I'm coming along a walkway and meet my brother who is pushing a perambulator with his new born son.  Somehow the son, who looks like a little white sperm, wiggles out of his grasp and falls to the ground near a manhole with a sewer flowing beneath.  He gets hooked up on a little protrusion and I try to retrieve him but my fingers are too blunt.  My friend tries but knocks the sperm son into the sewer.  I am quite concerned that the son is gone but he seems relieved, offers a positive explanation and goes on about his business.

Sometimes dreams are more or less undisguised statements about a current life situation. At the same time they may speak of such subtle things that subtle they require very clever symbols.  Obviously highly symbolic dreams are more difficult to fathom and one needs to take care not to find in them what one wants to find.  This dream is open at least three interpretations.  Perhaps the complex, conflicted life situation in which it occurred needed clarification from several angles. 

 

The ‘sperm’ son opens this dream up to a Freudian interpretation. From this point of view it could be speaking about the ego’s sexual views.  While this interpretation may have been relevant when I was younger I don't think it is warranted in this case. II think it is more about issues raised in my relationship with a particularly dear but difficult friend, a brilliant but morally flawed man whose life was in constant turmoil.   Although the relationship began on a business level I eventually became his spiritual mentor, a role I assumed reluctantly and one that caused me considerable grief.  I supported him spiritually for twelve years but his problems were so entrenched that I eventually had to abandon our friendship. This dream is telling me that the relationship is over. 

 

The ‘brother’ is my friend.  The ‘newborn son’ is his fledgling spiritual consciousness. The ‘sewer’ into which it falls is adultery. My attempt to retrieve his spirituality fails.  My ‘blunt fingers’ mean that the method I used to awaken him were unskillful.  He was actually too emotionally wounded to absorb the spiritual message, which requires a more or less mature mind.  He should have gone into psychotherapy.  The dream makes it clear that I actually care more about his soul than he does.  A short time after this dream, when he took up with another woman right under his wife’s nose for the umpteenth time, I wrote him off. 

 

At the same time I wrote off my philandering friend I broke up with a girlfriend who I really loved.  Our sex life obviously came to an end.  The dream could easily apply to my conflicting views about sex...or about the relationship itself.  In this case the ‘brother’ is the part of myself that is indifferent to sex, assuming that the ‘sperm’ is a symbol of our sex life, which, is not unreasonable.  When the relationship ends this part is unconcerned, offers a reasonable explanation, and moves on.  The other fellow, the dream ego, which represents the pleasure seeker, the lover, is attached and tries to get the relationship back. This proves futile.  In reality I did not try to get the relationship back.  I had already understood that it was over.  

 

The third way to take this dream is as a revelation of the dualistic nature of the mind.  On one hand it wants what it wants; on the other it doesn’t care if it gets what it wants.  There is a beautiful verse in one of the Upanishads that is relevant here.  It says, “Two birds, beautiful of wing sitting in a tree.  One eats the sweet fruit, the other looks on.”   The non-dual Self appears as a watcher and a doer.