This lunar new year, I had a strange dream. I was standing in my childhood home looking out to the backyard. My childhood house had the entire wall pointing out to the backyard like thick glass, so you could see everything happening outside the street.
In this dream, I was looking outside the glass and saw a giant orange snake-like creature with large black dots on its back. The head was not the head of a snake, though, but rather the head of a dragon or a naga
This dragon-snake-like creature was lying asleep on a tree bent like a rainbow.
Out of nowhere, a yellow frog shows up with a big trigram covering its back. The trigram was "Qian" or heaven.
The frog went to the dragon, looked straight into its eyes, and did a 180 jump onto its back like it was ready to ride it. The dragon woke up, and they flew away together.
Dumbfounded as I was experiencing this in the dream, I looked for other people in the house to tell them what I had seen. I wanted them to come to the glass wall to show them, but as I was returning to the wall, the dragon came flying toward me at full speed. Then I woke up.
What amazed me was not just the content of the dream but the timing of it. It happened on the night of the lunar new year. The dragon is a creature you will see a lot in east Asia, and my wife and I had visited Vietnam the month before.
Dreams are not always random
Dreams come in different shapes and sizes. Some dreams are full of a bunch of random stuff. Often a result of our deep subconscious working things out. Other dreams (like the one I had on Lunar New Year) feel like they get imprinted into your brain. It is easy to remember and might have and typically have hidden or symbolic meanings.
I am still trying to figure out what this dragon and frog were about. But this dream holds a deeper meaning and does not fall in the category of the more random ones that are hard to remember.
In Vietnam, the dragon symbolizes Yang, power, and leadership. The frog symbolizes prosperity. In ancient Taoist thought, the trigram Qian (on the frog's back) symbolizes emptiness/nothingness, potentiality, creativity, and ideas. This will be a good experiment to see if 2023 will bring this.
If you, my dear reader, have experienced strange dreams, I would love to hear about them.