reply to post by WhiteHat
Oh wow. We have a lot in common! I am living in a country that is not my native one too. I've been here for 20 years though. In the beginning, I
wasn't planning on staying this long, I didn't speak the language here, and was pretty unhappy for a couple of years. I began to introvert a lot
because, well, I just couldn't feel a part of anything around me anyway!
I took up hiking by myself, meditating in nature, and basically just became very very tuned to my interior. My dreams and visions all began to get
very important to me, and a lot of strange phenomena began to happen.
One of them was that my dreams, or visions I'd have when meditating, would start to show me things before they happened. -Like I saw the death of one
of my parents, and it upset me for days, until I got a call from my stepfather to tell me my mother had died unexpectedly.
Now, I don't want to suggest that in this case, your dream predicts a real future event, I get the feeling it is not.
But what I think happened to me in time is that my previous ego broke down progressively, being in an environment which was so totally different, in
which my ideas, values and beliefs no longer applied, and no one else was with me to sustain them. I began to lose myself and my perception of my
place in the world.
I now see that as a phase which was beneficial to me in the long run- if you really want to be a self made person, you'd have to be stripped down of
all your previosu education, down past the subconscious conditioning you recieved as a child, to start again choosing your values, views and ideas
consciously. But that stripping down is scary. I think it was Carl Jung that described this process- in order to be sane, you have to first go insane.
Because that transition means you lose all the barriers that protect your mind and are open then to all kinds of energy in the collective
consciousness.
That is all hard to explain, and I haven't foudn a clear and easy way of decribing it yet. But to get to my guess at your dream, I propose this-
Your boyfriend is the man whom you project upon your inner masculine side, your
animus.
One way to look at the masculine side of yourself is to consider it the ego. The consciousness of self that focuses intent and goals into the future.
We can have that part of us change a few times in life, depending upon how we are projecting our our future, and therefore the meanings of everything
we do in the present in accordance to that future.
In other words, our ego can die, when our vision of our future become unclear or changes drastically. When that happens, a new ego, a new vision of
future, goals, and intents is born and slowly develops, and because of that, our self concept changes.
You may have your previous view of your future undergoign a drastic change, in which all your previous projections of future possibility are being let
go, and perhaps in favor of searching a new vision of future, and your place in the world, and how and what you will do in it.
This may not be telling you about the passing away of your boyfriend, but telling you of the passing away of your previous ego, your self concept. The
one that was supposed to die, could actually be a symbol of that, and you might have some fear that if you were to radically change- become no longer
what you were- would you also lose your boyfriend??? He fell in love with a specific kind of person..... if that person became different.....maybe his
love would go with too?
That is just my guess and I am just throwing it out there on the table, only you can ultimately figure out what it really meant. But like I said, I am
(was) in a similar situation. When I did begin to let my new personality and new intents start to take place, I got very scared that I would loose my
husband (especially since I was very dependant upon him, being in his country!) The new me that was emerging was very different than what he had
originally fallen in love with.
But ultimately, I had no choice. I could not stop the growth, no more than a caterpillar can avoid becoming a butterfly. I can tell you this though-
my change was into a woman more powerful, more dynamic, more wise, more exciting! Not only did he not stop loving me, his love for me grew stronger!
I eventually had to accept that I was never going home, and that unless I wanted to stay depressed about that for the rest of my life, I had to let go
of the past and start investing myself completely in this environment. It was good a decision for me, and opened a whole new world of opportunity. Be
here now, and don't be afraid of your boyfriend being overwhelmed by the butterfly that might emerge! Growth in such circumstance is unavoidable-
your mind is being expanded by your experiences, and at some point it just has to shed it's barriers to form larger ones to contain it..