The Treasure Dream
Let me tell you a story. It’s an old story, but like the best of the old stories its meaning transcends time and place. It's a story I tell both as a reminder of the importance of following your dreams and a caution to not overlook your internal resources in their pursuit. However, as the story shows, the path to finding your treasure is not a straightforward one. You must be able to identify your treasure, and often we don't know what it is until after we've found it. This is why interpreting dreams requires logic, imagination and a certain amount of time to contemplate them. As the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery says, 'The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.'
There was once a man who had the same dream seven nights running; that if he went to a certain bridge he would find treasure there. He knew exactly where that bridge was, and one morning set off to find the treasure he dreamed of. When he came to the bridge he spent many hours peering into its cracks and crevices, in search of the treasure. A stranger watching his movements asked whether he had lost something. The man sheepishly admitted to having had the repeated dream, and the stranger laughed. He explained that he too had such a dream and described the place where his treasure lay; inside a house with a blue front door and a peach tree in the front yard. The stranger scoffed at the man for pursuing his dream and told him to ignore it, as he himself had done. Afterall, a dream has no substance. The two men said goodbye to each other and the treasure seeker returned home. Upon reaching his house, he plucked a peach from the tree that grew in his front yard, then opened his blue front door and walked over to the fireplace. He reached up inside and just as the stranger explained in his dream, found a leather satchel hidden away on a ledge inside the chimney. He emptied it onto the floor and beheld a mound of gold sovereigns. He was now a very rich man.This story is found in many cultures and has been recorded by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm as Traum vom Schatz auf der Brücke in Deutsche Sagen (1816/1818), vol. 1, no. 212. and The Man Who Became Rich through a Dream in The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, translated by Richard F. Burton (London: The Burton Club, 1885), vol. 4, pp. 289-90. It falls into Aarne-Thompson type 1645 about dreamers who seek treasure abroad but find it at home.
