A lady who we will call Norma had a dream that was most disturbing to her. She came to me in an agitated state and asked for my help.

Norma's Dream

Norma dreamt that she was sitting naked on the settee in her front room. She was horrified as her daughter was also in the room. However, the daughter seemed completely indifferent to Norma's nakedness and was chatting away happily. The television was on and Norma saw the gates of a cemetery. "I recognise those gates" she thought and was immediately transported to them.

Norma found herself standing with her husband and their children looking through the gates at the cemetery beyond. She said to her husband 'I want to go inside and find our graves' but he refused. Norma left him and the children and entered the Cemetery. She made her way to a building where inside was an old man pawing over a thick ledger. Norma gave him her husband's name and asked him where the grave was. The old man was running his fingers up and down columns, turning over the pages, obviously having difficulty in finding the grave.

After a while he pushed a ledger towards Norma and she opened this. There on a card that was taped to the inside page of the book was her name saying 'she was a good person'. Norma then woke up.

Interpretation

Firstly it was obvious that Norma would be horrified to 'bare all' to her daughter (bare her soul). Was there something that Norma did not want her daughter to know? If there was Norma was not to worry as the girl would take it in her stride and be at ease with it. Norma confided that when she married her husband he came with a baby girl a few months old. They had decided to bring the child up as their own and not tell her of her real parentage. However, the husband was a persistent adulterer who had caused Norma no end of anguish. He controlled Norma by threatening to tell the girl the truth and to take her away from Norma. The dream was urging Norma to tell the daughter the truth, she would not lose her.

Television is communication and a cemetery is where you put things to rest. Norma wanted out of the marriage, her husband didn't. The dream was communicating to Norma to go against her husband's wishes and take the steps necessary to achieve this. The book that the old man was pawing over was the book of the dead and he could not find Norma's husband mentioned. Passing the book to Norma showed that she needed to see for herself that to continue with the marriage could be the death of her (the death of the person that she was), and that her husband was not affected by the stresses in their marriage. Norma's name was taped in the book, she was not meant to suffer that way.