Why Dreams, why now? part two
In part one of this blog, I shared a story about my first experience with dreamwork because I wanted to exemplify how working a single dream actually opened a door in my life that none of the other inner work I was doing seemed to touch. In this part, I will explain why I think that’s the case, and why I believe dreams are a crucial part of our personal and collective healing.
My sense of the healing I encountered through that dreamwork session comes down to a few key things that I will talk about here, the first of which is timing.
Soul is often spoken of as a ripening, and that has felt very true for me; we are organic beings after all. In the story I told in part one, I’d been struggling with my healing for the better half of a decade after some heavy trauma in my late teens and early twenties. Step by concrete step, I had been learning to show up in ways that every single time, felt scary and beyond my capacity. After all my shortcuts to get “back” to my familiar sense of myself failed, I finally accepted that walking further into the unknown was the only option. After that first dreamwork session, dreams became an essential part of my healing process, acting as mirrors and guideposts. When I went to Joshua Tree, I was at a pivotal point in my life - I’d done just enough work to be ready to see that my old life was over. Had the realization occurred much earlier, it may have destabilized me and been more retraumatizing than healing.
Another factor in why this particular dream was healing in a way that other practices hadn’t been was that it provided a deeply felt meaning.
As James Hillman discusses in his book Healing Fictions, we are mythological beings constantly weaving and reweaving our own mythologies to fit the facts of our lives. An essential part of healing is crafting a narrative around our wounds that gives the pain, the heartbreak, the despair a way of transmuting, giving all the energy of that raging, muddy river a path and a direction through which the silt can eventually settle and the water can run clear again. By having my dream mirror to me exactly where I was deep inside, I could stop trying to be anywhere else. By taking on the name Exile, I could finally feel honest. That was the truth. I was exiled from my old life and had no idea what came next.
A third factor of this turning point was the piercing mirroring by my guide, Brian, and the heartfelt presence of the community. The community container in a five day intensive aimed at conversation with the deep psyche usually grows deep roots, fast. By having a guide trained to smell the signs of a dead story and hold up a well-honed mirror, and by being among 15 other brave beings also following their souls’ longing and ache, I was witnessed and validated in the meaning of my emerging story and the significance of its timing.
So this leads me to the original question and intention of this blog: Why dreams, why now?
I think the above illustrates one way dreams are agents of a deeper intelligence. Collectively, I feel (and maybe you do too, if you’ve read this far) that the stories and social cohesion narratives that have been gluing together the postmodern, globalized world are falling apart. This myth of progress that’s been driving the multi-millenia colonial project is dead and on some level, many of us feel it. This often shows up as a sense of meaninglessness, depression, and increasingly, despair as we gaze into the abyss of runaway climate change.
Building a career in a system that likely won’t be here, at least in any recognizable form, in twenty years doesn’t make sense. And we can’t go backward, as I tried to do, to a “better time.” No, we are here amidst a great humbling, a great unraveling, perhaps a great turning. We are being asked to slow down enough to look in the mirror and truly see where we are.
One of the most amazing things I’ve learned through accompanying other people in their dreams is that the dream reveals the place of wounding and what is unseen, as well as offering the medicine or the remedy. Sometimes that remedy is simply stopping. Sometimes that remedy is claiming and saying yes to the sense of exile. Sometimes it’s stepping into a wildly radical expression. Like each person, each dream is utterly unique.
It’s been said that the great myths of all time come from the same place as dreams which would imply that deep in the collective psyche, the stories we need already exist. Our souls are of the earth and some myths claim they arrived with a medicine for the exact times that they incarnated into. If that’s true, dreams are one of the best ways for attuning to and embodying our own unique medicine, gift, or authenticity.
On a rational level, we can’t know what to do about the world because the notion of the world itself is too large and colonial for what the future requires. Rather, we now have the opportunity and the necessity to return to a more ancient way of listening, hearing the way our own fleeting life may serve the place and time we inhabit. By honoring and working with our dreams, we may yet find our unique way of belonging, tending, and serving a life-enhancing future.