Many of us identify with a character, or want to be like a character, and we seem to subconsciously follow and live out the tale without ever realizing it. I always questioned meanings of stories told to me, but I was never given the answers I was looking for. I always felt somehow that these stories were meant to control me, and of course I always rebelled. My favorite myth growing up was the Creation Story of Genesis in the Bible. The fascination for me was God creating new things, and transforming what we would perceive as nothing into something remarkable. I will not use this story though, for purely superstitious reasons (just in case). I would like to use the story of Cinderella not that I really think that I am like her, but that I seem to have been pushed into living this story somehow, repeatedly. "If your good and do everything your told, your prince will come and rescue you." "If your a good little girl you will go to heaven." "If this, if that, you can't do this, you can't do that." Personally, I liked the Fairy god mother - she had it altogether, she was good and she had power and she was free to live her own life and make her own decisions. I realized that Cinderella is more than a fairy tale, and a vehicle to control children's behavior, it is a story of spiritual awakening. In a dream context, the rich symbolism of Cinderella's story clearly has meanings lurking beneath the surface of her unconsciousness. .
In the Walt Disney's version, the mother passes away, and the father is left to care for his daughter. I feel, that Cinderella's initial mother and father represented the Uroboros and paradise. The father felt that she was in need of a mother figure and remarried a widow and her two daughters. The fall from paradise is represented when her father dies leaving her with her step-mother. Which signifies the old dying off in order for regeneration of a higher awareness within her self (Bethards 86).
