The silver turquoise goat

Once upon a dream, standing at an open casement window, resting my elbows on the sill, I noticed a silvery shining in the flowerbed below.

My heart leapt, for there it was, something very precious to me, a gleaming silver statue of a goat, studded in turquoise gems, half-hidden in the foliage like a discarded child’s toy. I reached through the window and nestled it into my arms. It fitted perfectly, being about as long as my forearm and a little taller than its length.

It wasn’t heavy, despite its silver sovereignty: solid silver yet light as a feather. Untarnished. Indeed, someone must have polished it very recently, so how did it end up fallen by the wayside? And why did it feel so familiar and precious to me?

When I awoke from this dream last week, the silver turquoise goat stayed with me, floating within my mind’s eye during the day, shining a lovely energy through to my heart.

So what did it mean?

Leaning into the feeling of deep connection with the silver turquoise goat, my first awareness was that I often say to people that I was blessed to be born on the cusp at the northern hemisphere’s winter solstice, my birth sign straddling between Sagittarius and Capricorn. Now, I’m no astrologer, but I did take on board from a young age that according to astrology, I was half horse (centaur) and half goat. Throughout my life I have observed these two energies interplay, the blessing, as I sense it, being that I get very visionary and set huge far out goals (plucking my arrow, taking aim from horseback), then bring in mountain goat energy to plod, climb, plod, climb, all the way up the mountain to the chosen goal. Yes, my understanding of astrology is probably totally skewed, but the point I’m making is that my perception of my approach to various endeavours, throughout my life, has been to reach for the stars and then set out on the foot journey, one foot after the other, just plodding away at it until it’s done.

In my wiser years, I’m not so sure that my horse-goat, visionary-plod, approach has always been the best, but I acknowledge that it has served me well.

So that was my first conclusion about my dream goat, and when I turned my attention to the turquoise gems that adorned it I remembered that I have always considered turquoise to be my birthstone. The two symbols, the goat and the turquoise, somewhat confirmed each other. My dreaming mind had come up with a good symbol to represent my Capricorn goat energy.

Why silver? I love both silver and gold, and white gold too.

The first thing that came to me when I asked myself why the goat was silver, was that it was valuable but not as valuable as gold. Gold is first place, silver second. As always with dream work, we discover our own truths and perceptions, not absolute truths. In my mind, conscious or unconscious, silver was second to gold, and my Capricorn goat energy, precious though it felt to me, was second to my Sagittarius horse-centaur energy. The dream suggested I valued my visionary aim for the stars energy over my plodding get-the-job-done goat energy. (Oh, and I should add that according to Chinese astrology I am a horse: all zeal and passion. I absolutely relate to that. You can see why I perhaps need that balancing mountain goat energy to get things done and finished!)

So far, just playing with the dream symbol, I had discovered that my ‘stick in there and get it done’ energy had been recently polished, and that perhaps I didn’t value this side of myself as highly as it deserved. According to my dream, this value had fallen by the wayside, a fact that hit home as I have written before about my habit of immediately forgetting all the hard work that goes into a project once it’s done. (Like childbirth, better to remember the labour as a lesser deal so you’re open to giving birth again. Nature’s protector.)

I have a twist in the story to deliver, but let’s pause here for a moment.

Last month, I wrote a blog, Dream Interpretation Chart, for my online-learning platform, The Dream Academy, in which I said that “Interpreting dreams is an immersive affair.  If you really want to understand and gain helpful insight from a dream, dabbling in the shallow waters around the edges of the dream isn’t going to take you there. Playing with one symbol from your dream isn’t going to take you there. Meditating upon the dream and emerging with an intuitive understanding isn’t going to take you the whole way there. All of these approaches are important, the dabbling, the teasing of symbols, the meditation, but they are insufficient alone.”

In that blog I went on to say that interpreting a dream deeply and accurately requires a series of systematic approaches, a step-by-step recipe that delivers results. Does this step-by-step remind you of my mountain goat?

I decided to tell you the story of my silver turquoise goat from last week’s dream to illustrate this point: look how much information and insight I derived from “playing with one symbol from a dream”. I learned about two key values, and the order in which I ranked them, and was able not only to acknowledge this but to re-evaluate their ranking, especially in the context of what I had been doing in the day or two prior to the dream. But I then needed to delve into all the other details of the dream, step-by-step, to gain the full and deep insight that the dream –and I – deserved.

It’s true that I value my visionary nature and somewhat pioneering spirit over my ability to put in the follow-through work that manifests the desired outcome. It’s true that I need to be kinder to myself and acknowledge the hard work. It’s also true that my zeal and passion for dream work extends to advocating a step-by-step approach to interpreting dreams, an approach that nestles wonderfully magical intuitive dream work within its embrace, just as I nestled the silver turquoise goat in my dream.

I was puzzled momentarily as to why I saw the silver turquoise goat as “discarded, like a child’s toy”.

I laughed when I remembered a toy from my childhood. I was born in a time when children had very few toys compared to today. One of my favourites was a furry lamb  – yes, a lamb, not a goat – on wheels with a pram handle. It was a baby walker designed to help a baby take their first steps by pushing it along. I don’t remember learning to walk, but watching my own children and grandchildren do this I know it’s a very tough adventure, one you take step by step, plodding along, until finally you have the confidence to run and jump and discard the baby walker along with all the memories of the tough task. Walking? Easy, peasy!

Layers upon layers, as many of you will know that I have spent the last few months rehabilitating from a fracture, and am only now back to the freedoms of totally fluid walking.

And if you’re still with me, here’s one more association to make you smile. Why was my dream goat a statue? Any ideas? (It wasn’t a fluffy toy like my long-ago baby walker: it was most definitely a statue.) Well, a statue’s job is to stand. You stand before you learn to walk. You stand in order to walk. But what stood out (ahem) to me, was that the statue felt like a totem, something of great value to stand (ahem again) the test of time and to inspire and re-inspire me to walk this path through this life.

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