The Power of a Dream Symbol

 

In a previous post, I told you about a delightful gorilla dream as an example of how fun and funny animal dreams can be.  I didn’t fear that gorilla, but when he came back as King Kong, well then; it’s time to take stock.

When we have a dream practice, which means we pay attention to our dreams, record them, at least some of the time, and ponder them often, we recognize the power of a dream symbol. 

 

If my dream symbol grows from personal dream energy to the archetypal size of King Kong, it is an important story my dream is telling me.  This means I go on the trail of this symbol, what Robert Moss refers to as "dream archeology." First I search through my own dream recollections and written records.  In King Kong's case, this is the third instance of this energy in my dreams in the past decade.  I print out each dream and add it to my journal now because whatever this dream is signaling with this symbol, it holds healing energy available to me now.  

 

The challenge is to ponder the symbol a dream has presented for quite a while and in many ways until I have a felt sense of what the dream is saying, if not an intellectual explanation of its meaning. It’s not that dreams are never obvious. I’ve had many dreams that were decidedly unsubtle and quite verbally direct, but that’s not the way of dreams generally.  Understanding them can be like playing charades or Pictionary. 

 

Given the fact that many of the great Aesclepian temples of ancient Greece had amphitheaters for performance of plays and that the temples were places where people seeking healing came to petition the god, Aesclapius, for a healing dream, perhaps those ancient actors in Greece performed people’s dreams.  Was dream theater the catalyst for modern theater?

 

Dream language is definitely the language of pictures not of words. According to an early pioneer of modern dream studies, Dr. Ann Faraday, it’s no coincidence that our earliest ancestors communicated through drawings, some of which are magically still extant on cave walls like those of Lascaux, in France.  She also points out how most all of us, as children, loved to draw and tell stories from our drawings.  Pictorial, symbolic language is inborn in us; perhaps because it’s the language of our dreams and we are never apart from our dreaming selves.

 

To honor this dream symbol that has so forcefully called on my attention, I begin by asking various questions. What is the context of each dream adventure?  Is the location familiar, unfamiliar? What is my dream self doing and feeling; am I happy about where she’s at?  Who else is in my dream? What is my relationship to each character in the dream, and in waking life, if I know them?  

 

Another step to open the gift a dream is offering me is sharing my dream with other trusted dreamers.  A dream friend is one who honors the dream as yours but can also put her/himself in your dream shoes and give you their associations and feeling responses.  In Active Dreaming's Lightning Dreaming process, that feedback is always offered without personal projection onto the dreamer by using the preface, "If this were my dream..." 

 

Whether I share my dream in that way or not, I’m going to have fun exploring what I can find on the internet.  I’m not looking for the “meaning” of gorilla or King Kong in my searches.  I’m letting serendipity lead and just checking out various references like the King Kong movies and movie reviews for starters.

 

Wow, what an archetypal patriarchal white man shadow King Kong turns out to be!  Far out! My dreams are not playing; they are posing an important challenge for me and I am excited to give it my best effort.

 

In another post, I’ll share what this symbol teaches me, but for now, I want to share with you this understanding of the vitality of dream symbols for personal and spiritual growth, as well as for good fun.  May your dreams shine a path through the darkness. May we become strong enough dreamers to bring about a healing future for all and for our Earth.

 

May it be so.

The Power of Your Dreaming Mind

Being a full time dream explorer means straddling two worlds.  Not in a split personality way that threatens to dissolve a healthy ego, but as a practice of balancing two realities.   We live in a multi-dimensional universe; physics and modern spiritual teachings agree.  This is most obvious when you follow a regular dream practice, remembering and journaling dreams frequently.  After countless dream experiences have provided significant help and teaching; a person realizes that waking reality is only one side of the existence coin. What we're learning as dreamers is that there is a way to balance these multi-realities so that the most feared hazard, loss of sanity, is not an issue.  As Jesus said, "render unto Caesar what belongs to Caeser." Pay attention to the waking world; take it seriously and do what you can.  But we are visitors here; each of our individual lives is much, much broader in experience and potential if we can accept who we are. We are spiritual beings having a physical experience, and not for the first time.  Every physical experience is rooted in the primal source of physical being, spiritual being.

The option a dream practice offers for living in this reality is to do it with respect, but without seeing it as the ultimate reality.  It isn't.  The ultimate reality is that we are forever and we are evolving.  Towards what; each of us decides.  My vote?  Towards beings who know that Love is the Answer.

I may be wrong.  If I am; I'll find out when I die.  If I'm not, then the best is yet to come!  And although I've reached this conclusion based on my own dreaming experience, countless respected modern scholars teach the same thing.  This is only one aspect of my journey, so I don't need to lose myself in it.  The perspective dreaming gives me is a life line in the fluid ocean of occurence that is physical existence and that life line is knowing that this is temporary - temporal.

The power of your dreaming mind is that it allows you to live life truly large, on many levels at once.  What happens during the waking day is no more or less important than what happens in my dreams.  Through my dream practice I can bi-locate, I can enjoy my waking adventures and I can live wonderful adventures in dreaming realities simultaneously, on a regular basis.  How much would you pay for that technology if Apple came up with it?

We are born with a powerful dreaming mind.  Humanity has always payed attention to dreaming, as depicted in dramatic cave paintings found in the south of France from some 40,000 years ago.  Humanity's dreaming can be traced back through every known ancient civilization; the Egyptians and the Greeks dedicated temples to healing through dreams.  Humanity's connection to dreaming was thrwarted for about the last 2,000 years, for reasons I've discussed before and no doubt will again.  Still, we haven't strayed far.  The gates of dreaming were held open by visionaries like Carl Jung.  Dreaming always brings us home again, and even during the most ignorant of those dreamless years, dreaming offered a portal to sanity to anyone who payed attention.

The power of the dreaming mind is that it requires little to tap into it; it's organic.  Each of us is born with the connection, each of us lives with that connection.  Some have been conditioned to view dreams as delusional and to be ignored, others believe they don't have time in their busy lives to pay attention to dreams, but everyone I've seen open to dreaming, changes that opinion quickly.  All it takes to realize the power of your dreaming is to pay attention to it. When we're acclimated to the "waking treadmill" of work, struggle, stress and entertainment, we can miss the option we have of altering that unilateral existence, if we want to.  Dreaming shines a light on the unconscious forces that drive us, sometimes controlling our egos; it helps us stay connected to our spiritual core, what Jung called the Self or some call the Higher Self.

Dreaming can take us into realms of magic and wonder.  If your dreams disturb you and educating yourself through good reading doesn't dispel that, then seek good professional help.  You'll know it's good help if it connects you to your dreams directly and doesn't tell you what your dream or your life mean.  The best teachers make you curiouser and curiouser; they don't give you answers.

As we experimentally open the doors to a dreaming awareness, we find that there's more to us than meets the I (the ego); we open ourselves to exploring the exhilirating reality of living on more than one dimension at once. Mono-dimensional thinking leads to limitation and depression; multi-dimensional thinking leads to engagement, adventure and hope.

I propose that the power of the dreaming mind is to liberate each of us from slavish thinking and negative projections; what you can dream, can exist in waking reality.  According to John Perkins, one valuable lesson he learned from the South American shamans who taught him is that "the world is as you dream it." The world, Perkins says, is as it is because someone dreamt it this way and others continue to consent in allowing that dream reality.  It just takes someone, or many, to dream it differently and transform what once was to what I want it to be.  That's the challenge of the dreaming mind.  Once we learn to use it; it's no longer confined to dreaming dimensions; it helps us create in waking reality, as well.

I and Thou: Dream Characters and Other People

Still reading Robert Waggoner's book on lucid dreaming (see previous post) and am delighting in the chapter: "Independent Agents and the Voice of the Unconscious" in which he poses some intriguing ideas:

"Taught to believe and expect that the entire dream exists as our imagined projection, that we dream it into being, many lucid dreamers naturally resist any notion of not completely creating and controlling the dream. Yet, these conversations suggest a new level of inherent complexity in dreaming. With experience, lucid dreamers come to realize that the dream space contains various types of dream figures, behaving with varying degrees of awareness." p.58

What, who, where are the characters in our dreams? Are they aspects of our own waking personalities that need attention and integration? Of course, but Waggoner raises the possibility of autonomy in some dream characters. A key indicator of a character's autonomy or "otherness" is when he experiences in lucid dream adventures characters who resist his intentions, give him unexpected information or profess independent viewpoints. Are dream characters projections of our own personalities, created by our dreaming minds to instruct our waking egos? Or are they, as in our waking experience, independent beings, separate from us and capable of choice, as we are?

A little mind blowing, perhaps, but how valuable a consideration. What's wonderful about the dream world is anything is possible. It doesn't have to be one way or the other; it can be both, or entirely different than expected, so dreaming offers a model for expanded consciousness and creativity in the waking world.

In ancient alchemical teachings, inner and outer realities mirror each other, as above, so below. I find this is very true with dreaming. What I learn in the dreaming, can usually come in handy in waking reality. Reflecting on waking experience, how much of what I know about other people is my own projection based on my own needs, much as I might assume the shadow figures and animus gents in my dreams are? The negative things I see about people and the people I put on a pedestal, if they were dream figures, how would I see them? Why would they be in my dream?

Considering the autonomy of dream figures in my dreams heightens my sense of my own autonomy and that of others, those I like and those I don't, in waking life. I'm more mindful of my waking projections and also more eager to look at my dreams for that spark of independence in people I encounter. Perhaps these are other dreamers sharing my dream locale or people who lived in another time or on another dimension?

One of my favorite authors, Ursula LeGuin, writes about outer space as a metaphor for inner space. In her view, inner space is the real frontier for exploration, available through the vast unconscious to all of us. Dreams help me understand myself better, and they help me understand others. In my dreams there are scenarios, like when I find myself in traffic on a highway or when I'm riding on a train or bus. that say to me, "We are multitudes, but we're all in this together." I take that feeling into my waking relationships.

The idea that dream figures may in some cases be autonomous just as I assume people in waking life are creates another dimension of exploration every time I cross the threshold of sleep. At the same time, realizing that even in waking life, people I meet reflect for me some aspect of myself, especially when they elicit strong emotional reaction, helps me interact more mindfully with everyone, keeping a check on my projections and truly honoring each individual and his or her unique life journey.

Watcher Dream

In my dream last night, I watched a scene from a movie; that’s how it felt.

A woman lies in her bed. She’s wearing panties and a tank top and has a lovely, young lithe body. Her straight, shoulder length light brown hair floats around her on the pillow as she lingers in that dreamy in between of sleep and waking. It’s a double bed, from the look of the covers, she didn’t spend the night alone.

Into the room walks a man, obviously older than her by at least ten years, her lover. He’s dressed in a red flannel shirt and jeans. He’s not a handsome man, really rather ordinary looking with thinning blonde hair and workman’s features. He’s telling her that he’s leaving, for good. It obviously comes as a painful surprise to her. She does a languid backward somersault off the side of the bed, which is near a wall, and stands to face him.

It’s as if that incongruous physical gesture allows her to register her emotions. She stands, back against the wall and speaks her truth to him. I don’t remember the dialogue in detail, just the tone of it. She’s recounting their brief affair and what it meant to her. She’s describing him, his behavior, lamenting his inability to grasp the depth of emotion she opened to him. At one point I’m amused to hear her say sadly, but without bitterness or irony; “the truth is, you’re not that smart.”

Then another man is in the room; he’s a friend of the other one, stockier, white haired and definitely hostile. I got the impression he’s the impetus for her lover’s departure. He is physically aggressive towards the woman and lunges towards her, as if to attack her. I think she’s either going to kung fu his ass or get hurt herself. Instead, she embraces him, pinning his arms to his side, and unleashes her grief in a torrent of wails and tears. The man is helpless in her arms.

I wake up. The feelings that lingered for me were wonder and satisfaction. I witnessed the power of true emotion expressed. I honor the power of women to channel emotion and perhaps to open that door for men. I also take home the beauty of speaking my truth, however emotionally messy it might be.

My training in psychotherapy leads me to ask what does this dream mean about me and my emotional life and my relationships to the men in it? But recently I’ve been reading a fascinating book by Jurgen Ziewe, Multidimensional Man, in which the author relates his many journeys out of body, (OBEs) into other dimensional worlds. He believes these very dimensions are the places we’ll all travel to after physical death. Here’s a thought provoking quote from his book regarding ordinary dreams:

“I was talking to people in my dream, becoming fully awake and aware while maintaining my conversation…I was distracted only briefly from our conversation by the realization that many dreams are probably as real as waking life, except for our lack of awareness. I wondered how many dreams were real.” Pg. 173

Robert Moss frequently states that a dream is a place, one that the dream self, free of the physical restraints of our three dimensional world, explores and experiences, just as the waking self explores and experiences events in daytime life. A psychological interpretation of dreams is what our Western, rational oriented world accepts as the most plausible. As Robert recently reminded me, it’s not the approach favored by ancient and indigenous cultures, nor is it his.

I was there in this dream place, watching the events unfold but not interacting with the characters directly. Are these Shadow and Animus figures acting our a drama for the benefit of my psychological growth; or are these other dimensional people, living out their own dramas, flickering on my dream screen for this one scene? Do they know I saw them? Was I meant to watch, to learn?

Since the beginning of this month, I’ve been absorbed in renewed studies of OBE, lucid dreaming and ordinary dreaming experiences, my own and those of authors I’m reading. I’ve attempted many times to post something meaningful about exploring these dream dimensions and have been daunted by the mind-boggling quality of this subject. This morning, this simple dream experience featuring this brave and honest woman tipped the scales for me. I offer it in its simplicity as the beginning of a conversation I’m eager to entertain, on this dimension and on many others.

What is a dream? A dream is a place.

(FYI: http://www.multidimensionalman.com/Multidimensional-Man/Astral_Travel_and_life_after_death.html)

Honoring Dreams - Dreams Require Action

Active Dreaming is a direct, accessible approach to building a dreaming life for just about anyone of any age. I'd like to emphasize how important “honoring a dream” is in an Active Dreaming practice.  Using indigenous peoples' understanding of dreaming, AD teaches the value of of listening and responding to dreams in conscious, waking life. 

Robert Moss has written extensively on this topic, so I refer you to his books for more information, and if you prefer audio/visual learning, to the DVD series that Jim and I produced with Robert, presenting Active Dreaming, The Way of the Dreamer with Robert Moss. 

People who live/lived much closer to Nature than we do now had lots more time on their hands for introspection. Not necessarily because their lives were less stressed than ours, (try hunting and gathering for a living) but because they didn’t have or need our distractions. Visualize the phenomenal amount of hours the average American man, woman and child watch television or other devices, the lack of sleep that afflicts many and the “hurry sickness” that infects our conscious lives. Who has time or energy for introspection or dream work? But for our indigenous ancestors, dreams provided a lot of their entertainment; they also connected through dreams to the worlds of Spirit.

I'm not saying honor your dreams by doing whatever you think your dream is telling you to do, fly, beat up your boss or go to church naked. Honoring a dream is about: 

1. Listening. Paying Attention.  I just heard the old song, “Elusive Butterfly of Love” by Bob Lind, which is about a love struck romantic chasing his beloved into her dreams through his. (Hmmm, sounds good to me). I use this example because he’s obviously tuned in to his dreams, even though he’s telling her in the song not to let his flitting in bother her, it’s just a dream. (Actually it's very bad etiquette to flit into someone's dream without permission.) Still, his dreams are a happening place.  When I go to sleep, I know I’m going somewhere. I’ll be doing something. Sometimes I “incubate” what I want from my dream by asking for a dream about a desire or need, but when I don’t, I still know I’m going on a dream journey, just like when I get into my car, I’m headed somewhere. 

2. Recording, Journaling. I’ve posted some ideas on recording dreams previously; what I wish to emphasize now is  the pleasure of this exercise. Your dream journal becomes your book of life. It contains stories that you’ll grow to love and see as part of who you are. All it takes is developing the simple practice of writing your dream story into your journal. This practice not only honors your dream, it honors your soul, for as some of our indigenous ancestors taught, dreams are the secret wishes of the soul.

3. Engage and Dialogue.  Once I record my dream there are many ways to play with its story. I can do stream of consciousness writing or drawing, I can copy a dance or song from a dream.  I can also engage characters from the dream in dialogue.  My favorite dream play practice is to re-enter a dream and continue it's action to my satisfaction.  Dreams bridge the gap between waking and sleep, the two portals we enter and exit daily that are equally part of our existence on this planet. Just as we use our conscious mind to navigate our waking world, we can use our imagination to navigate our dream worlds.

4. Gratitude. In gratitude to my dream, I consciously honor it in my waking life by acting on its message or manifesting its symbols. I may share it with a person who was part of my dream by contacting them, whether I share the dream or not. I may follow its inspiration in writing stories, songs or poems. I may draw a picture or find one to display prominently, to evoke the dream for me as I go about my daily affairs,  Sometimes, I just ponder it for days, turning it around in my thoughts, letting the symbols dance in my mind’s eye until it reveals something of itself I’ve missed.  

It takes building a relationship with our dreams to know just how to honor one in waking life; the more we play with them, the more we can live our lives creatively. Dream play, honoring your dream, is like sex, if you can make time for it and enjoy it, you don’t regret it. 

Archetypes

The word archetype derives from the Greek, archetupon. meaning something like, first-molded. It combines arche, the beginning and tupos, a pattern, model or type. (My source is Wikipedia.)

According to one on-line dictionary I used, it’s come to mean:

1. the original pattern or model from which all things of the same kind are copied or on which they are based; a model or first form; prototype.

2. (in Jungian psychology) a collectively inherited unconscious idea, pattern of thought, image, etc., universally present in individual psyches.

I bring this concept up because my husband, Jim, and I have a favorite "discussion"; "What is an archetype?" We often lapse into it lying in bed, waiting for sleep; I love when the room is dark and we talk. If I bring up our archetype discussion he’s likely to pose the question; "If there were no people, would archetypes exist?"

I think he believes that "archetypes" are human constructs. For instance, he'll say, "our pre-historic ancestors are out in a terrifying storm, the lightning blazing and the thunder booming so loud their teeth chatter. For that ineffable power they’ve experienced, they create an archetype, the God/Goddess of Thunder or Storm, the ultimate source of all this power.

Well, it makes sense. The purpose of it, I suppose, is to interact with this power in some approachable form in order to see if you can get IT to go easy on your neighborhood.

No people, no archetypes seems to be his thinking, but maybe it’s no people, less pressure on the Archetypes to make it better. Here's how I see it:

Archetypes are Energies that have been intuited by humans from the dawn of our habitation here on earth. They are energies experienced universally by woman and man of any race, in any culture, at any time in history. I don't think we create the Energies, although I think we create the forms they take in our personal or elected cultural mythology. These Energies can shape shift into many forms and can be recognized in stories, myths, religions and now, the mind-bending science of contemporary physics.

Because the Archetypes are actually Energies not subject to one permanent form, I think it's a waste of time and an invitation to trouble to fix the Energy, say of Divine Love, into one immutable aspect of itself. Especially when that concrete image excludes other aspects of that same energy vital for it to flow and do its job. For instance, God the Father definitely suffers from a lack of God the Mother.

In our dreams, the archetypes show up in many forms and communicate a lot of useful information. Jung identified some common ones as: the Self, the complete person, integrated in her or his many aspects, body, mind and soul; the Animus/Anima, the opposite gender aspect of each person’s psyche, one we’re likely to project on to the person with whom we “fall in love.” In dreams, this archetype can be tracked in the opposite gender characters peopling our night adventures; the Shadow, which contains the disavowed aspects of ourselves we commonly project on to others, shows up in characters we dislike, envy or of whom we are in awe, usually the same sex as the dreamer; and the Persona, is the mask to meet the faces that we meet, the one Ego dons to face the public. Sometimes when we dream of ourselves naked in public, it may have to do with how we think we’re perceived or how we desire to be seen.

There are many Archetypes; the Major Arcana of the Tarot is a gallery of universal archetypes preserved through centuries in a pack of playing cards. The greater the Archetypal figure in our psyche, the stronger the energy that accompanies its appearance. How I feel about a figure in my dream is often the first clue to who I’m really dealing with.

In my next post, I’ll tell you my Howling Mary dream. This is a Big Dream in my life story, a visit from the Mother Archetype. It came some forty years ago, before I had any idea what its message was, but to this day, it’s my moral compass and spiritual paradigm.

Although we may name the Archetypes, we don’t invent them and we certainly don’t control them. In my opinion, religion tries to bottle these archetypes and sell them under their brand name. I see no point in denying that the Archetypal Energy manifests in a myriad of metaphors and shape shifts according to each persons needs. That is normal. What's not normal is trying to claim absolute TRUTH status for one manifestation.

Being in tune with personal revelations in our dreams can save us from believing the projections of those whose intentions may be to manipulate us where we are most vulnerable, our imaginations. Dream work helps us claim our imaginations for our own ends, making us far less vulnerable to the myths of others.

What are “archetypes” is a popular conversation with many people, in and out of bed. The wonderful astrologer, Caroline Casey, suggests that we consider “composting” the word; her Trickster Redeemer is a wonderful manifestation of her composting work with archetypes. I’m grateful for my own on-going dialogue with such a wit as is Jim; and now, I’m opening the discussion to you. Your comments are most welcome.

Video courtesy of Jim and Chango.

A Fleeting Glimpse

Talking to a friend yesterday, she described an image she woke with, the only remnant of a dream. The image is of a friend of hers laughing, a very pleasant image.

It made me think of a dream I had recently, also just a fleeting image of a friend that carried wonderful energy for me.

Just one image can unlock an amazing dream narrative. One image can animate when I re-enter a dream and accompany me through expanded adventures of active imagination. One image can give me a portal into a dream moment and continue to provide real pleasure and enjoyment in my waking day.

If my friend's dream were my dream, maybe I'll hold the image of this person laughing in my mind's eye when I speak to my friend; or maybe I'll just share the image with her, painting the picture of her I saw and sharing the wonderful feelings it evoked for me. In this way, the dream image becomes a gift for us both, a gift which may deepen our friendship.

The language of dreams is imagery. In her wonderful book, "The Dream Game," psychologist Ann Faraday speculates that imagery was our prehistoric ancestors’ first language, and very likely our initial language when we're born. Our first vocabulary in other words, (pun intended) would require a pictionary, not a dictionary, to decipher. Imagery is a powerful psychic language; it impacts the mind, body and emotions.

A picture’s worth a thousand words; why is that? Perhaps because imagery is the language we can understand instinctively, innately and universally. The phrase, “dream interpretation” may be a misnomer. Instead of asking the cognitive question, “What does my dream mean?” perhaps it’s better to ask, “What is my dream depicting? Do I get the picture?”

This is especially true when all we can remember is a single fleeting image from a night of dreaming. I encourage you not to dismiss that little picture fragment. Make a note of it in your journal; carry it around with you in contemplation. Make a drawing of it or write a poem. It might prove a valuable cipher to a previous or future dream. It may provide the key to unlocking an inner psychological struggle; perhaps it will shed light on a difficult waking life situation.

Get the picture?

Sole Responsibility

Facing death, understanding that it is inevitable, leads to lots of philosophical questions. I particularly like what Ecclesiastes says in the Old Testament; “Naked came I into this world and naked I shall return.” To me this means that I have sole responsibility for my soul; this is the vessel I’ll ride out of here, so it’s up to me to steer, both here and once I cross over. I can’t let anyone else interpret the meaning of my life because no preacher, teacher or lawmaker is going to cross with me, let alone, for me. The dreamer is the only interpreter of her or his dream; my life, my soul, my crossing is my sole responsibility.

Dreaming is the bridge between these two realities for me. I live in this plane and I live on other planes, mostly at night, in dreams. It’s important to keep a balance, pay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, recognize the laws of waking, material existence and thrive there. The Taoist’s philosophy of Yin and Yang teaches that opposites can be balanced and when they are, we exist in harmony. Yin/Yang is a dance of opposites constantly in motion, flowing from one to the other.

Waking/Dreaming is also such a flow, such a dance.

I don’t remember a dream from last night in words, I remember it in the afterglow of feelings, like I'm returning from a very enjoyable experience. I woke feeling contentment and that’s the feeling I carry into my day; it colors my actions and words, my outlook and thoughts.

I take from the teachings of this waking world, its religions and philosophies, whatever feeds my soul; I reject what I feel shrinks my soul. From my dreams, I get the strength, courage and humor to live the best life on this planet I can. I offer these thoughts in case they help you. Jesus got into a lot of trouble for claiming to be his own authority, but he was right. The kingdom of heaven is within; all we have to do is pay attention and trust ourselves. “Naked came I into this world, and naked I shall return.”

Thanks again to my dear friend, Mally DeSomma, who gave me permission to use her beautiful painting.

The Evolution of Meaning in a Dream

"What does it mean?" is probably the most frequently asked question about dreams. My experience is that a dream's meaning evolves and materializes as I pay attention, as I ponder it for days, weeks or sometimes, years. Meaning dawns in my thoughts, feelings and in the sychronistic events of my waking life, but what I experience is not just intellectual understanding. I experience something like a door opening for me, a gift being given me, an opportunity to act in waking life for my own healing and pleasure, perhaps in a new and exciting direction.

In my previous post, I shared with you the image of a woman hugging a child from a recent dream, but I didn't share the dream. This is it; it's titled: Caring for The Little Girl.

Jim and I find a little girl, 3 or 4 years old, who'd been abandoned in her crib with a puppy; she's blond, blue eyed, very sweet. We have to go home because Jim needs to get up early for a gig. I insist on taking her home. We get little footie pajamas and some clothes from the room she's in. Holding her, I realize she's running a fever. I put the pajamas on her. She'll sleep with me and Jim will sleep in the guest room (with the puppy).

I often take action to honor my dream by painting it. I'm not a visual artist professionally, but since I was a small child, I've loved to draw . Perhaps you did, too? Sketching and painting my dream images or scenarios gives free expression to that little girl who once loved to draw things. I unplug my superego/critic and just let myself flow with whatever I happen to do on the paper. I hold the dream in my mind's eye and let something come out on the paper, no judgements, no over-corrections. I can always just throw it away, so no pressure.

The drawing in this post is the second one I painted from the dream. I'm always surprised, and usually delighted by what I actually get on paper, but every once in a while, I experience a visual Gestalt from the unintentional appearance of a figure I draw in this flow state.

In this picture, it's the "ghost" that appears behind the child's crib. When I first drew that figure, I was going for the baby's face. It came out the face of an older, heavy woman, wearing a not very pleasant expression. I abandoned trying to transform the face to a baby's and started again next to it. Happy, if still bewildered, with the overall sketch, I began painting it in watercolors. My charcoal pencil lines remained distinct on everything but that odd figure I drew that wasn't in the actual dream. When I painted over her, her lines blurred and flowed into the paint. She became a ghost. I know I'll be dialoguing with this figure as I explore the dream further.

This dream is equivalent to about three good therapy sessions for me. I'll be exploring it for a while longer, I'm sure; it's got good juju. The real energy and understanding of the dream began to flow after doing these drawings. I hope my sharing this with you gives you a sense of what I mean by the process of understanding a dream, the evolution of it's meaning.

Your comments and questions are welcome.

Dream School

Last night I had a wonderful dream; one of those that I feel is worth risking losing sleep over by writing it down right away, even at 3:26 AM.

I'm in a class. I love this class; we've got a great teacher. He's passionate, learned and resourceful in his teaching. We're reading from erotica magazines he's ordered for the class. He's a maverick, risks upsetting the authorities by choosing such a risque curriculum; I admire him. He loves to teach and cares for his students. He asks 3 different women to read the same sentence on page 3, to give their dramatic interpretation of the reading. I'm ready with my reading but he doesn't call on me, which doesn't diminish what I learn from hearing the other women read. As I walk out of class I hear him sigh as he moves to his lectern by the window at the left front of the class; "Oh, the dependence of women."

I have another class with a young woman teacher next; also at the end of class I hear her sigh the same thing to herself. I turn and tell her how amazingly synchronistic her saying that is and why.

I wake up delighted to have a synchronicity experience in a dream and to hear such a loud and clear message. I title the dream "Oh the dependence of women". Dream schools are one of my favorite dream locations. They alert me to the fact that there's something I have to learn or something I am learning. I've also met some amazing teachers in dreaming that have helped me learn big lessons for my waking life. I recognize many lessons in this dream and many keys that may help me open doors that are blocking me in waking life. This is a very good dream and I'm grateful for it.

Also relevant is that yesterday I received one of those fowarded emails from a friend who thinks differently than I do; it was about how feminism has ruined life for women and reminiscing about the good old days when a woman was pampered and kept by her husband and had it made without going out in the world to work, the way our grandmothers had it made. Well, I don't know about her grandmothers, but one of mine died very young, poor, dependent on family and ill, leaving her children to fend for themselves at an early age, and the other died relatively young, maybe in her fifties, years before my grandfather, after 18 pregnancies, 13 children.

Obviously my dream source agrees with me. Yet, it touched so perfectly on my own dependency, giving me so much to think about, that I thought I'd share it with you. Any thoughts?

The Meaning of Dreams

There are two questions that people often ask me, lots of times, back to back. Knowing my penchant for dream conversation they'll tell me about a dream they had. If they didn't already preface their account with, "I had the weirdest dream..." then it's likely they'll finish their report with, "Isn't that weird?" followed closely by "What does it mean?"

This phenomenon always makes me smile to myself. Here's how I usually respond:

When you learn to understand the language of image and the imaginal logic of the dreaming mind, then it doesn't seem weird in the same sense. It's like visiting a culture/country very different from your own where language you consider very difficult to learn is spoken. At first it's alien and weird; a few years there and it's normal. Same thing in dreamland; spend enough conscious time there and you catch on.

What does it mean? This one really cracks me up. It's like what does love mean? What's beauty? There are so many levels, so many possibilities, so much to play with in each dream. I find I live my way into understanding the dream. Sometimes I intuit some meaning right away; even before I record it, but I know that's not necessarily all the dream has to offer me. It either comes back into my mind at some revelatory moment or I go digging years later and it reveals another layer. Dreams are treasure maps; the treasure is your own whole, healed, joyous Self.

Add to that what Jung and most teacher's I've worked with emphasize, the dreamer is the only authority on the meaning of the dream, and you might see why I find the question amusing.

I can be of help to a person who is trying to understand a dream; dream teacher is a calling I love to practice. It's like giving someone a fish to eat or a fishing pole and teaching them how to fish. I do consider myself a decent dream guide, but with the ultimate respect I've learned for the relationship of each dreamer to their dreams, the only simple answer to the question is "I don't know; you do."

The Language of Dreams

One thing I think I've learned about understanding dreams is that they speak a different language than any of us do in conscious/waking experience. It's often referred to as the language of symbol, but I prefer to think of it as the language of image. The reason is that when I ponder a dream, I really see the images, feel the images, relate intuitively, creatively, spontaneously and observantly to these visuals and energies. The language of dreams is not a left brain language, at any rate.

I don't like the word symbol because I think it's too easy to conceive of it intellectually; it's easier for most of us in this culture to use that rational part of our brains.

Image can't be contained within the narrow left brain paradigm because the word itself evokes something more experiential like seeing and something more primal like pictures. I'm sure those cave paintings were used to communicate. Images were our ancestors' first alphabet, perhaps.

Besides, I know that the beauty and juice of dreams are usually in the images, though I have been pretty impressed by stuff I've heard in dreams, too. Perhaps you have these same experiences with dreams?

Anyway, I do invite you to ponder those images, let them hang out or brave up to them a bit more, as Robert is fond of saying.

Thanks for listening; sweet dreams.