This morning, my daughter was reminiscing about a time when she wanted to eat cake cut into tiny cubes. Cake cut into tiny cubes, I said. What do you think was going on with that?
It wasn’t a dream, Mom, she said. You don’t have to interpret it.
You don’t have to, but one thing dreamwork has been teaching me is that you definitely can if you want to. Starting to pick up messages from your dreams is a great start (and I’m still hoping to get into more detail about this process once this tarot series is finished), but the real trick is weaving that information into your daily life.
Since cups have to do with the subconscious – our personal depths – and queens can be read as embodiment, the Queen of Cups (like this whale queen from the Anima Mundi Tarot) may not be the main card of the dream world, but it might be the best card for bringing those dreams to life.
I’ve been thinking about the cake thing, for example, and since Catherine Shainberg says it’s fine to offer an opinion on the dreams of others as a kind of “secondary dreamer,” here’s what comes up for me:
Cake is highly desirable and associated with both appetite and lack of control, but as a comfort food it can also be associated with care and nurturing. The careful cubing could be another way of representing such an offering of attention, though at the same time it feels to me like a potential foil of any control issues at play. The cake here is definitely not infinite, it is precisely measured in tiny cubes! To me, this feels like a dream of integration, appetite balanced against ego.
I was happy to hear that my daughter got her cubes of cake, which is another important aspect of all this. Not only can you often read waking life like a dream, but you can also feed the cyclical process of dreaming by acting materially on the images you receive from both.