Daily so many images float across my awareness I find the process of picking one for the purpose of dream seeding difficult. Rather than worry about finding one, I scroll through a few social media feeds and simply pick one. Recently I chose a post from @sophiacycles to seed my dream. The post from 11/13 reads: "Psychologically, the symbol of the flower...points to a spirituality which is far removed from ego consciousness. As a symbol it is the birthplace of the inner realization of the divinity, as the Eastern symbol of the lotus proves." A quote by M.L. von Franz.
With the image of the flower in mind, I commented: "Flower...color, fragile, silky, fragrant, gift, nature, spring, emergent, seed, bee, wilt, temporary, Narcissus."
I hardly had much time to reflect further on the image of the flower, nor look for additional symbolism. Instead, my psyche took over and that night I had the following dream:
"I was in a shop getting things repaired. The shop keeper showed me a souvenir I had repaired. It was polished and the words on it were much clearly although they were backwards. After a while of looking around a woman and I left and drove out the back of the shop and drove down hill. At the bottom of the hill the woman was eating and asked me to take over driving the car. The steering wheel then appeared in front of me and I began to drive back up the hill to the shop. I steered slowly as the woman driver pressed on the gas and brake pedals. When we got back up to the shop we drove through and hit a planter of flowers. We stopped to pick it up and return it to its position."
From the Book of Symbols, flowers evoke the psychological concepts of renewal, transition, sensuality and sexuality (think Georgia O'Keefe), and can be seen as a bridge between the manifest and unseen world. Archetypally, the flower as symbol connects to larger themes of prima materia - the core essence of our being - and the synthesis of four elements, as well as a beginning and ending point of the archetype of the way.
I only remembered about 50% of this dream. I wanted to remember more. I was lucid during most of it, but I was not making choices. I didn't recognize the flower shop until I returned and remembered that I had seeded the flower. Considering the seed and the circuitous path down, then back up to the flower shop, this dream reflected an unconscious roadmap of my path towards lucid dreaming.
As I work with the image of the flower and the dream, I feel the powerful incarnation in playful juxtaposition too often incongruent, twisted and fragile turns of life. To drive in this dream back to the flower shop, I am reminded of the beauty of all that is evanescent and transformative.
