A while ago I dreamed of walking into a home which was for sale and finding it was abandoned and full from top to bottom with mess. Here is a link to that dream.

Messes in dreams started to symbolize ego for me a few years ago when I was working through Richard Hasting’s 19-Day Transformation Program which is now able to be purchased on his website Dreams For Peace.

The reason a mess symbolizes ego is that the ego is the part of us which acts out of fear, anger or other negative emotions. The actions which come from ego usually end up being hurtful for the dreamer or those closely associated with the dreamer. Now when I dream of messes I stop and ask myself, “Where is there a big mess in my life?” And the answer to this question is where I start to clean things up.

The problem in this dream is that the biggest mess in the dream wasn’t mine to clean up. Whose mess is it? The owners made the mess with their things but then they left and no longer own the house or the mess. Who even knows where they are. If we waited for them to clean it up it would turn into one of those rotton old homes, over-run by weeds and garbage and turn into a dump. Who wants that in the neighbourhood? No one.

Does the mess belong to the real estate agent? She doesn’t want anything to do with it. She feels she didn’t make the mess and doesn’t even want to sell the house but she does it because she’s ordered by the bank to do so. She doesn’t care if the house sells or not. She figures she didn’t make the mess and she doesn’t care if the house sells so why should she clean it. Her role as agent does not include house-cleaning, she figures. And that is a common way of looking at things in our culture.

The bank now owns the house legally, so should they hire someone to come and clean it. In the real world this is the most likely solution because we tend to move around money and people by the roles they hold in their day jobs. It’s not like a teller from a bank will send an interested individual to go and clean the house up. No. Things don’t work like that. The problem is who decides at the bank to invest money into an old house in a run down neighbourhood? The house and the people who used to live there and the people who live nearby have no value to them bankers. So they didn’t jump at the chance of cleaning up the place first.

So the problem I had in the dream is that since I saw the physical mess in the house and since I saw the tangled cultural mess of ownership I had the desire to just start cleaning the mess myself. But I stopped myself because it seemed to me it was not my place to clean it. I just wanted to clean it because I know how to clean and I have some time and I want to help.

But no one would pay me to do the work and if I give my time to volunteer to clean this mess then I will not be doing work which pays my bills and clearly paying my bills was on my mind because that showed up in the next scene of the dream.

I don’t know for sure but I think the message of the dream might be about this old tendency I have to work for free and that I’m seeing how it doesn’t serve me anymore. It puts me at a disadvantage and in the past even crippled me.

That leaves me to think about where is there a mess like this in my real life and what can I do to ensure I don’t end up spending time on things which are not beneficial to me and my family and my work.