Dream Interpretations by Peter
| About me
I am a tall quite friendly man aged 60 but looking younger than this. I was first diagnosed with high-functioning Asperger Syndrome in November 2007, six months after my redundancy from a firm at which I had worked as an accounts clerk for 22 years. By 2007 I’d worked for about 33 years. As to music, I find the music of Haydn rational and well-meaning, elegant, happy and with generosity of spirit. Other favourite composers include Handel, Mozart, Rossini, Offenbach, Schubert, Donizetti, Sullivan, Vaughan-Williams Scott Joplin, and Albert Ketelbey.
I’ve completed 18 Marathons, 7 Great North Runs, numerous London to Brighton bike rides and annual 3 mile Swimathons, despite weight gain during 1999 due to anti-depressants which made me run slower.
Account of my dream 18/4/08,
On April 18 2008, I dreamed of a park wherein an area to the far left of it was wooded, close to a stream and not like a park at all. It was completely untended, and had been the creation of a person called Adrian Coke, a bohemian character who died aged 27 in a “madhouse” in 1900. As to the rest of the park, it was neat and tidy with well tended flowerbeds and lawns, tennis courts and a bowls green, and this had been the creation of two very worthy town councillors who had each lived to be over 90.
And in reality, there is no park entrance in Heath Road close to the junction with Woodlands Park Road, although there is a park nearby off Woodlands Park Road, and another park higher up Heath Road in Bournville. The park in my dream was privately owned- firstly by Adrian Coke who first created it, and then by the two councillors who expanded it, and there was a notice at the Birmingham entrance informing you about all this.
The neat and tidy area of the park made me feel positive and happy, just as I feel when I am organized, but the words “died in a madhouse” which applied to Mr. Coke appeared twice in the dream, as there was a second notice at the London end of the park. Dream 18/4/08- interpretation.
As a result of a Dream Interpretation workshop with Debbie, I saw that the park represented the state of my mind, being mostly well organized, but some of it absolutely chaotic. I saw this as not good enough, and had fears that my capacity to be chaotic might cause me to go mad and have to be confined to an institution- as indicated by the repetition in the dream of the words “died in a madhouse” applying to Adrian Coke who designed what became the unruly part of this park.
I learned to put less emphasis on all the surreal but incidental features in this dream, for example, the public park with private owners, the small error in the public notice “born 1887 died 1979 aged 94- should have been “aged 92″, and the fact of the park beginning in Birmingham and ending in London.
Another point is that the unruly part of the park was profoundly depressing to me. This was a reminder to me that I should try to rectify the untidiness in my life, for I did not wish to be untidy and this was a major cause of my intermittent depression.
Account of my dream on 8/9/09.
I firstly dreamed of being with my bicycle at a road junction with a curiously unnecessary roundabout, and which bore some resemblance to the junction of Castlenau and Lonsdale Road near Hammersmith Bridge. On July 16 2006, I had cycled only 7 miles into a 40 mile cycle ride when suffering a puncture in Lonsdale Road. Having no repair kit, I had to abandon all cycling for that day, and this incident might have been one of the causes of this dream. It seemed as if I had suddenly been landed in this place, and somehow presented with a bicycle, as I did not dream of cycling to reach this place, which is not remotely near my home. It was 12 noon on what I felt was a Saturday. I then saw a funeral procession go round the roundabout and pass into a very dark wooded if suburban side road. I then stood outside the house which two undertakers entered. Despite having no periscope and being unable to see into any upstairs room in that house, I somehow knew that an old woman was in an upstairs bedroom lying dead, and that people had been keeping a vigil round her bed. Two undertakers came downstairs with her body in a coffin, which they then loaded into the hearse, and I had a vague sense that normal funeral procedures were not being followed, but only after I awoke did I see that the old lady must have just died and that her funeral could not possibly have been taking place that day. I assume the procession went back to the main road. Perhaps there had been a mistake, and there should only have been a hearse but not a procession? And now I think of it, all the people who had been keeping vigil round the old lady’s bed would surely have wanted to go to the funeral. I then cycled on. There were no more houses after the house of this now deceased old lady, and the road went downhill into a valley then became level. I became frightened by the very sinister atmosphere. It occurred to me some time after having had the dream that a quotation from Psalm 23 in the Bible was very appropriate if you substituted the word “walk” with the word “cycle”. “Yea, though I cycle in the shadow of the valley of death, I will fear no evil.” I certainly feared no evil, but the experience was not pleasant. At length, however, I found myself cycling up a very steep footpath on a common which led up to a housing estate, and was very relieved. All the oppressive atmosphere had gone. The estate was light, bright, and near an airport, if dull with few shops and no post office as for some unexplained reason I needed to send a very urgent letter. But better a rather dull grey council estate with no post office than the valley of death or that very sunny roundabout with a funeral procession going round it. It was now quite definitely 1.15 p.m on a Tuesday. It did not seem that I had been cycling for three days, and yet it had not seemed like a Tuesday when I was outside that old lady’s house. But it must have been a Tuesday, a Tuesday on which I had been feeling very sad indeed, but having at length passed through the valley of death to this council estate, I was feeling very different. Dream 8/9/09- interpretation. Although I live quite close to a firm of undertakers and regularly see hearses leaving from the premises, I have never dreamed about funerals or undertakers before, so why now? why about a funeral procession when the person in question had only just died, and why about an upstairs room that in reality I could not have seen from where I was? I don’t know, but the sunny though very sad mood in this part of the dream has featured in previous dreams. I then cycled through the valley of death, but ended up on a council estate, which reflects my sense of humour and also a wish that life after death should prove to be as lifelike and ordinary as possible. DREAM OF 9/5/99. I am looking for the version of this dream that I wrote in a thick blue felt pen on a green sheet of paper in a restaurant in The Cut, Waterloo on the evening of Friday 6/4/01 after work, but still have good recall of it. It began when my friend Michele drove me in Paris to the Basilique du Sacre Coeur, a memory from January 2 1999. I visited her in Paris ( was there from the evening of Dec 31 to the evening of January 3 1999- travelled as never before or since by Eurostar ) having not seen her for 20 years and she found me to be most peculiar and mentally unwell. I had suffered from depression following a one week therapy course in Ireland in June 1998, but recovered from it on 4/1/99 then started becoming a lot happier, and the quality of my work dramatically improved. My memory began improving, as
I had suffered some loss of memory, which greatly troubled me.
To return to the dream, I was in a square at an elevated level and although no longer with my friend Michele in this dream, I thought I was near to the Basilique du Sacre Coeur. But the surroundings of Paris had almost imperceptibly changed, and I was told in the dream that I was now in Battersea. However, I went down the steps at the far side of the square to fund a suburban road reminiscent of one in a suburb of Brighton, but houses behind another side of the square did resemble houses found at Clapham Common London SW4 not far at all from Battersea.
The square “morphed” into a parade ground in an Army barracks. I was standing on the edge of it while an Army lorry driver kept on driving round the parade ground deliberately narrowly missing me every time he passed me. Don’t ask me why I remained rooted to the spot. At last I moved over to a wall, but the driver stopped the lorry in such a way that I was nearly crushed between the vehicle and the wall. The driver did not know me nor did I know him. He just derived pleasure from frightening me, but why he decided to do so was not explained at all. There was then some kind of Army open air exhibition. I stopped at a marquee to apply for a court martial which took place half an hour later in a private area within this marquee. A brigadier questioned me. He said indignantly ”Surely you are not saying our driver did this deliberately?” and I was intimidated by him. “No, I suppose I’m not”, I replied, so lost my case, which was a miscarriage of justice..
The second part of the dream seemed unrelated to all before. Impossibly,
I travelled by bus from Ireland to London, and never wondered how I could be doing so without crossing the Irish Sea, or whether the place-labels were simply wrong. As we approached the terminus, houses became shabbier and shabbier with some boarded up, and we crossed an absolutely filthy canal, and the bridge was covered in soot. I got off the bus with my friend Wendy and two other women, possibly her friends. We all walked in the direction of the sunset but across waste ground of a demolition site and towards the concrete jungle and sink estate of Gothem City. Then suddenly I turned round and briskly walked in the other direction saying “No more of this, thank you.”
Then in the final scene, it was the following day a Sunday at 2 p.m., so maybe I had stayed at some guest house in this area. It was a brilliantly sunny afternoon, and the filthy bridge had become an imposing suspension bridge, and I walked across it. It was over a wide blue sea- not a filthy canal, and seagulls flew overhead. At the end of the bridge a road continued upwards with pleasant very expensive detached houses of the kind one may find in places like Wimbledon, and I really wanted to go in this direction.
I was really happy and optimistic in mood, then woke up.
Dream of 9/5/99- interpretation.
I have stated in my account of this dream that I had made a recovery from depression in the New Year of 1999, and this is clearly reflected in the second part of the dream, in which I turned away from Gothem City and in which a filthy canal became a blue sea and a small soot-covered bridge became a broad suspension bridge with a walkway. I was at the time very aware of trying to be happy every single day, and 1999 was a bright year of achievement for me.
As to the first part of the dream, I don’t really understand why I dreamed
of the Army lorry driver who kept narrowly missing me, but he was obviously symbolic of persons who had bullied or tormented me, and exhibited Schadenfreude, pleasure in my discomfort. I can’t currently remember any instances of complaining about bullying and finding my complaints being rejected. However, my French friend found my behaviour with her in Paris odd and unacceptable, and maybe I had sub-consciously felt she was very unkind although she was just very concerned about me.
Interestingly, and impossibly, the park took me from Heath Road, Northfield, Birmingham near where I was born, to a part of London between Peckham and Honor Oak Park which I did not know at the time of the dream but was to know in January 2009 when visiting a friend near here. Born in Birmingham, educated there both at school and University, getting a degree in Spanish and Russian, my parents moved to Surrey in 1972 and I moved to Surrey in 1973 to live with my father after my mother’s death. My father died in 1985. I live there still as a single man. Since 1993, I’ve had numerous dreams about Northfield, Birmingham where I was born and lived with my parents firstly in a house, then in a flat until 1971. I revisited Birmingham for a student reunion dinner-dance in November 2003 staying four whole days, but only travelled between Wylde Green and Erdington in the north of the city and Edgbaston, so have not re-visited Northfield (which is 4-5 miles south of Edgbaston.) In two of my dreams about Northfield, the road where I first lived ( Bunbury Road ) had been replaced by a motorway, and the second road where I lived ( South Road ) had completely disappeared together with its fire station. But both roads are still there, and so is the fire station. Since my 2007 redundancy I’ve done voluntary work some of it in libraries, and written a lot of poems often humorous.
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