Request

Dream Power, should I go and see my father? It's taking me so long to get a divorce. Is it the old father-hurt making it take so long? Could I reconcile something if I went home to see my father?

Dream

I am getting on a motorcycle. My father is standing there saying, "You'll never make it. You'll never be able to ride a motorcycle." I get on and ride beautifully, hair blowing in the wind, and super control around curves and with high speeds. I enjoy it. I ride it and drive it well. I get off the motorcycle and my father is standing there saying, "See, I told you that you'd never be able to ride a motorcycle."

Notes

Transforming symbol: All the old hurt and anger is an extremely powerful energy source within me when transformed into a motorcycle--a symbol of energy, power, and creativity. The motorcycle has been a tremendously helpful transforming symbol in my decision to take my Ph.D...

After-Realization

My real father continues to be a super son-of-a-bitch. I went home on a Thanksgiving visit and he was totally punishing, name-calling, mean, and rejecting...

Remedy

Divorce Father! Try to remember what he would say if he could, and above all to remember that I can ride a motorcycle, whatever he says... if I have any more nonsense from this topdog, I shall get on my motorcycle and run him down--and run him down--and run him down--until he accepts and loves me, until I accept and love myself.

--Ann

On Transformative Symbols

In Jungian writings it seems as if the important dreams marking progress on the path of self-realization always involve sticks or swords emblazoned with ancient script, great trees standing in circular temple courtyards, mythic beasts rising lrom the ocean depths, doves descending on altars and suchlike, which has led many readers to conclude that unless their dreams are like this they must be relatively unimportant.

Nothing could be farther from the truth... most life-changing dream symbols are quite ordinary objects derived from everyday life, like Ann's motorcycle, and could be missed if the dreamer has been led to think that major dreams must contain traditional archetypal images.

Ann's motorcycle would lose rather than gain in significance by being treated as a modern version of an ancient symbol like a chariot, or Pegasus, the flying horse. To begin with, there was no real equivalent to the throbbing energy of the internal-combustion engine in earlier times, yet this is a very vivid symbol of a certain aspect of psychological energy, combining in a single image the swiftness of the horse, the roar of the bull, and the beat of the pulse, adding the further quality of thc motor vehicle itself, a product of human ingenuity and creativity that goes faster and packs more power than anything mankind knew in pretechnological days.

But it would be quite wrong to think that the symbol of the motorcycle carries a universal meaning, for it will always have its unique and personal meaning to the dreamer--in Ann's case, expressing her feeling of being in perfect control of her own "masculine drive."

--Ann Faraday

SOURCE: The Dream Game, Ann Faraday, Harper & Row, 1976 ed.; pp 292-4. Faraday's title.