The Dream: It’s as if I am travelling by ferry to France and back, first alone, then with my wife. There’s a train to the quay, queuing, then embarking and disembarking from the ferry—the actual crossing over features. Needing to stay the night before or after taking the ferry, we find ourselves not in a hotel but more like a hostel, with perhaps four double beds in a ward-like, long, wide, and high dormitory. We are the only people using a bed, though when I wake up very early, I find the other beds are probably occupied.
I’m in northern France somewhere in Normandy, probably with a TV production crew. We are in the centre of a town somewhere. I’m unsure how I’ve ended up with them, but they realise I know the area and am good at talking to people, and they ask me if I’d like to do some of the interviews (they don’t have a presenter or reporter). The producer asks in France if I speak, and I say I’m fluent, spoken and comprehension, though my written French is poor and when working in French TV decades before, I’d always had a bilingual P.A.
An interviewing situation comes up. I’m invited to step up. The middle-aged woman has lots of stories and colour and enjoys talking.
As we set up and I approach her, she turns into a rabbit. Determined not to be fazed by this, I made conversation with her in my basic French. She begins to talk about where she comes from. I ask when the story we’re interested in began, and she says it began when she was still studying. I then stumbled over my grammar in my efforts to ask when and where this was, when she was studying. She is hesitant and distracted by the producer, who then steps in, thinking he can help by telling her what she has to say. She then calms up, and being a rabbit, she hops off.
I tell the producer you should keep it conversational. Help them talk and say it in their own words, not put words into their mouths.
The Analysis:
Having written the dream down as fully as I could remember it, I did not then ask AI to tell me what it meant. That is precisely what I wanted to avoid. I have become increasingly wary of the idea that a dream can be decoded by attaching fixed meanings to its objects: ferry equals transition, rabbit equals vulnerability, France equals escape, and so on. Jung’s approach is much more demanding, but also much more convincing to me, because it starts from the assumption that the dream belongs to the dreamer. Its images may draw on wider cultural material, but their meaning has to be recovered through my own associations, memories, emotions and present circumstances.
The method I use with AI is therefore deliberately structured. I give it the dream and instruct it not to interpret anything at first. Instead, I ask it to work in a Jungian, spiralling way: returning repeatedly to the same details from slightly different angles, asking context-specific questions that arise from my answers rather than following a generic questionnaire. I mark my own responses with “J>”, and these become the material for the next round. The process matters because it prevents the analysis from leaping too quickly towards a neat explanation. A detail that seems unimportant at first can become central once it is connected to something in waking life.
That happened several times with this dream. The journey to Normandy by ferry initially looked like background scenery, but when I was asked what the ferry meant to me personally, I did not associate it with romance or adventure at all. I associated it with delay, bureaucracy and the tedious business of getting somewhere. We had in fact made almost exactly that journey two weeks earlier. The train, the waiting, the check-in, the bus, passport control and the temporary overnight accommodation all belonged to “getting there”, not to the destination itself. That immediately shifted the dream away from abstract symbolism and towards lived experience.
The most productive questions came when the dream moved into television. I was asked what it felt like when the crew realised that I knew the area, could speak French and was good at talking to people. My answer was that I felt like an insider, useful, competent, and flattered to be asked to conduct the interview. From there came a much more important association: whenever I have temporarily returned to television production, it has felt like a homecoming. I began to recognise that the dream was not merely recalling an old job. It was touching an abandoned professional identity and the question of what became of the abilities I developed there.
Another example came from the woman turning into a rabbit. Had I asked for an immediate interpretation, I could easily have been given a standard symbolic answer about rabbits. The questioning process did something far more useful. I was asked what actually changed in the woman from my point of view. My answer was that she remained exactly the same person to me, but became quieter, more timid, more self-conscious, easier to startle and harder to hold in conversation. That led directly to a present-day association with coaching teenagers. Some swimmers are open and talkative; others suddenly become inward, reluctant to explain themselves, or simply want to get on with the set. The point was not that “rabbit means teenager”. The point was that the dream had found an image for a change in relational availability that I recognised from waking life.
The questions then began to tighten around authority and competence. I had described myself as being “in control” of the interview, yet I also insisted that good interviewing means not controlling the interviewee. Being asked to explain that contradiction was useful. I realised that my idea of control has changed. It now means controlling the conditions rather than the person: remaining calm, reading the situation, knowing when to intervene and when not to, giving the other person enough agency to relax and speak in their own words. That is as true in coaching as it was in television.
The dream’s moment of linguistic difficulty also became much more revealing through questioning. I am fluent enough in French to understand almost everything, but I can still find myself searching for the right construction. I then made the connection with coaching: when another coach writes a session in shorthand on the whiteboard, I know the language of swimming well, but I may not immediately understand every detail. The feeling is similar. I am not ignorant; I am in a language I know, but not always with total fluency. From there came one of the more important insights of the whole process: competence, for me now, increasingly means not being rattled by what I do not immediately know. It means asking, checking, adjusting and accepting that I do not need to be the fount of all knowledge.
We kept going until the questions began to repeat the same underlying tensions from different directions: television and coaching, authority and subordination, speaking and listening, recognition and retirement, experience and uncertainty. At that point it became clear that the spiralling inquiry had done enough. The analysis was then drawn together provisionally, with a distinction between what I had actually revealed and what could only be inferred.
The strongest conclusion was not that the dream had one hidden meaning waiting to be uncovered. It was that several parts of my life had begun to gather around the same psychological theme. The television producer I once was had not disappeared. The skills had migrated elsewhere: into coaching, writing, civic work, environmental work and other forms of leadership. What had changed was my relationship to authority and recognition. I no longer need quite so much to prove that I am competent. I am more interested in judgement, timing and wisdom: when to speak, when to ask, when to intervene, when to stand back and when simply to let someone get on with what they need to do.
That was where the rabbit finally mattered. The dream did not teach me what a rabbit “symbolises”. It helped me understand that sometimes the person in front of me is still perfectly capable of understanding and responding, but not at that moment, and not necessarily to me. The mature response may be to remain calm, not take it personally, and let the rabbit hop away.
The whole process took several substantial rounds of questioning and response, spread over roughly a day. That slowness was part of its value. The eventual interpretation was not imposed at the beginning and then justified afterwards. It emerged from the accumulation of my own associations. By the end, the dream had opened onto something much larger than the peculiar image of interviewing a rabbit in Normandy. It had become a reflection on ageing, competence, professional identity, listening, authority, relinquishment and the quieter forms of usefulness that become possible when proving oneself matters less.
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