For as long as we have laid our heads upon a pillow, we have woken with questions… What does it mean? Where did that come from? Am I insane? Can it get any stranger?

Sigmund Freud believed dreams revealed what waking life had pressed down… the unsaid, the unadmitted, the carefully folded-away desires of the heart. Carl Jung looked deeper still and wrote of symbols rising from a shared well… images older than the dreamer, shaped by archetype and ancient pattern: birds, houses, storms, thresholds, the long road and the locked door. Modern neuroscience, less given to metaphor yet no less curious, suggests that dreams help the brain process emotion, weave memory into meaning, and soften the sharp edges of unresolved strain. Across these varied disciplines; the couch, the study, the laboratory… one truth holds steady: dreams do not speak in the language of daylight. They speak in symbols and emotion.

And yet, beyond the universities and white-lit research halls, there has always been another understanding.

In spiritual traditions scattered across the world and across centuries, dreams have been interpreted as messages… from the soul, from the ancestors, from the divine, from the subtle layers of reality that waking life keeps… just beyond the threshold of perception. Ancient Mediterranean writers recorded revelatory dreams. Norse sagas speak of prophetic visions in sleep. Indigenous traditions continue to hold dreaming as sacred terrain. Whether one names the source unconscious integration or sacred communication, the approach required is much the same… Attention. Listening. A willingness to let the image stand before you and ask its quiet question.

There is no universal key that unlocks a dream. Meaning is not assigned; it’s revealed in relation to the life of the dreamer. Therefore, to look deeply at a dream, is not to consult a tidy dictionary of symbols. One must sit with the images honestly and ask what in one’s own life they mirror.

What I’m offering here is such an attempt… a personal reckoning with a dream that would not be dismissed.

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The Dream...

There are nights when sleep does not bring rest, but carries you somewhere else entirely… somewhere the world is lit by a bruised and peculiar light, the kind that gathers when the sky holds its breath before a storm.

I found myself outdoors, as though I had wandered from my own door into a wood I did not know and yet somehow recognized. The trees stood dark and heavy, their branches like the arms of old women bent in worry. The light was that of a storm at dusk… the rich, teal-coloured, swollen glow that warns of rain. The air was palpable carrying with it on the breeze something ancient, something waiting.

In this wood, or at its edge, there was a cage.

Inside it sat a bald eagle, a great bird of sovereignty and sky… and yet it was not fully formed, not fully itself. It was very large, and yet it wore a bit of the soft fuzz of a fledgling, that tender, unfinished down that says I am not yet what I shall be. And upon it (and here my heart faltered) upon its feathers there had begun to grow a coat of moss, green and creeping. The bird did not thrash against its bars. It simply was.

I opened the cage. No creature should be confined in such a manner.

The eagle stepped free, and as it did, it grew with the slow, certain spreading of something finding its proper size. It became vast, condor-vast, wings that could hold the wind of two counties. It spread those wings and I thought: now. Now it will rise. Yet it did not. It wandered instead into what had become, as dreams will insist upon, my own front yard. My fence. My familiar ground.

Then came the peacock.

Brilliant, vain, impossible thing, yet also bedraggled. It hopped onto the picket fence with the confidence of a creature that has never once doubted its right to be anywhere. It turned its bright eye upon the great mossy eagle and it pecked at it… impertinent.  My heart lurched. I nearly ran out to defend the eagle, to place myself between them as I have placed myself between harm and the things I love a hundred times without thinking.

But I stayed my feet.

Because I saw… truly saw…  that this was not cruelty. This was the language of creatures. This was the way of things between those who are learning whether they may trust one another. The eagle did not flinch as one wounded. The peacock did not strike as one who means to wound. And slowly, as I watched, something settled between them. A kind of ease. A kind of knowing. Two birds, wholly unlike, sharing the same grass, the same fence, the same strange twilight world.

I felt friendship forming like bread rising. Quiet. Inevitable.

As you well know, dreams shift without apology, so later, there was another cage beside the trees.  And in this one, a young woman. Dark of hair, brown of eye, beautiful in the way that certain things are beautiful which have been kept too long from light and air. She was thin…  the thinness that speaks only of deprivation. I let her out as I had let the eagle out, without any inkling other than knowing it was right.  And I carried, in that moment, a shame I could not name. Something old. Something that had been in me for aeons.

She was sweet. She was kind. She thanked me without words in the way some people do, with their eyes alone.

And then… she told me I looked larger than she remembered.

I heard myself say, quiet and small, that I knew I needed to lose some poundage. And she agreed. Gently, as though it were a simple and obvious thing.

I woke with the darkness, the brewing storm, and the dream resting on my chest like a stone in still water.

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What I Make of It, By Morning's Honest Light…

I am no scholar of the sleeping mind, and yet I think deeply on such things. I have lived long enough with my own heart to know when a dream is trying to tell me something. So let me sit with it plainly, and ponder as I will.

That brooding, pre-storm twilight… this is not difficult to read. It’s the light of a threshold. Of change that has not yet arrived but is certain to come. Scholars of the dream-world have said that stormy or dim outdoor landscapes often represent the dreamer's sense of standing at a crossroads, or of facing emotional weather that has been gathering for some time. I have felt this. There is something in my life that is shifting, that has not yet broken open.

The eagle is the heart of this dream, I think, and I must look at it carefully. The bald eagle speaks of freedom, of sovereignty… of power that is meant to soar. That it was caged tells me plainly enough that something in me, or in my life, has been confined. That it appeared to be a baby and yet was large… simultaneously young and vast… this is the image of a thing that contains more capacity than it has yet been allowed to express. Potential that has been arrested. The moss growing upon it is the most haunting detail: when living things are held still too long, other life begins to grow upon them. The world does not wait. If we do not move, we are moved upon.

And yet (and this matters) the eagle, when freed, did not fly away. It stayed near. It wandered the familiar yard. Dream interpreters note that the failure or refusal to fly, in a dream about a bird, often signals that freedom is desired but not yet fully accepted. That the dreamer may have released something but is not yet ready to let it soar entirely… or that the freed thing itself needs time to remember what it is.

The peacock arriving is a gift of meaning. The peacock in the long tradition of symbol and dream represents visibility, pride, self-expression… the courage to display one's colours without apology. That it interacted with the mossy, grounded eagle, prodding and engaging it, suggests that self-expression and suppressed potential are in dialogue within me. I nearly intervened, nearly protected one from the other. But I held back. And the result was not harm but companionship. This, I believe, is the dream telling me that aspects of myself I have kept separate; the quiet, earth-bound self and the bold, visible self… need not be in conflict. They can coexist. They may even become friends.

The young woman in the cage troubles me most, because she troubles me in the way that true things trouble us. She is thin to the point of suffering. She is beautiful. She is dark-eyed and kind. She is, I believe, some part of me… or some relationship I have with myself… that has been kept from what it needs.

The shame I felt was not hers to give me. It arrived the moment I saw her caged, before a single word passed between us. That is worth sitting with. In the tradition of depth psychology, shame felt upon freeing a captive figure speaks of guilt around having been complicit, however unwillingly, in a confinement. Not that I put her there. But perhaps that I did not open the door sooner. Perhaps that I have known, somewhere beneath knowing, that something in me has been held in too small a space and I have let it remain so, tending to other things, telling myself it could wait.

She was starved. And she told me I looked larger than she remembered.

This juxtaposition is, I think, the most pointed thing the dream offered me, and I must not look away from it. She who had been denied, who was all deprivation, all hollowness; looked upon me and named an excess. In the language of symbol, this is not simply about the body. It speaks to a relationship between two states of being: one that has been deprived of expression, nourishment, freedom… and one that has perhaps been filling itself, compensating, taking up space in other ways while the caged part went without. The thin and the overfed are not strangers in the dreaming mind; they are often two faces of the same imbalance. What has been starved, and what has been fed in its place?

That she said it kindly, and that I agreed without argument, and that we seemed on easy terms;  this suggests no war between these two selves, only an honest reckoning beginning. She was not cruel. She was merely clear. And perhaps the truest gift of her freedom was not only that she could breathe again, but that at last she could speak plainly to me; and I, at last, was ready to hear it without shattering.

What is being overfed while something else in me goes hungry? That is the question the dream leaves in my hands like a coal… warm, and asking to be held carefully.

I believe this dream is speaking of liberation and its complications. Of things in me… power, expression, some neglected interior life… that have been caged, that are beginning to stir free, that are not yet ready to fly but are finding their way about the yard. It is speaking of the guilt of a keeper who did not know she was keeping. And it is asking me, plainly, to look at the imbalance: what part of me has been locked away and thinned to almost nothing, and what has been filling the space where it ought to have lived?

The two cages in this dream are not separate stories. They are the same story, told twice. Something sovereign and sky-meant has been grounded. Something human and hungry has been confined. Both have been let out, now, into the stormy yard. Neither flies yet. But they are here. They are loose. They are beginning to find their footing.

The storm in the sky had not yet broken when I woke. But I think it will, soon enough. And I find, this morning, that I am not afraid of it. I am only sorry it took me this long to open the doors.