They saw the lines and knew behind the bait was likely a hook hidden but with the bait begin almost irresistible to them, they took the bait almost every time. Instead of reflecting on this action, they argued amongst themselves about how to remove the fisherman in the most loving way possible according to God’s love. The problem was each fish had a different version of what God’s love was. This made them even more confused and in the confusion they became even more likely to bite the fisherman’s bait.

The fisherman being rewarded with baskets and baskets of fish now thought to himself two things. The first was that he was indeed a great fisherman. The second was this was a really good spot to catch fish. Not to mention it confirmed his belief even further that fish we’re not the brightest of God’s creatures.

God of course couldn’t agree knowing Herself first hand that each fish was crafted with eyes best to see the fisherman’s lines even in the darkest of nights. God also knew first hand that She made every fish with the sharpest of faculties for determining nourishment from a fisherman’s bait.

She was also well aware that it was only a matter of time for each fish to discover this for themselves and choose to feast on the abundance of nourishment provided for them instead of continuing to take the fisherman’s bait. She knew too that before long the fisherman was soon to realize he was too a fish who had been taking the bait of another fisherman for quite some time.

You hold me in your arms
And when I slip and fall you pull me up
Though I’m still scared to feel your love,
But when I open up my heart you fill me up.

God I feel you.
God I feel everything too.

When I don’t want to feel this pain,
I get down on my knees and pray.
God please help me, help me on through,
And take me to the other side brand new.

God I feel you.
God I feel everything too.

Cause God I want to love you,
Just the way you love me too.
And God I want to love you,
The way you love me too.

In a way then interpreting them can often achieve the opposite effect. That’s why our dreams don’t come to us in an essay format. The language of our intellect is incapable of teaching us the language of our soul in the same way that a mathematical formula is incapable of teaching us to love.

In this example, a dream I wrote about here: http://disorderlyhappiness.com/2012/01/23/heres-the-scoop-on-the-satan-claus-dreams/, the meaning came to me moments after I cried about the feelings brought up in me and the connected events in my life. So I actually didn’t go down the track of interpreting it via considering the dream’s symbols, I just had no idea what it mean’t one moment, cried about some things, then the next moment it all became crystal clear.

Now if you’re someone who tends to see dreams and such at face value and you’re a Christian you might say that it was Satan just tormenting me because I’ve invited him into my life by writing about him – saying things like Satan and God are the same thing. Here’s all the posts about that:

Satan Claus
We’re scared to rage at God so we call him Satan
The Devil is a Woman
God is Satan

That’s a lot of stuff about the devil. More about that later. But on the topic at hand. Let say Satan is an entirely separate being and he noticed while surfing the net some posts by me about him and God being not indifferent, clearly he’d be quite happy with this – wouldn’t he? I mean, it is an untruth (apparently) and doesn’t Satan like generally being deceptive? And isn’t the idea that he wants to de-throne his creator and be God?

He’d rather be patting me on the back, not coming to torment me in a dream for providing a whole bunch of free marketing for him. Tormenting me is not the way to get more of all that – is it? Worth thinking about if you are inclined to believe that kind of stuff.

Now back to the dream.

If we take the Jungian approach, each character in my dream is representative of an aspect of myself.

So, let’s look at Santa. He’s also called “Father Christmas”. That was the name I grew up with. Father Christmas gives only gifts to good boys and girls – he punishes the rest by refraining from giving. So not only do you not get your gifts if you were bad, but you get humiliated as well in front of your whole family come Christmas time. Nice!

Who else do we experience a person giving to us when we’re good and taking away when we are bad? Isn’t that the usual method for parenting?

What’s even more relevant to me is my father right now sees me as a bad boy. It all started a few weeks back when I didn’t go to the family Christmas thingy because my wife was ill and I didn’t want to leave her at home by herself.

So the evil Santa is my dad but more closely represents my emotional perspective on my father – who the dream is telling me, I still want be the “good boy” for – to receive the gift – my father’s love – in other words, receiving the love also makes me feel worthy of being loved. So lets just say I don’t feel worthy and that is being reflected in my external reality right now.

My father and mother have chosen not resume a relationship unless the relationship suits what the want from it. Problem is what they want is for me to be unloving to myself by accepting their projections of anger, character judgement on myself and my wife, accepting anything said contrary to my own personal experience and not question them on any of this.

(Update: Parent’s are now willing to talk through a mediation process. Certainly to be confronting for all)

But back on topic, what’s interesting is the dream language and how perfect it is.

I’ve shown the connection to the evil Santa and my father. But what about me?

In the dream I was a Pinocchio type character. I was wooden and made of wooden cubes like kids building blocks. Pinocchio if you remember wanted his creator’s (father’s) love by becoming a real boy. So he set himself to prove his worth and this led him down the wrong track, he became a “bad” boy. Pinocchio also had a peculiar trait that exposed any lie by an external change – his nose would grow.

First up – wooden. Tells me I am unable to feel the true grief. Wood is not as bad as stone which, in degrees is harder heart. The phrase in the Bible is relevant here (Ezekiel 36:26):

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

Pinocchio’s (my) heart of wood then is not quite ready to feel the emotional truth on this but not being a heart of stone is actually on it’s way to feeling with a heart of flesh. A heart of flesh is completely open to feeling.

The other reference to Pinocchio’s condition, is really an emphasis of this. Pinocchio is unable to be a convincing liar. In fact his nose growing kind of precludes him from actually lying at all as it’s immediately obvious to anyone when he distorts truth. So the intent of lying to avoid responsibility can never be achieved. It’s indicating to me that I’m closer now to a person with “the heart of flesh” – a person that cannot deny truth even to oneself. Truthfully, I’m finding it hard and harder to avoid truth, even if there’s a part in me wants to “white lie” to make things easier, I’m finding there’s a physical repulsion in me that automatically arises. Kind of like eating something really sour.

Interestingly my folks feel my disclousure of our family life is a lie and an avenue to avoid personal responsibility.

The next part is fairly straight-forward as to the origin of my wooden heart. I was made of blocks, childhood wooden blocks. Hence emotional blocks (blockages) from childhood. So that’s point me in the right direction.

The next part after that was about being laid down on a table – it was like an operating table and evil Santa started cutting through my limbs here. There was a huge amount of fear in me in the dream at that time. What I did notice was that the blocks were flying out around me as I was being hacked into.

This is about how I am to have a heart of flesh – through the willingness to confront the fear. This willingness is not about standing up as an equal aggressor but lying down, baring myself (my truth) despite the fear. And this is the path to removing my blocks. It is the confrontation that doesn’t defend, doesn’t protect and allows all feeling (bad and good ones) to surface through the fear, or even while experiencing the fear that all these childhood blocks will be dismantled.

And the devil in the background – who / what is that? This is as Jung often states “the shadow” of myself. In the dream, that’s just where he lurked – behind the scene, in a darkened corner of the room, too dark to see but a presence I was fully aware of being there. The shadow of myself from an emotional perspective is the damaged self – the pain that exists inside of me that I’m unwilling even now to see, let alone feel.

The shadow represents the deepest causal emotions still and now within me.

UPDATE: Another relevant dream last night: I spoke to my father about my emotional hurt caused by him. At that point he turned to his mother (now dead) and told her that she hit him as a child (hit could just as well mean caused emotional pain). She denied it, but it was clear to all of us that she knew she lied. Both my father and grandmother began to tear-up. I told them that they are feeling the truth and that it’s good for people to cry about such things. Suddenly I felt a profound sense of peace and a love I felt perhaps was from God to me.

Cause it’s never there and I can’t even share, what Ive tried to hide from me.

Something unloved, something unheard, something I can’t even see.

Hidden from me.

How can I believe, How can I believe you love me?
When I am who I am and I am who I am,
and I’m not even good enough for me.

Good enough for me.

Pain runs through life
Pleasure’s other side
Fear, some say, gives us such long lives
Leads us where we drive
Time will soon be born
It is starting at the dawn
And the world is moving towards
Things like opposites and wars
And one knows to hear the birds sing
There was nothing til the beginning
And the water from my eyes
Is because I care who dies
Although death is transforming
There is nothing after the ending
Everything is eternal
Nothingness does not exist
No thing has ever become nothing
And nothing has never become something
What is has always been and will always be

You know I’ve worn this old heart,
though it’s been holding up.
It’s breaking down and broken up,
from the seams, falling apart.

I can’t hold it on my own,
still waiting on a broken throne.
It’s clearer now, I see,
the place you hold for me.

All I have to do is leave it up to you, to make me what you intend to.

And all I have to do is leave it up to you, to make me what you intend to, to make me what you intend to.

Before I knew it was all laid out,
just crumpled up and thrown about.
Turn the page to what is mine,
through the deepest pain, love divine.

On the darkest night I screamed it out,
I’ve nothing left to give out.
I’m alone, don’t know what I’m about,
then a light shines from your house.

All I have to do is leave it up to you, to make me what you intend to.

And all I have to do is leave it up to you, to make me what you intend to, to make me what you intend to.

God always holds a gift out to us called love.

We scream and shout and jump up and down…

“I want it, I want it.. Why can’t I have it?”

God says…

“Here, take it with your hands, I made it just for you, all you have to do is drop those bags you carry called fear and doubt and you can hold my love for eternity”

This story is a great analogy about value…

A well-known speaker started off his seminar holding up a $20.00 bill. In the room of 200, he asked, “Who would like this $20 bill?” Hands started going up. He said, “I am going to give this $20 to one of you but first, let me do this.” He proceeded to crumple up the $20 dollar bill. He then asked, “Who still wants it…?” Still the hands wer…e up in the air. “Well,” he replied, “What if I do this?” And he dropped it on the ground and started to grind it into the floor with his shoe. He picked it up, now crumpled and dirty. “Now, who still wants it?” Still the hands went into the air. “My friends, we have all learned a very valuable lesson. No matter what I did to the money, you still wanted it because it did not decrease in value. It was still worth $20. Many times in our lives, we are dropped, crumpled, and ground into the dirt by the decisions we make and the circumstances that come our way. We feel as though we are worthless. But no matter what has happened or what will happen, you will never lose your value. Dirty or clean, crumpled or finely creased, you are still priceless to those who DO LOVE you. The worth of our lives comes not in what we do or who we know, but by WHO WE ARE. You are special-Don’t EVER forget it.

I believe it originates from Paulo Coelho. It does bring up something about how we place money’s value above our own.

It seems we have things mixed up. Money has no inherent value on its own. We put an artificial value on it but the fact is it’s a piece of paper, nothing more. Whereas humans have an inherent value, every single one of us.

Instead of understanding that, we believe we are valueless inherently and we need to earn (or prove) our value to others and ourselves. It’s the error belief that we are valueless as a starting point that begins all this but the truth is – no matter how much artificial value we accumulate (money), because we know in our souls that it is only artificial, this direction won’t ever convince us (emotionally) that we are of inherent value in the first place.

Money soon enough though will be kind of useless anyway, right now it’s losing even its artificial value.. we might have millions of these bits of paper and their best use might be for burning and keeping us warm but considering it’s often made of plastic now, it’s not going to be even much use in that regards either.

Immediately I woke. I was a bit freaked out. I prayed to God, I basically said I was afraid to fall asleep. Then my two and a half year old daughter, who was still sleeping between myself and my wife held my hand. She actually reached over and grabbed it.

It’s clearly not a new idea with Santa.

Here an interesting link: http://www.av1611.org/othpubls/santa.html

And the movie: