Last week I dreamed I was working in the manor house of an old estate with several outbuildings on many acres. My coworkers were the same crowd I worked with in the corporate communications department of a Fortune 500 electric utility, and our offices were situated on the second floor, as they were in waking life.
In the dream, I need a cup of coffee, but I have to go to the basement for it. Once there, I discover the coffeemaker is missing. I locate it high on a warehouse-type shelf and find someone with a ladder to retrieve it for me. When I plug it in, I find the filter basket is missing. When I locate that, I then discover the carafe is missing. And so on and so on. I see our department head lurking about and determine he’s playing a practical joke on me.
Still without java, I return upstairs and tell my coworkers what happened and that the boss is teasing me, I think, but I don’t know if that means he likes me or doesn’t. One of my coworkers says, “Maybe, but it seems like a kind of rape to me.”
Hmmm…
Still in search of coffee, I wander the estate and a nearby village. It’s pitch-black out by now, and I make a wrong turn and get lost. I stumble down a path and eventually meet up with a woman near what appears to be an athletic field. I’m extremely tired at this point, and my back is aching. The woman offers me a scooter of sorts. It’s shaped like a box and has a steering mechanism on the side. I sit down on it and take off. Everything is up hill, but I keep plowing ahead. I finally get to the manor house, but I can’t remember which of three doors to go in.
Then I’m lying on my back in pitch blackness, staring up at the night sky until constellations appear. It takes me a while to realize I have REALLY woke up and am staring at my bedroom ceiling. The starlight fades.
Where’s Jung when you need him?
A couple decades ago, I invested three years working with a Jungian analyst to understand what my dreams were trying to tell me. I was building an inner counselor–a “Jung inside me,” so to speak. So you see, Jung is here, right where I need him.
The analysis taught me to sit with the dream for a while and note any feelings it conjured. The first thing I felt about this dream was that it reminded me of the opening passage from Dante’s Divine Comedy:
In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell what a wild, and rough, and stubborn wood this was, which in my thought renews the fear!
This strikes me as curiously absurd, since during analysis I dreamed something similar but in reverse. That dream began in the dark wood–in a valley, actually–and I emerged into an office building. My recent dream began in the office, then went out into the dark woods, then returned to the office. And then the kicker: I couldn’t figure out how to get inside.
It was my own, personal “Divine Comedy,” with the emphasis on “comedy.”
Remember, everyone is me
That’s one of the first lessons of breaking down dreams. All the characters in a dream are likely aspects of one’s self. So “the boss” in my dream is, I think, an inner trickster figure. But how are his tricks like a rape, as “coworker-me” said?
Jung suggests the etymology of a word is like the unconscious unlived life in a person, so look back to where a word comes from and its original meaning for dream insight. The word rape derives from the Latin rapere, which meant “to snatch, to grab, or to carry off,” in the way that the early Romans carried off, or stole, the Sabine women to become their wives.
So my thinking here is that my inner trickster–“the boss”–snatches away my confidence when facing some new task and I become asleep to my own potential. Interestingly, I recently HAD taken on a new task, and I felt at turns overwhelmed by it, even though it involved things I’d handled with ease in my long career in public relations.
I was tapped late in the game to chair publicity for a major annual garden club event. The previous chair called it quits after 10 years in which the event grew to attract more than 70 vendors and 1,500 attendees. Someone volunteered to replace her, then backed out. Publicity planning should have started in October 2024, but I wasn’t brought in until the last week of January 2025 to plan for a May 2025 event.
I feel this task is what the dream referred to because the setting involved my real coworkers from a previous public relations job, and that’s certainly what I agreed to do for the garden club event.
The prior publicity chair, thankfully, kept great records of media contacts and a schedule of what to do when. I needed to write an event listing and a press release for print/electronic publications and public service announcements for radio, then distribute all.
Piece of cake!
But I also had to work with the communications coordinator at the county extension office to produce a flyer, speaker bios and other support signage for display cases, as well as signage at the event itself. Some of this has been confusing since I got several different stories from different folks as to what I was actually supposed to provide.
In waking life, it’s working itself out but at times has seemed very much an “up-hill” battle. Like the dream-me, I just keep chugging along.
After all, facing the closed doors to the manor house wasn’t the end of the dream.
This was…
The day after I had this dream I saw this photo in New Scientist of the newly discovered, largest known structure in the universe. It’s 1.4 billion light years across and contains nearly 70 galactic superclusters, making it hundreds of thousand of times more massive than a single galaxy, such as the Milky Way of which we are a part.
It looks a LOT like what I saw in my dream on my bedroom ceiling.
Dreaming about constellations and the night sky may symbolize a search for guidance, direction or a deeper understanding of life’s path. But it also shows there’s a plan and everything is connected. In my waking-life case, the task I faced seemed enormous, but I found that seeing this in my dream comforted me. I saw the image telling me there is much more ahead for me, and it’s all part of a larger plan.
And then there’s the Incas
Hans Böhringer at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, Germany, who with his colleagues discovered the cosmic superstructure, named it “Quipu” because it reminded him of an Incan counting system made from knotted rope, examples of which Böhringer saw in a Chilean museum.
Instead of paper, stone, wood or any known form of writing, Incas used woven cords with branching structures and knots. The number of cords found in individual quipus varies from a few dozen to several hundred.
Add to that variations in materials used, textures, thickness, color and knots and you begin to understand its capacity for storing diverse data. The problem is, no one today knows how to read what’s recorded therein.
Our best guess is quipus were largely used to record numerical data–inventories, crops planted, crops harvested, a leader’s reign, civil and military structure, family lineage and such.
Some theorize actual language may have been recorded in them and they could have been used for correspondence. Modern-day Incan communities still preserve sacred quipus, which are said to hold vital information concerning its history. Anthropologists call them a “three-dimensional script,” the only script ever to require the engagement of two senses simultaneously.
Don’t forget the scooter!
My dream scooter was crude in design but amazingly reliable. Boxy in shape, it reminded me a bit–given the waking-life nature of my challenge–to a motorized garden cart. Though the path was steeply up hill, it chugged away, never faltering. (I wish I had such a garden scooter in waking-life that could zip around my yard!)
Riding a scooter in a dream signifies a sense of adventure and a willingness to explore new opportunities. It encourages the dreamer to take risks and trust in her abilities to overcome obstacles.
The galactic Quipu is experiencing obstacles too, among scientists who say structures like it seem to violate the cosmological principle that at very large distances the universe should appear to spread out evenly in every direction. These clump together in uneven ways.
Don’t ask me what any of THAT means. But what Böhringer said in response makes sense in terms of my dream. “Making observations in a too small part of the universe…can be misleading.”
Summing up…
So I’m hearing my dream tell me to keep a bigger picture in mind, to not let my limited view trick me. The reality of the garden club is intricate and interwoven, like the Incan quipus, like the galactic Quipu. There’s a hidden script. Look to history as well as to the future.
After sitting with the dream for several days and analyzing its symbols, I was left with a sense of lightness and a reminder to live my life to the fullest. I’m going to let that scooter take me where it wants to go!
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- A synchronicity of connection of life events you’ve experienced
- A particularly compelling dream you had and what you think it meant
& {sometimes} WHY 
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