Death of the last king

[Rhapsode]

Here's a dream I had last night. It was my final dream before getting up, so this is why I was able to remember it from beginning to end and why it was particularly vivid. I have a few ideas about what it could mean but would love to hear your own interpretations if you have any. Also, it is important to note that I was not a participant in the dream, merely a floating point of awareness.

The dream: It is an English style court -- medieval in style but with the anachronistic presence of cameras and news crews. The crowd is all there to see the crowning of the prince, who is young and sickly. His mother the queen stands behind him. She is old and looks slightly alien, like an idea of a person but not actually a person herself, like some sort of mannequin. An old man in black appears in the court room, and all stand in awe before him (I think that he looks a little bit like Christopher Lee). He is clearly a man of great magical talent. He is angry and cries out that "the prince is not fit to rule, and indeed shall be the last king", and strikes the boy down, killing him where he stands. No one attempts to stop the wizard, for his strength is unfathomable. But, as if acknowledging that this is the way it must end, the old man lets the guards take hold of him, throw him to the ground, and quarter him with their blades into four evenly divided pieces. He is very clearly dead. The pieces of the old man's body disappear and a black horse appears in the air above where it lay, beating at the air with its hooves. With a loud whinny, it rides into a fiery vortex that has opened in the ground and which closes behind it.  

[IndigoGhost]

I would be making a wild guess but could the little boy be your child mind and the wizard be your more "Occult" or "Magically" inclined side, the side that interests you in things that are not normal and every day occurring. He strikes down your child mind and wants to take over but in that he dies as well leaving the black horse which is a combination of the two, the childhood innocence of the horse and the black color is your wizard that it also takes with it. Maybe a creation of a new outlook, or one you wish to achieve.   

[greg lousy]

Thanks IG, I like to see people taking real shots in this dream interpretation area.

I'm just gonna put this out there and run with it instead of qualifying everything with "perhaps", "maybe", and "I don't know you very well but"
All my posts here are shots in the dark, I just happen to love shooting in the dark.

      I think the prince could represent an inner child thing, or the traditional path - whatever your upbringing would indicate you should do with your life, and the wizard is your idea of truth, which renders the traditional path meaningless. The truth wizard then chooses destruction over authority. Maybe the truest king is no king.

     I don't know about the horse, maybe it left for the realm of unbridled freedom.

     The newscasters are a reminder of your concern that whatever inner transition your aiming at will be exposed in ways you won't be able to control and that others may not understand. - In fact, a certain sacrifice may be necessary.
    
        Sacrifice seems to be a big theme here. The wizard sacrifices both the child and himself.  In fact, the whole structure of the world is sacrificed (the succession of kings).
      
        We cannot move ahead carrying the child of the past, and to merely replace that child defeats the point. All this and we don't even know where we're going. The truth wizard inevitably vanishes.   Any internal change has its difficult reckoning with the world, and maybe part of you is thinking about that.
      
    You seem to be an inner adventurer of sorts, and sometimes it seems to me that this path is very exciting and can have frightening implications for the ego. Thats what I think this dream is about.

    You said you had this dream just before awakening - how did you feel?
      

[Rhapsode]

IndigoGhost: Great interpretation of the two main figures. I agree that, though I was not myself the child king within the dream, he more than likely represented me. And you saying that it specifically represented my 'child mind' really puts his role into perspective. I've spent the past few months getting rid of things and habits that I no longer wish to be a part of me or my life: physical objects, mindsets, goals, some of these things even having been carried over from as early as childhood, for I've seen my unhealthy reliance on them to protect me from the outside (as well as the inner) world, much as a sick child depends on the nurture of any nurse available. Thus he was struck down in life by my actions as much as he was in the dream.

Greg: Geez criminy. You've really given me some food for thought. "Maybe the truest king is no king", eh? That's an interesting albeit somewhat terrifying idea in regards to ego consciousness, as you've stated. And the fact that the wizard was separated into four pieces, thus creating a quaternity, the sacred symbol of the individuated self, reinforces that idea even more, saying that only through their mutual destruction can wholeness be achieved.

I believe that the old man was not just my passion for the, shall we say, 'occult', or even an emblem of truth, both things he very much had within him, but he represented what lies at the very root of those things: The unconscious mind in all its power and mystery. My 'guards' allowed him passage, for I respect and understand the role the subconscious plays within my being, but once he struck down childish, sickly and over-empowered ego, his purpose of being; the wizardly guise in which this autonomous process clothed itself; was fulfilled, and thus had to be destroyed so, as you've indicated Greg, none, not even him, should take the place of ruler. Thus, neither conscious nor subconscious alone would hold authority within my being.

As I mentioned to you earlier, my goal last weekend was to meet death within my dreams in order to affect some sort of change within myself. Thus, as mentioned, 'sacrifice' was the great theme to be found here, and I think this dream was a slightly delayed answer to that pursuit. And to answer your last question, I think this dream may have been more than a message of what needs to be done, I think it may have been the needed thing itself, for I felt ecstatic and content all that day, as though I'd reached a new level of understanding about my life without quite knowing what it was I understood, and as though a load had been removed from my shoulders.

Yet in contrast to this seemingly good news, all of this morning I have felt empty and shaken to my very core. I think that while there should be no solitary ruler in the throne room of self, a ruler is still needed, else I am empty and am about as human as a pile of dirt. Thus the quaternity -- the four which were separated -- must again become one and take their rightful place at the center of being. So not to clear up any vagueness by this I mean the four aspects of self postulated by Carl Jung: sensing, thinking, feeling and intuiting. From these also come the archetypes of the anima/animus, the wise old man, the shadow, and even the ego itself (in the 'thinking' role), among others.

Thanks for the analyses guys. It's helped elucidate my path enough to give me some confidence about where I'm headed.