I've recently made a decision to have no more contact with my mother, because in the words of my therapist, "even when she thinks she's building you up, she's tearing you down." There is some guilt over "honor thy father and thy mother." A big part of that "bull" is "keep your mouth shut about family matters," and "family comes first, no matter what."

I note two things:

1. The train hit the bull *after* emerging from the tunnel.
2. I took my baggage with me when I left the train.

I'm figuring out that I'm still having these dreams until I can leave my baggage behind, but I still don't quite get the tunnel. It could be tunnel vision, rather than alluding to the sexual abuse, since I have a lot of guilt over not contacting my birth family and also over being divorced and remarried. That guilt is religious. Christian fundamentalism, to be exact. Walking the straight and narrow. And come to think of it, what is straighter and narrower than that tunnel? But I'd already passed *through* it when the train hit the bull. It seems to me that if the dream were telling me about the old way of thinking, the bull would have appeared inside the tunnel, which represents the old way of thinking, telling me that it was "bull."

Or...

Maybe I had to emerge from the tunnel in order to be able to "see" the bull.

In any case, I'll have to tell myself next time to leave my baggage on the train.