Was I in a situation, in an unhappy relationship, where I was being my own worst enemy, instead of my own best friend? You bet I was. Now, it makes sense to look at these characters as aspects of myself, since they are clearly not the actual people they looked like. This dream is clearly telling me that there are people in my home – and I’m going to tell you here and now that the house is one of the clearest dream symbols for the state of our lives – that were doing me harm, and that these people were supposed to be friends. When I had this dream, I was in a very unhappy relationship and feeling trapped. Now, if dreams tell us nothing else, they tell us to take responsibility for ourselves, our lives, and the decisions we make, including who we invite into our lives, and how we let them treat us. But who were these dream characters? One of them was presented as a person I knew, but in real life he was doing nothing wrong, so looking at it, I need to come up with another explanation. They filled my house with poison, putting my family at risk. The dream clearly shows that there are friends in my home who were no friends of mine at all. It’s certainly a good example of conflict in dreams, so let’s look at exactly what’s going on here. This dream breaks my heart, but I love it. The following is this old dream of mine, with the excerpt from the book. Because there’s never a time where we couldn’t do with the reminder to trust our wild, instinctual nature. I enjoyed being reminded tangibly of her so much, that I’ve decided to bring her once more into my current conscious life in some way – by finding her in stories again, perhaps, or making a crafty representation of her for our upcoming solstice altar – and thus to carry her teaching with me. She’s the Old Woman, the Old Witch, the Hag, Baba Yaga and the Cailleach, and one of the best teachers there is. In one of them I found a character who has turned up again and again in my journeys, in my dreams, and when I was a professional storyteller, I loved to tell her stories.

They go back almost thirty years and chronicle a whole tale of growth and (gradual!) maturity. Because the easiest way to show how to apply the principals in dream work is to use examples of actual dreams, this book has quite a few of my old dreams used as examples in it, and I got side-tracked reading some of them. I was looking through my small book on dreamwork the other day, deciding whether to continue work on it, and if so, when.

Building Character by Kate Genet