A sense of balance

An eternity ago, when I was in my late teens, I had a recurring dream where I struggled to walk through the university campus.

It wasn’t one of those glue feet dreams, the ones where your feet are heavy or stuck to the road, or you feel like you’re walking through treacle. I had that recurring dream too.

The reason walking was such a struggle in my late-teens dream was because I wore a flat shoe on one foot, and a stiletto on the other. It never occurred to me to take the stiletto off in the dream, or to take both shoes off and walk barefoot. I struggled on regardless.

Looking back through the blur of time, I think I related the uneven limping gait in my dream to an accident I had when I was eleven. I had fallen from a fence and injured my hip and knee. As a young student scientist, I wondered whether the dream was picking up on a tiny imbalance between my hips or legs, something imperceptible to me in waking life, but amplified in my dream.

I know now that dreams can reflect physical imbalances or sicknesses. Signs and symptoms we might not notice – or choose to ignore – are registered by our unconscious mind and may be processed in our dreams.

Did my dream highlight a postural imbalance, or was there more to the story?

Reflecting on my teenage dream with the double blessing of hindsight and my professional experience as a dream analyst, I see the imbalance not so much as between my hips or knees as within myself.

On the one hand (or foot) I was grounded, practical, as represented by the flat shoe. I knew how to navigate my courses, how to study and pass exams. On the other hand (or high-heel adorned foot) I was developing my social life and working out how to be an adult female in the world now that I lived away from home. It was the early 1970s. Feminism was still taking its first shaky steps. As was I.

I was reminded of this dream last week when I bought a Bosu ball. (A Bosu ball is like an exercise ball cut in half, glued onto a flat board.) I bought it to strengthen my ankles. You stand on it – on one leg or two – and practise balancing. At first, I wobbled from foot to foot, much as I did in that old recurring dream, until I engaged my core muscles and discovered how to balance.

Dreams often reflect the perceived imbalances in our lives, whether they are physical, emotional, mental or spiritual, and offer us the inside information we need to discover how to engage a sense of healthy equilibrium.

 

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