie in bed and seem to totally recount the events of a dream but a very short time later can only remember that I had a dream, not remembering a single thing about it or even what I went over while lying there. That is why this morning I decided to go straight to the computer before I lost this one.
It seems that on a photoshoot I had taken two very different series of photographs. The first series were very bright and colorful. If it is possible to still use the word in it's original context--they were very light hearted and gay. I was very pleased with the photographs and had enlarged several of them to show. They were photographs that made me feel very good, very happy, very pleased. However, the second set of photographs was dark and moody. It seemed that both sets of photographs were very abstract not really depicting anything recognizable. The first seemed to be more splotches of bright, cheerful, diffused colors and the second were mostly more distinct shapes, lines and circles of dull colors against a very dark background. I could not say what had been in front of the camera on either set; only that I had shot both sets on the same photoshoot, the same day. I think I wondered why I had taken the second set and could not see anything of any value in the photographs.
Then, in the dream this morning, I dreamed that I had a dream about the photographs. I dreamed that the second set of photographs were not actually taken by me but were taken by a person that was a gardener. Even though I recall seeing the image of the gardener I could not tell you if the person was a man or a woman. What I recall mostly was the overalls, and the torn, wide brimmed straw hat that the gardener wore. I only saw the gardener from behind so I do not know that I ever saw the gardener’s face. What was special about this gardener was that he/she couldn’t walk. All the gardening was being done by crawling around the garden on his/her stomach. The gardener did not feel put upon because he/she couldn’t travel around the garden more easily. Actually, the gardener seemed a very happy, very content person; enjoying very much what he/she was doing. I also recall that the gardener was a very pleasant person to be around. I felt very good being with the gardener and I when I was I seemed to see everything from the gardeners perspective.
I do not know why the photographs at first were mine and then became the photographs of the gardener but by making that change made a considerable difference in how I felt about the photographs. For some reason I no longer saw the second series as dull and even depressing. They were still dark and moody but now in a very beautiful way. My feelings about the two sets of images did a reversal. What was in the second set of photographs was what the gardener was crawling about the ground creating and enjoying so much. I was aware that the gardener never saw an overall view or the garden, the landscaping, the flowers, the things we generally accept as beautiful about a garden. All the gardener saw was the stems, the soil, the dark shadowed passages beneath the spreading plants. I remember in the dream seeing the garden from that perspective and somehow realizing that there was none of the color that is associated with a garden of flowers but that there was something very special, even up lifting, about seeing it from the perspective of the gardener. I don’t know that I knew what was special about it, only knowing that it was special.
I greatly enjoy my dreams. I do not know if there are, as Jung believed, messages in dreams. If there are I’m not intelligent enough to figure them out. If Jung was correct I most likely should not be posting them to the Internet. When I wake, I frequently will lay there going over the scenario in my head wondering how I seem to put such visions together, and why. For many years I had horrendous nightmares. I loved them. I would partially wake up and rewrite the scenario, doze off to the same nightmare, partially wake and rewrite again—trying to affect the ending, to make it more palatable, less devastating. I seemed to do this over and over all during the night. I seldom have nightmares anymore and actually I miss them. Although it really doesn’t matter as long as the dreams I have are still interestingly baffling and they are. I still dream a lot about Janet but probably not as often as I dream about Elizabeth. And I say I still don’t have nightmares?
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