Your Messenger message:

"Good morning, Tony! I dreamt of being busy with teaching and other work at the ________ in _____. There is a scene in the dream where i tried on clothes but the one I liked wearing was a pair of denim cullottes.

"As i have taken an additional vow in ( real life ), I was aware even in my dream that there are clothes I could no longer wear, so i kept on asking 'Does this come on as jeans ? Or it is loose enough to look like culottes. I was assured by others that, indeed, they look like cullottes, not jeans.

"Strangely, a close friend of long ago who died in August was with me in my dream. She and i were often together. As it was dark in the ________ area at night, i felt safe walking with two of my ____ students always trailing behind us as we go home. One of the ____s is identifiable while the other is not. He is one of my favorite students in terms of character but he is one of two who flunked last semester.

"In this dream, i was very happy in that pair of culottes and happy there were always two ____s walking behind my friend and me.

"Can you interpret the above dream?"

My reply:

Hello _________!

Whenever we do vows or consciously change our lifestyles and our values, our old self still lingers, thus rendering the change incomplete especially on the level of the unconscious. Real change does not occur when we deliberately engineer it, it happens only from the inside going out, and it happens when we are truly ready, not when we want it to happen.

The culottes represent your clinging on, albeit by a thread, to a previous lifestyle.

Your dead friend represents your old self--not your dead self, for even our dead selves can come back to haunt us.

The students who walk behind you in your dream represent your defense mechanisms. The darkness represents your fear--perhaps fear of regression, or fear of the unknown.

Reread the last sentence of your dream narrative:

"In this dream, i was very happy in that pair of culottes and happy there were always two ____s walking behind my friend and me."

Do you see the answer now?

Meaningful change is not destroying and rejecting the old in order to take in the new. It is taking in the new and merging it with the old, for both realities comprise the yin and the yang in our lives.