May 10, 2024. The subject in Lauren Lawrence’s dreams column this week is Carolyne Roehm, a girl from the Midwest who came to the Big Town and made it right up to the top; a classic story for the dreamers in all of us.
I’ve known Carolyne for some time in a neighborly way as well-known or even famous. She is devoted to beauty, really like an artist, although her canvas is broader. But it’s all around natural beauty. She’s been part of American design culture for over four decades, with a career spanning the fashion, gardening, entertaining, publishing, and decorative arts worlds. This passion for beauty eventually led her into the world of flowers.
She had a serious illness a few years ago, which she has recovered from. She remains industrious in creating books (she’s published twelve) about her pursuit of nature’s beauty and creating a stupendous garden of gardens all around and about her property in Connecticut. She also lives on a mountaintop in Aspen with her longtime companion; and a beautiful duplex apartment on the Upper East Side. Her mission? To teach others how to capture and create beauty in their lives, in both the everyday and out of the ordinary.
But what she is is Brave. And her gardens are her protection. A practical choice, Nature’s beauty; she wears it as a Life jacket.
SOCIETY DREAMS
by Lauren Lawrence
The Dream: I dreamt I walked over this hill and looked down into a low valley. I walked down into it, where there was this glorious, glowing blue light. There was the serenity of a nativity scene … white colors, blue colors. I thought how beautiful all this color was. What is your interpretation?
The Interpretation: Whereas walking up a hill represents the arduous path to the top, walking over the hill means the dreamer has already been there — having surmounted an obstacle or impediment en route. Viewed as a cliche, it reveals that one is past their prime. But in that Roehm has traveled the road to personal achievement, excelled and gone beyond self-negativity, descending into a low valley expresses a yearning for depth, a deeper level of understanding. The valley is symbolic of the immense recessed subliminal landscape of the unconscious, where the instincts emit bright flashes of intention.
Similarly, walking into the blue represents the wish to explore unknown subterranean regions that require courage and daring. In another view, the low valley is a depression the dreamer must experience: There is remorse, the downcast eyes, the descent, the solitary foray into a hallowed landscape infused with blues.
There is the recognition that sadness is only a certain place in time. As such, Roehm makes it a glowing place and vivifies the moment as only Roehm can do, and has done throughout her illustrious designing career. The luminous nativity scene is self- referential: There is an inner passion for renewal and rebirth. Something transcendent has awakened within the dreamer’s unconscious. One understands she has seen the light!
Colors represent emotions. As such, blue symbolizes sorrow, but is also phonetically interpreted as “blew,” signifying a blown chance — that which has gone the way of the wind, as it were. Yet Carolyne has realized an illuminating revelation that all feeling is beautiful, a symbol of heart, no matter what the feeling elicits.
For private dream analysis, contact laurenlawrence@aol.com
