[MusicMike]

I know I have inner conflict IRL and sometimes dream of fighting my brother, but this is the most extreme fight with my brother I've ever had in a dream. The only thing I can think of during the day that I might have been conflicted over is that I tutored a college student in math, and this particular student makes me very anxious a lot of the time because he is very agitated, speaks rapidly with short rapid in-breaths, stomps his foot and bumps into me just form agitated movement. And my inner child hates this and hates that I've committed to tutoring him in math. Also I meditated a lot yesterday also and was on the receiving end of a lot of visual thinking in the form of attacks.

So here's the dream:

I am a member of a village in the U.S. and the entire village has decided to move overseas to a beautiful island. We look for a real estate developer who will build houses, build a whole new town on the seaside, for all of us if we pay them in silver pins. Each pin is worth thousands of dollars. So we gather all these pins. Then my brother is there and we start fighting. We punch each other and every time we punch each other we drive staples and nails and some of the silver pins into each other. I don't want to keep fighting him and I try to contain his anger, like get a bunch of people to help me hold onto his fingers and hold him back, but he keeps getting free and punching me again, and I keep punching back. I am aware that I'm trying to contain him with force. At this point we are both full of nails and staples.

We travel on an airplane to the new island, all this time my brother and I punching each other. A woman comes who is an expert on hiring real estate developers and she says we may have made a bad deal and that we need to stop paying them now and force them to build something first. A baby is there who is my little baby sister and she has just one pin to pay for her share, a tiny share compared to the rest of us. It's kind of cute.

Then my brother and I make a truce. We look at each other and realize the fighting is never going to end if we don't mutually agree to stop it. I start to pick all the staples and nails out of myself, and the silver pins too. I am extremely worried about losing the silver pins since they are so valuable. I put them down on a plate of food, like restaurant food, and most of the food has been eaten, so it's possible that a bus boy could come along and throw away the contents of the plate and throw away the silver pins. I get extremely worried this will happen. Suddenly the woman comes and tells us it's time to get on a plane and move somewhere new. But I'm so worried about losing pins that I spend a lot of time trying to gather them up. They are on this plate and in other locations. In one location is an older man who reminds me of a Unitarian-Universalist minister who is annoyed with me for gathering pins nearby him because he needs to use the phone.

I become aware that I've missed the flight. It's too late for me to catch up with the other villagers. I notice I'm on a beautiful island and I wander around and tell people we are planning to build a new village on the shore. I look at the ocean. It doesn't seem to matter much that I've missed the flight.

Then I start thinking about the real-life town Malibu where rich people have houses on the beach front. This is true in real life--these people own the property down to the tide line, but members of the public are free to come to use the beach if the tide is out and they stay below the tide line. Nevertheless, again this is true in real life, Malibu has hired these patrols who kick people off the beach because the rich people don't want their "privacy" invaded. So in the dream I'm on a Malibu beach and the tide is coming in, so I use this little boat to try to get to a public corridor where I can get off the beach without tresspassing, and something goes wrong and I start to get drawn out to sea. A lifeguard is there but he can't help me. In part of the dream I feel like I'm underwater watching this boat from the underside.

That's the last I remember of the dream.

[CANDC]

I appreciate your dream and how you can remember it. I find I can understand the meaning of my own dreams better than anyone.

Here are articles on figuring out what your dreams mean.
psychcentral.com/lib/how-to-analyze-your-dreams...its.../0005975

psychcentral.com/lib/exploring-your-dreams-qa-with.../00012605

[MusicMike]

Hi CANDC,
Can you look into those links? They don't work for me. I would love to read a PsychCentral article on dream interpretation.

Regarding the question of whether to get dream interpretation from myself or from others, I do think that ultimately it's up to me to decide if a particular interpretation resonates, but other people's feedback can be extremely useful to see into my blind spots. I believe that one function of dreams is to bring to conscious awareness things that I'm not very good at paying attention to in waking life precisely because they are my blind spots.

For instance, Thunder Bow's recent comment on my dream of the flying car as perhaps saying that my life stops taking flight when I over think things. It's obvious as a pattern in the dream now that he points it out, but it wasn't obvious to me at first because I'm pretty entrenched in my "over thinking ways." His interpretation does resonate with my own sense of what's true about my life, so that's good.

Mike

[MusicMike]

It occurs to me that I titled this dream "fight with my brother" but there is also a truce in the dream, and a healing process (picking the staples and nails out of myself). Maybe what was significant to me at the time of dreaming this wasn't so much extra conflict that day, but instead having called a truce that day and engaged in healing. I'm not consciously aware of either thing, but they are plausibly something I was doing unconsciously.

[Thunder Bow]

Originally Posted by mike1127

It occurs to me that I titled this dream "fight with my brother" but there is also a truce in the dream, and a healing process (picking the staples and nails out of myself). Maybe what was significant to me at the time of dreaming this wasn't so much extra conflict that day, but instead having called a truce that day and engaged in healing. I'm not consciously aware of either thing, but they are plausibly something I was doing unconsciously.

This is a good interpretation. It is interesting you both are sicking yourselves with things you feel to have some value. After healing you miss the plane, because the pins are no longer valuable to you. The battle within yourself is over.

You feel you do not belong on a calm beach with beauty in you, a place where you can build your life on. But the scene draws you into it, and you become a part of it, looking up at the boat you came in.

[MusicMike]

Thanks, Thunder Bow.

Here are some other thoughts.

I also had an association of sticking a silver pin in my brother as trying to kill a vampire, i.e. combining the ideas from folklore that you kill a vampire with a stake through its heart or with a silver bullet. In the dream we are fighting each other equally--however, once I had this association, I think it might be more right to say I was trying to kill my brother, and he was fighting back. What the dream is teaching me is that whatever violence I do to him, he does back. Violence begets violence. Only love and forgiveness can heal. I can't be rid of my brother inside, I can only forgive him.

That further led to me to have an association to traveling to a foreign island as trying to build a new life without my brother. I think I attached to the idea of a peaceful life without conflict, but I think that I tend to see the only way that can happen as if my brother is dead.

The silver pins are seen as valuable by me both in buying this new life and perhaps in killing my brother.

Not all of this resonates equally, but I definitely think that part of me thinks I can only be peaceful if he's out of my life permanently, rather than looking to make peace with him.

[Thunder Bow]

I am going to stay with my above interpretation. I think it the most real. However, the dreamer has the last word on his own dreams.