Dream of a mountain lake

Dreams always matter to me. I have vivid, allegorical dreams that have led me to better understandings about my life. I have pedestrian dreams where I am doing nothing but busy work. Sometimes I see relatives long gone in dreams mixed together with current relatives. Some nights I know I dreamt all night long and remember none no matter how hard I try. I believe working to remember our dreams can help us in our lives. Having a dream journal is a way to keep track of the symbols you are seeing in your dreams that recur.

Perhaps because I am an artist, I sometimes have dreams I can paint, others that lead into stories to write. I thought I'd share one of my dreams as it came this week. It unfolded like a movie.

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A mountain village, timbered around it, small stores and homes. The woman came to live there from elsewhere. She worked in the community and it seems was maybe a teacher. She found a boyfriend-- very good looking, kind, smooth-featured man and was happy with her life. (Was she me? I don't know.)

For a special event, she was invited to the mountain home of the local timber baron, whom she had not yet met. The home was higher in the mountains at one end of a long valley, heavily timbered, lake in the middle and huge house, very manor like.

She felt an instant connection to the laird. He was older than her, ruggedly handsome, powerful in physique and manner, but also had a lovely wife, grown children. He invited the young woman to explore his valley and took her on a boat across the lake. By this time the wife had left for business elsewhere.

When they arrived at the other end of the lake, there were a cluster of buildings and one was a parsonage where the man had grown up with many siblings and without much money. His father had been parson to a small community. The man had restored his childhood home to a tidy little memorial to that family which was now gone. She recognized that by now she was very attracted to this man. He told her that he would not make love to her in the home where he had grown up out of respect to his father's values. He invited her instead to come back to his large home and live with him for two months as if they were man and wife. When his wife returned from her trip, their interlude would end.

She didn't answer him but she was very tempted to take his offer as she wanted what they could experience in those two months even knowing she would never know it again in her life and since the village was small, likely would cost her continuing to live there. As they took the boat back across the lake to the manor, the view shifted to the manor house and her boyfriend who was waiting there for her. The dream ended before the story did.

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I suppose this is a version of many fairy tales-- a promise of an enchanted time but with a price to be paid. The boyfriend represented safety and security but the laird represented the unknown and risk. I did look up what a lake meant in an online dream dictionary. I use it mostly when I have dreams with many symbols which I think might have significance-- especially if they don't fit into my real life in any daily sense. In this case, I saw many symbols, but doubt most would appear in any dream dictionary.

This is my favorite dream dictionary and sometimes I have used it to tear a dream apart from one end to the other and found a lot of personal applications from what might not seem significant otherwise. I believe most symbology we must figure out for ourselves as the significance of something in a dream for one person might be very different than for another.

How do you use your dreams?