My dear friend and I, the one from the train in my first post, are having an ongoing conversation about Life and Death and Healing in both realms. I'm sure I'll share more of what surfaces, but here's what I'm hot on the trail of now.
There are experiences in life that can send bits of our Soul or Psyche or Self - however you conceive of your Being, into hiding, into exile. There is a cornucopia of literature on soul recovery and/or healing psychotherapy, as I'm sure you know.
In dreams, the stories of these exiled selves pops up from time to time. Because I keep a journal, I can trace these appearances and ponder them. Tracing a character or character type through past dreams is particularly revelatory when we're ready to see and to listen, sometimes even years after the dream; (Did I mention what a good idea I think it is to keep a journal?)
I use dream characters, themes, scenarios and images as maps to life's deeper meanings. By observing the drama presented in dreams each time a particular image appears, I learn the story of this exile. In that character, I also have a dream gate I can enter to renew my relationship with the part of me I'm calling back.
These encounters and relationships are serendipitous and genuine; I can't predict how the adventure is going to go. It's a process that's full of surprises. It's a two-way street; just as challenging as any waking relationship and just as worth it.
When you write these journals, do you wake yourself up right after the dream or wait until morning to record it?
ReplyDeleteIt really depends. Sometimes I wake up so psyched about a dream, I write it even if it's the middle of the night. The sooner you write a dream down, the more detail you'll remember; (usually, although sometimes it's amazing how a dream will just crystallize in your mind later in the day, after not remembering it initially). Have you ever woken up from a dream in the night and you say, oh, I'll remember this one, only to lose almost all of it when you wake up in the morning? So, if I really want to make sure I have the most of the dream memory I can recover, I write it right away.
ReplyDeleteStill, I value my sleep, so one thing I try to do when I wake up in the night with a dream I want to remember but I don't want to wake myself up by writing in my journal is to focus some key images of the dream in my mind, like little gray cat for example, and hope I can pull the rest back from that image when I wake up in the morning. Sometimes I can and sometimes I can't. I don't obsess about the ones that got away. That would take all the fun out of it:-)