There are many ways we can connect dreams to astrology, and many don't require that you know all about your Natal Chart. In this column we will be exploring the symbolic rather than predictive aspects of astrology. Symbolic astrology attempts to use the images of astrological to give meaning to one's life and empower choices rather than predict paths. We do this by imaginal overlay. In this process we impleach, (poetically interweave) dream, image, feeling, life and symbol in a way to evoke a felt sense of the dream's imagery and its position in our life.

This year we are focusing each month on a different House. The inner circle of the Natal or Birth Chart is divided into 12 distinct regions know as Houses. They relate to everyday activates. One will be about physical appearances and temperament, while another relates to possessions, for example. Planets and signs fall within these Houses and influence the areas of focus. We will be watching for images of planets, signs and other celestial events and hopefully begin to see the emergence of an astrological chart that dips into birth charts, dreams, and our waking life.

The Seventh House. Libra. Just as the First House relates to personality, the Seventh House relates to close relationships, marriage partners, close business partners and open enemies.

The characteristics that are valued in others and sought in a partner, as well as characteristics possessed by our enemies that make us vulnerable are found in this house. Thus we will have both Jungian Shadow and Anima/Animus issues here. A correction to this. Generally the Jungians feel the Anima/Animus a very strong archetype in determining a persons libidinal desires, but a *mate* is usually better found in someone that can satisfy both the mother/father complex as well as the anima/animus complex. Both the perfect mate and the not-so-perfect mate may show up in Seventh House dreams.

Dream: "I am at a show an watching an actress who I know immediately I was meant to be with for life. She comes to my table and leads me across the room like a pet. People laugh all around but I don't care."

This is more the "siren" aspect of the Anima and she leads the man to ruin and is nearly irresistible. A more positive aspect is the "Sophia" that leads a man to his true Self.

Dream: "After wandering for hours in a forest I feel quite lost. A woman appears and leads me up a hill. I follow her to a cave near the top of the hill that I realize is my cave, and I am the teacher that lives here."

Seventh house dreams may make us aware of the characteristics we are seeking in a partner an will (hopefully) someday develop ourselves.

Dream: "My sister visits me with an unknown woman. While I sit in the kitchen they bring up bags of potatoes and other vegetables from the cellar. I think they are planning a large celebration or getting ready for the Fall or Winter. It makes me feel like I=m part of a larger family."

The Shadow will generally have 3 characteristics, they will appear to us as morally inferior (drunken, braggart, thief, glutton, lazy), will get under our skin without much provocation and we would rather die than have someone think we are like them. These qualities are our own, but we have denied them for so long they now appear foreign and disgusting. If they are deeply repressed, they may show up as monsters trying to get us.

In the Seventh House, the characteristics that make us vulnerable will be more emphasized, even though the characters may show other shadow characteristics.

Dream: "I went to B's party, even though I knew there would be trouble. As soon as she open the door to let me in, she wickedly complemented my hair which for some reason would not stay up. I kept trying to put it up but the latch in pin wasn't working. Later B. also mentioned my dress, which had the same latch problem as the zipper on the side wouldn't stay up. "

Dream: "I had counted the money from the register twice, but when my partner came by to check, I couldn't get it to balance. I felt like he was being really smug about this and it somehow proved he was right about everything we had disagreed about."

Often the Seventh house is about fate that seems to be in the hands of our partners. Good and bad luck, happiness and unhappiness, and other events that seem to be "outer" directed. A growthful way of approaching these events is to see that they are manifestations of our inner life. In dreamwork, this is a common interpretive approach and a much more useful approach than blaming the stars, even if the stars are to blame.

Thus dreamwork in the Seventh House becomes essential for those seeking partners as well as those who have partners. Patterns of hurt and rejection may become apparent. Often those who seeks partners based on superficial values of appearance, financial status, emotional dependency or social pressure are simply planting seeds of loneliness. These values will show up dreamland.

On the more positive and fun side, looking at dreams from the view of the Seventh House leads to finding just what it is that does satisfy us and produces positive, productive unions. These partnerships can be outer as well as inner ones. By attention to the values and characteristics pf partnerships, as well as contracts and agreements, we can arrive at unions based on harmony in both others and ourselves.

Next month: 8th House - Crimes, inheritances of money and emotional patterns. Send in your dreams to M. Aionia at aionia@dreamgate.com

Island (2000 July). Astrology Extra: Island's 7th House Dreams and Questions. Electric Dreams 7(7). Retrieved July 14, 2000 from Electric Dreams on the World Wide Web: http://www.dreamgate.com/electric-dreams

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Following is a journal entry of dreams that focus on seventh house issues, precipitating questions that I would like to share:

July 8, 1997. Journal Entry. Vivid dream about Nikki. I'm avoiding transcribing it, only because I don't understand why I'm dreaming of her. We were never friends because she treated me as if we were enemies, sometimes treating me with disdain; other times as if I didn't even exist, and she even went so far as to influence how others treated me. Her best friend who openly competed with me and lost for head majorette actually slapped me without provocation when we were in training one afternoon. What a humiliation! Nikki's best friend also became intimate with my boyfriend, who became ex-boyfriend in the process, and he later told me, in derision, that she said to him, "What did you ever see in her (me)?" What was worse, Nikki was the most popular and well-liked person in our high school. But she brought me a lot of pain (I have not actually seen her in thirty years, with the one exception where she attended the funeral of the gay brother of her best friend who had died from AIDS. As I recall, nothing had changed -- 17 years later, she was still as arrogant and aloof as always. This last encounter was before the suicide of her son). Even several nights ago, I dreamed of her and didn't record it. That dream was where she was still mourning the fact of her 16-year-old son's suicide. (Nikki had become a well-liked teacher in that same high-school, but they, for whatever reasons, moved to another state. Her son, apparently, was violently opposed to the move, and took his life.) In the dream, I took compassion on her, held her in my arms, and rocked her, saying that, one day, I promised, she would see that that event, (which happened at least a decade ago), held great meaning for her life in the overall scheme of things. My thought after awaking was, "Why did I assume I had that kind of power? To promise her that she, at some future point, would resolve that kind of pain?" I also dreamed, I believe it was Sunday morning, that my husband's former business partner is present, talking, just as my husband and I are to head out for Catalina Island. I ask my husband if he still wants to go to Catalina. First, he says, "no," and then at the very last moment, he changes his mind again. I say, "It's too late," and am very firm about it. Because of my decisiveness, the relationship ends. Then a famous actor takes me into his family, places me in the movies, primarily because I wasn't striving for it at all, as I had given up on that lifetime hope and dream that I could be with someone who, not only would embrace me wholeheartedly, but would cherish me as well. It came as a total surprise. That dream left me feeling ambivalent, until I realized that, at first, my husband wasn't especially devoted to me. As a result, we never went to "Catalina Island." Instead I poured my energies into work in a very decisive manner, uncharacteristic of me, since I really don't draw the line about anything generally. That decisiveness led to a remarkable shift in our relationship, and he became like this famous actor and, just like in the dream, he takes me into his family, places me in "our movie," a total surprise. Now onto the dream of Nikki this morning: somehow we're visiting Nikki, my husband and myself. First there's a car that we're in. Our prime worry is where we will make love. Apparently even though we visit Nikki, no one is actually offering to put us up or house us anywhere, perhaps because it's not an overnight visit. I think in the dream of making love in the parking lot of where we currently live but realize it's too lighted an area and we will be seen. Then Nikki negotiates with me for some books. Now she actually drives a very hard bargain, although I freely tell her that she may have anything that is on my shelf. I then also tell her the actual recent event of the big box of books I packed in New York, books very important to me since they represented five hard years of the study of poetry, just before moving to California, about 75 books in all, only to have them scattered by postal authorities as the box was negligently handled on a conveyer belt and immediately sent to San Francisco, where my books now flounder in an ocean of books coming from at least ten other states, never to be retrieved without an exact title supplied to the authorities in writing. As I relive by recounting the event in my dream to Nikki, I am as upset as I was in reality. I then continue to look for a place to make love. At that point Nikki suddenly enters what appears to be a dark closet. She goes down deep inside, and I worry for her. What has happened to her? Did she, too, commit suicide? Or was she showing my husband and I where we might make love? She seems to have entered this dark closet, then lowered herself to a room far below, through some sort of opening or hole in the closet floor. My concern mounts. So I go to the opening in the floor, peer down inside, then call out to her, to see if she needs my help, or to discover what has happened, if she is even still alive. I find that she is actually swimming in that hole.

These dreams, suggesting a very curious seventh house emphasis, reveal roots that go back to childhood, nearly four decades ago. To me, it's an amazing example of how deeply I may be impacted throughout my life by seemingly insignificant, inconsequential events transpiring decades earlier. For in reality, who is Nikki to me now? Why do I care what Nikki did or did not do to me three to four decades ago? Am I still consciously angry with Nikki? How could I allow her to influence my life in the present? Or is she symbolic, gracing me with aspects of myself that I would never be aware of consciously and, even if made to be aware of them, be hard pressed to admit? The fact that dreams are probably the only happening that would ever have Nikki surface, giving rise to a multitude of questions, is yet another example, for me, of what a wonderful healing gift dreams are.

Partnering has always been very important to me, and I have had my share of disappointments, especially through what I perceived to be "open enemies." These few dreams dreamt within one week's period seem to point to the fact that, although I am happily married, I am not done yet as, obviously, I am relating to myself, my business associates, and close intimates in ways that are either serving the relationships or not. How much in reality have I become like Nikki, I must ask myself, first? Am I mourning still a life shattering event from the past, and do I need to take myself in my arms and say to myself, "At some point I'll understand. In the meantime, take courage." How much do my childhood perceptions of how others view me, whether they are my close friend or not, loyal partner or not, open enemy or not, color my present close relationships? Because 23 degree Taurus is on the cusp of my seventh house, I know that I seek stable, committed, trustworthy relationships. Further, I value relationship. Are the dreams suggesting that open enemies must be embraced, forgiven, loved, if relationships are to thrive? Or even more to the point, do I drive too hard a bargain, expecting -- even demanding -- that people be dedicated, committed, stable at all times -- if I am to allow myself to form a close relationship with them?

How did the move from New York to California really impact on me emotionally? Did I, metaphorically, commit suicide, or am I now swimming in a hole far below in my subconscious and have all but disappeared to my loved ones? But as I do not especially appreciate Nikki's style of driving a hard bargain, her arrogance, her superiority, her aloofness which may be my own should I just let her swim around for a while? Or are those aspects of myself being regenerated, far below, in the oceanic depths of my being?

Or is the key to improved relationships to be found in a measure of "decisiveness," as the dream suggests, something so difficult for me, when I recall the house of my undoing (12th house), where Libra sits on the cusp. Does the fact that Libra is on the cusp of my 12th house suggest that relationships in and of themselves are my undoing? Or is the indecisiveness I bring to a relationship, my inability to draw the line, perhaps characteristic of Libra, my undoing in relationships? Should I even fear the ending of relationships? Here the dream suggests that, proverbially, as one door closes, another opens, for when I put my foot down with my husband due to his indecisiveness about going to Catalina (or my own indecisiveness), and say, "no, I will not go at the last moment," the relationship ends, but in reality, it only changes, and is improved.

Books. What do the books symbolize? For me, books are like intimate friends. When I read a book, I have come to know intimately aspects of another person that I would never know otherwise, not even, perhaps, if that person were in actual, close relationship to me day after day after day. Now the dream seems to suggest that, these aspects of humanity that I value so highly -- and the fact that they are poetical -- representing the highest and best qualities -- are actually mishandled and devalued by the "authorities," and are thus dispersed, ending up in an ocean of books (intimate aspects of others) where they cannot be differentiated, one from another. (It is only through a feeling process of differentiation that I can even begin to choose partners, perhaps because Gemini, the fact gatherer, also occupies my 7th house). This drives me wild, both in dream and reality -- 75 of the books. Lost forever. The 7th house, the 5th house, and adding the two together, the 12th house. Again, the 7th house, being closely related -- understanding and owning aspects of self so that partnering can actually result; 5th house, once understanding and owning, expressing those aspects to others so they may or may not choose to form and further relationship -- be it romantically or creatively (as in someone choosing to read a poem I've written, or admire a painting I've painted), only to end in the 12th house, the house of sorrow, shadows and endings, poignantly calling to mind a verse from Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, by William Butler Yeats, which seems to express my sentiments precisely, though all the intellectualization in the world doesn't seem to unlock the truth of the dreams:

The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:
That image can bring wildness, bring a rage
To end all things, to end
What my laborious life imagined, even
The half-imagined, the half-written page;
O but we dreamed to mend
Whatever mischief seemed
To afflict mankind, but now
That winds of winter blow
Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.

Island