I had a dream on Thursday night in which I went back to school to get another graduate degree. I woke up around 7:30, fresh from the dream, and very happy. Upon reflection a few minutes later, I realized that going back to school to get another graduate degree would be a terrible idea for me, and wasn't possibly what I was happy about. I think what school represented in the dream, and the thing that made me happy to think about, was the idea of the kind of opportunity where you both have control over your path and a set number of specific if arbitrary hoops to jump through along the way. School in reality rarely felt like this, but in the dream it felt like school as the balance of a general pre-established direction and freedom to define your own path in the specific. Some measure of safety and some measure of the excitement of improvisation and discovery. And I think it was comforting to project myself into starting fresh with something, neatly wiping the slate clean like you do at the start of every academic year when you're in school. I could apply it to any number of things.
Perhaps I'd been affected by my reading of my Rob Brezny horoscope earlier that week:
Patches of yellow forsythias and blue gentian flowers have sprouted
high in the Austrian Alps this winter, appearing where snow usually
dominates the landscape. I predict that you're about to experience a
metaphorically similar phenomenon, Pisces. There'll be an unprecedented
blossoming in a situation that has previously been unable to support
growth. I wouldn't be surprised if some of your frozen assets began to
thaw as well.
As long as that "unprecedented blossoming" is a good thing, then this works. My fear is that the blossoming would be like "I suddenly grew an extra arm."