I enjoyed your examples and explanations. I feel the same as your friend and her outlook. It adds to my bouquet yet another personal example and view of choices and predetermined outcome.

The ribbon of cabinets is also a fascinating vision. It reminds me of a horizontal version of the vertebrae of my vision. The measuring tape is also another view that makes sense to me.

As for the cross on the door, it is interesting because at this moment it is tying in with the things on my mind. Not only the whole Jesus-butterfly-metamorphosis, but the cross or "X" I usually see when I think of Jesus or Christ and how it begins to morph into a see-sawing motion that becomes the butterfly.

The cross/Jesus connection leads to thoughts of "the cross we bear", which leads to my dreams and readings of late that mentioned the Essenes. I know very little about the Essenes, having learned only briefly about them in my spiritual/esoteric searches, other than they abstained from seeking pleasure. But I am reading a book (free on-line) A Dweller on Two Planets. I was led to this book by a dream a few nights ago about Mount Shasta. Many synchronicities for me surround the finding of this book.

The book A Dweller on Two Planets was written by Frederick S. Oliver and completed in 1886 when he was 20 years old. It is about his personal/soul-group history in Atlantis. It's heavy to read (at least it is to me) but I was led to the book because it has some deeper versions of truth for me to assimilate at this time. Though I am only part way through it, he mentions those of the time who were like the Essenes, though I have yet to read far enough for any particulars about them.

Then last night as I dreamed, I was in pain. I felt pain in both of my shoulders. I would wake and roll over to relieve the pain in one shoulder as it would then slowly build up in the other. This went on all night. At one stage the pain in one of my shoulders was so great that even though I didn't wake up, in my dream I could feel it, tried to ignore it, but eventually the pain got to the point I had to look down at my shoulder in the dream and I saw that a bone (like my collar bone) had broken and was now poking out of my skin.

The messages I kept receiving throughout the dream and in between were to bear the pain...to not seek pleasure and to not avoid pain. This was repeated to me over and over. I woke understanding it, though the depth of understanding began to fade as usual once my morning progressed. I feel that the message is one like that of Christ, which is to bear the pain that comes, to accept. Avoiding it is to escape back into the physical. It is probably like a membrane keeping one "trapped" in physical life unless it is broken through via acceptance. To accept the pain is to escape or overcome.

In your vision when you tried to push the cabinet back to get rid of the headache, it was perhaps a chance to see that seeking to hurry up the day in an attempt to avoid the pain was not the ultimate answer.

To bear the pain/cross, is to then exit through the door (membrane) to freedom. Somehow, like perhaps labor/birth pains, we have to ease into the pain and accept it rather than fight and avoid. The outcome is a new life!

Easier said than done, of course.