I approached my dreamwork session today with some fear and trepidation. I had a recent dream that has been very disturbing to think about and I really couldn’t find it’s meaning myself. In the dream a doctor ordered a lobotomy for me. There was no arguing with this authority in the dream, his word was it. I’m having a lobotomy. Two friends tried to help me get in and out of the hospital in an effort to fake out the staff so that I can pretend that I have it while actually avoiding it. The whole hospital seems enormously busy and impervious to me, so I think I’m getting by with it. Somehow though I get injected in the center of my forehead with an orange liquidy substance. I don’t see or experience it happening in the dream. I just know it happened and can see it from the inside.

This winter has been making me feel like I’m losing my mind, so I wondered if the dream was a final diagnosis. The mind is gone. She lost it. She used to be a nice, kind of smart girl, but look what’s left. What a pity (a phrase my Mom used to use.) A very, very pity (a phrase my baby daughter used to use imitating her Grandma.)

My friend was brilliant in helping with the dream however. Like a good doctor, he probed me with question after question until we hit on the spots where we could detect meaning. As it came out, I realized the doctor is Old Man Winter. He’s the authority, one that cannot be argued with. He and his staff are busy and apparently impervious to me. On his orders my vision is changed, an old way of seeing the world is removed. The orange liquid was the best part of the dream. When my dreamworker friend asked me about it I described it as the bright orange color of fire, but it was cool. Cool liquid fire. The center of my forehead was injected with this very vital color and substance, and now I’ll never see the world the same again.

I really thought my friend was genius when he picked up on who the two friends were who were trying to help me fake out the staff. Just yesterday I was working on an article in which I discuss Carl Jung’s Answer to Job. My friend had no idea of this, of course, but said that the two dream friends reminded him of Job’s friends. In Job’s story he has two friends who try to be helpful but actually end up just interfering with the larger plan and are useless. It is such an archetypal story. Suddenly I am reminded also of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and how basically useless they are to Hamlet also.

I never thought I might imagine a lobotomy as a good thing, even in a dream. I am so relieved. I love dreams.