Misinterpretation

I have just watched a rather self-satisfied dog scare away a noisy garbage truck, as only he knows how – a volley of gruff barking and a telepathic “get off my patch or else” warning. Works like magic every Thursday morning.

That’s the dog’s experience anyway. That’s how he reads the situation, I imagine, judging by the look on his face and the wag on his tail as he returns to the business of snoozing the morning away. Little does he know the truck driver can’t even hear him above the grinding crunch of the truck’s innards beating a street’s worth of garbage into submission.

A cat I once knew had an even better magic trick. If she sat and looked at the front door in a particularly focused way, it opened. Her method never failed. Sometimes it took a little longer to achieve, perhaps – I imagined she thought – when the wind was blowing the wrong way and she needed to still her focus more. Little did she know that whenever I noticed her sitting, staring down the door, I’d reach out and open it for her. She was too intent on performing her magic trick to notice me.

We’re much better than animals at knowing what’s going on, aren’t we? We learn from our experiences, test our theories, get consistent results. We understand life and how it works, don’t we?

Or are we just as blind to the hand that really opens the door, to what’s really going on behind the scenes of our conscious awareness?

That’s where dream interpretation helps. It allows us to see the bigger picture, to understand why we interpret – or misinterpret – our experiences in the way we do, why we see the world in the way we do.

So next time you’re busy making a big drama to scare an intruder off your patch, or wondering why doors aren’t opening for you in the way that they used to, look into your dreams to discover what’s really going on. That’s the power of dreams.

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