I’m taking an early morning walk while talking to my son on the phone. I cross an empty park and see this new, creative game I didn’t know, so the child in me gets curious and I decide to try it. I lay down on a large, tilted disk and gain momentum running my feet against the ground, then I lift my legs and let it turn free. I felt that special sensation of the uneven spin in my stomach, until it slowed down, and I ran to add momentum again. It was fun. After a few times I had enough and walked away.
When I arrived to my daughter’s apartment I realized her keys had fallen off of my pocket. It surely happened while laying down on that spinning disk. Her neighbor next door told me that they typically leave an extra key with each other when one goes out of town. This time they didn’t because I was staying there. I found it cute that she found me cute for playing in the park and lovingly tattled on me to my daughter. I powerwalked back to the park and I noticed that some people were taking the park’s path as a shortcut between the bus stops and the apartment buildings. It occurred to me that maybe one of them saw the key and could have taken it to post about it, with the intention of finding its owner. So, I started asking each person coming from inside the park if they, by chance, saw a lost key. The last woman I asked responded that yes, that she saw it on that disk, so I run my last part and there it was. I took this picture for my son who was waiting to hear the good news about the keys and I walked relieved, back to the apartment.
Then my son called again. He had shared with his girlfriend that I lost his sister’s key when they both realized the connection with his dream early that morning. They were 10 time zones away from where I was, so about 14 hours had passed after their morning and for them it was already night. In their morning, his girlfriend had woken up first and laughed at his sleeping position. He had his arm extended above and around his head and he was moving his fingers making a pincer. She asked out loud, “What are you doing?” and half asleep he responded: “My mom is giving me a key.” We both laughed about the coincidence. “Not only that - he said - but today the locksmith came to change the lock because my roommate broke his key inside. I never experienced so many references to keys in one day.” “Not only that - I said to add to his point - but this is the 2nd time this week that I find myself locked outside your sister’s apartment. The first time was when I met your brother for dinner in another city, then he dropped me off at my friend’s house to sleep over and took with him your sister’s car for the weekend. I accidentally left the apartment’s key in the same keychain as the car’s key, and I only realized what I did 4 days later when I returned by train and couldn’t open the door. Your brother had to come after work. It turned out to be a good thing because the following 2 days were national holidays and he stayed to spend them with me.”
Once past the mumbling about how crazy it is to find these synchronicities both in waking life and inside his dream, we asked each other what we thought they meant.
One thing I know from the years I’ve been immersed in dream analysis is the difference between an intrinsic meaning and an assigned meaning. I learned that the assigned meaning to our dreams and symbols is far more relevant and has more power over our physiques than any intrinsic meaning we may find set in other cultures or even in our own.
We started by stating the fact that there were multiple references to Keys, Locks and Doors for both of us in one day, and that those references serve as a pointer to the stories where they appear, to pay special attention to them, to see if there’s something to be found there that may not be laying on the surface and that may be important to notice. The second thing we stated was the intrinsic meaning to each of these symbols. A Key is used to open a door. It is something that we need in order to be able to do something else, and that without it we just can’t do it. It’s a very necessary element, an essential object or aspect to the action we are about to do. A Door on the other hand, is a boundary. A boundary that is not set in stone, it’s not a wall but it can be opened or closed. A portal through which we can cross between one side to the other side. We can say that a Door is an opportunity to take when we cross it, or to let it pass when we don’t cross it. it is said when someone offers you a job, for instance, he opens you a door. A Lock then, is the portion of the door that needs to be activated. A lock locks, excuse the redundancy. It is that part that may be preventing the door from being openable. It is the strictest part of the door. And a key must be a match to that lock, or else it doesn’t open. All these meanings seem obvious because they are intrinsic to these symbols in our culture. Yet, to describe them out loud is a step towards understanding the meaning of the story where they appear. Then we rewrite or retell the story, exchanging each symbol with its meaning.to get yet another layer of understanding.
For example, the story says: I lost the keys twice. Once it fell out of my pocket when I laid down and the other time I failed to separate 2 different keys when I needed to. In both cases the result was the same, I was locked out of the apartment.
Now we retell the story replacing the symbol with its meaning: I lost an important and very essential element not just once but twice. In both cases it was my lack of attention that caused the loss. As a result, I was left out of some valuable opportunities. I missed them repeatedly and I have no one to blame but myself. Had I have been more careful I would be exactly where I want to be. Even though I may find excuses for my distractions, like they may be cute and playful like in the case of the park, or they may be common and understandable like in the case of the shared keychain, the consequences are still the same and they could be serious if I couldn’t find a quick fix.
Surely you can see how the simple use of the intrinsic meaning of a symbol can shed some light to understanding a life story or a dream. However, we are dealing with very common symbols here, but that’s not always the case. Some symbols are not that easy to discover their intrinsic meaning. And even when it is easy, we can always search for another layer of understanding where we get to tell the meaning that we associate to them, what they mean to us, were we make it personal and somewhat intuitively we make associations with certain aspects and details in our lives. This is where two people having the same dream may get to very different analyses because of the unique experiences they’ve been through and their subconscious associations to them.
Going back to the stories shared with my son about the lost keys and his dream, I noticed that in both circumstances where I lost the key, it was either one of my sons that acted at the end of each story. In the first one, it was my son near me who literately drove to bring me the key back, resulting in the silver lining of getting to share 2 extra days together. In the second one, my son on the phone could not help me find the key physically, he was 10 meridians away from me, but in a mysterious way he was holding the key for me in his dream, on his fingers above his head, even hours before I lost them. The meaning that I associate with these endings is that both my sons hold within themselves the key elements to recuperate any missed opportunities. And that their active involvement, in one way or another, is what brings about the solution, THE KEY.