I have just arrived on foot, with my luggage, at the house where I will be staying, or perhaps
living. The owner greets me inside the entryway at the top of the steps. He begins to explain to
me how the switches work. The switches consist of round white buttons on somewhat larger pinkish
oblong-shaped buttons, like you might find on a toddler's workbench toy. They seem simple enough to
operate but when the owner tells me that they are voice-activated and I will need to use different
code words for the different operations controlled by the switches, I suddenly get alarmed. I grab
my stuff and go back out the front door and down the street the way I had come.
It is nighttime and the streets are empty but covered with several inches of snow. I am barefoot
and a little surprised that my feet are not cold. I am pulling a tan-colored hardshell suitcase
on roller wheels and carrying a large chunk of rose quartz along with something else. It is already
difficult for me to hold on to everything when the chunk of rose quartz starts breaking up. One
piece drops onto the street but when I reached down to pick it up I see only a small pink glass
figurine of a swan. The pink glass swan is quite pretty but I decided not to bring it with me
because unlike the rose quartz, it is not natural.
Retracing the route I had taken to the house, I turn onto a path leading into a college campus.
Several students are sitting on a railing along the path and I have to turn sideways to avoid
hitting them with the wings of the large carved wooden statue of a bird in flight which I am
carrying in my arms. At the other end of the railing I disturb three roosting birds which flutter
down to the ground. One is a sparrow I think; the other two are Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, a male and
a female. The female is okay but the male, which has fine dark streaks on his slightly pinkish
breast, is huddled in the snowy grass trying to keep warm. I wake up worried about the male
grosbeak and wondering if there is any way I could keep it warm overnight, because otherwise it
will probably die.
I don't claim a definitive understanding of this dream but several associations, along with the
symbols of a suitcase and the color pink which it shares with an earlier dream the same night -
Missing a flight - provide some clues. In the previous dream the color pink was associated with
my ex-wife Susan; here the pink rose quartz which is crumbling seems to picture the dissolution of
my marriage. When I stoop to pick up one of the broken pieces of quartz it has become a glass
figurine instead. It is neither alive nor natural, and I think it represents the relinquishing of
my agency, the subordination of my will to Susan's, which I believe would have been necessary to
save our marriage. I was unwilling to do that, and in the dream I decline to pick up the glass swan
figurine.
I have a pretty clear association of the house with the voice-activated buttons to the place I
rented from Lance L the year before I married Susan. My
decisions at that time in my life were driven at least in part by my fear of managing my own life,
represented in the dream by operating the buttons. Although I certainly chose to marry Susan, that
choice also involved an abdication of responsibility for directing my own life, which may be
represented in the dream by the suitcase which disappears soon after I leave the house. Walking
barefoot in the snow - I did that from time to time in college - I think indicates my naïveté about
what I was doing; I believed that I was doing the right thing in following God and marrying Susan
but I lacked the perspective to understand my motivations and recognize the consequences of my
actions.
In the dream when I walk onto the college campus I am wearing shoes; I now know what I am doing.
I am carrying a wooden sculpture of a large flying bird - a symbol perhaps of exercising agency in
the context of my disability. I am choosing my own path yet dependent on others to act.
I believe the pair of Rose-breasted Grosbeaks represents Darchelle and me. The pink wash on the
breast of the male may represent my continuing experience of Susan and my first marriage within me.
Although I left that marriage it will never fully leave me.