A Broken Crystal Goblet: Concluding Post

A cook had a waking dream in which his wife saw that a crystal goblet which had been in the family for a long time seemed to have spontaneously broken. On Wednesday, he and I isolated the symbols and then he made metaphoric associations for each symbol. We have now reassembled his dream removing the words that were the original symbols and then replacing them with his metaphoric descriptions. In addition, we have added phrases throughout, such as, “There is a part of me…” designed to remind the dreamer that all symbols in his dream represent facets of himself.

Reconstructed dream

There is a part of me that is in a time of celebration, reflection and honoring an important event that took place within myself. Cooking is my passion. I love to prepare delicious food for enjoyment and health. My present cooking has so many associations for me. I do it during special celebrations. There is something in my history that reminds me of olden times within myself. And there is also the association with attempting something that was not successful. This meal I am cooking within myself is involved. It means putting off other responsibilities and interests. But it’s a sharing with other parts of me. There’s comradery, enjoyment and maybe even a bit of showing off. There is no moderation. I’ll spare no effort, maybe to an excessive degree, since this is just a party. The part of me that is my partner and best friend, who offers a balanced view of my affairs when I am too closely involved to be objective, has a shocked reaction. This part of me sees that something within me that is elegant for the sake of elegance has been rendered unusable. The beauty is really not necessary; you don’t really need it to consume what it is intended to hold. There is a sense of preciousness for its own sake rather than for any practical concern. This elegance earned a special place by being ancient and being associated with all the parts of me for a long time. It was given extra care and attention. It was now useless and dangerous. It was almost as if the elegance broke itself of its own accord. There was no impact, no influence from anything else.

Discussion

As the dreamer and I were reassembling his dream in its metaphoric version, I noticed a word that got inserted into the new version that is a symbol.  The word is “cooking.” We ought to have stopped and gone through the same process of creating a metaphoric association for this word. But I decided to take a risk since the word “cooking” is such a common metaphor: “What’s cooking?” or “He’s cooking something up.” are both common expressions. It seemed as if the metaphoric message of that word was clear.

With that understanding, it’s fascinating to read the above version of the dream to get a clear sense of the themes running through it. There are issues of excess and “preciousness” that the more balanced part of the dreamer is shocked by. Tomorrow, we’ll ask the dreamer what he thinks this might all be about.