The Healing Power Of My Dreams

I must have my dreams if I am to live.  Dreams are the bridge that connects my waking life to my higher awareness.  My dreams are alive and filled with wisdom that often explains my world to my waking mind.  The people, events, all things in my dreams symbolize what I need to recognize and learn from in life.  

If I take the literal out of my dreams and look at their symbolic nature of what takes place in my dream scape I open to my inner wisdom.  Understanding and communicating with the symbols in my dreams allows me to move forward in my life's journey.  People, animals, things, and events in my dreams most often are mirrors of me and aspects of myself that I need to look at.  When I do this these dreams help me see a clearer picture of my life.  They show me where problems exist, actions I can take to resolve these things, and they introduce me to a deeper understanding of and relationship within my psyche.  

 

They bring me face to face with the shadow that I often try to avoid.  This avoidance I find often extends to my dream-time where I do my best not to have to connect or interact with this shadow.  Yet the shadow is an integral part of my psyche and when avoided it works harder to claim my attention.  When I accept that it wants and needs my attention it then gently moves into and takes its rightful place in my awareness.  It is my avoidance that creates resistance and struggle within me; when I relax into my resisting the struggle is resolved.  This recurs throughout my life as I move to deeper and deeper levels of awareness.

A recent dream of the young masculine energy resurfaced in my dreaming. (Post 12/4/14, Winter's Dark)  This is an energy that has stalked me throughout my adult life, and is one that I have negotiated and renegotiated with on my journey.  It has been a difficult energy for me to deal with, especially in the face that presents in my dreams, and I have often avoided it.  Recently it has become more persistent and I have had to work with this energy that I try to avoid in dreams.

At one point this energy and I engaged in conversation, but a few nights later I once again encounter this energy.  It is not threatening, only wanting to continue our conversation of the last time we met.  I am reticent and continue to try to avoid this until I find myself in a place that I have no way out, so I wake up to avoid the conversation.

My waking time leads me to explore more thoroughly my resistance in my dreaming of this energy.  A metaphor opens in my conscious awareness of the polarity of magnets.  I see two horseshoe magnets that I try to put together but I have the same poles lined up and they repel each other.  They cannot be forced together in this way.  When the opposite poles are placed together then an attraction is created and the magnets are pulled toward each other.  This gives me a conscious image for my unconscious struggle.  I have to change the charge of my own energy in the process of reintegration of this young male part of myself.  This conscious awareness can aid in my unconscious struggle.

Following this brief, but powerful, epiphany I have another dream with this energy. We are riding in a truck out in the country.  We are on a road, I am in the passenger seat looking out the right window, I see a beautiful tract of land.  It has gentle rolling hills, valleys, streams, and a river edging this property.  My young masculine energy is focused on driving and I remark on the beauty of the land we are passing.  He slows the truck near an intersecting road, pulls off onto a wider place in the road, and turns around into the other lane.  As we finish the turn I looked ahead and realized the land is familiar.  I thought that the road that was near where we pulled off to turn around looked like the land his family owns.  I remark on this and he says that it was but they no longer own it, and  they are no longer alive.  We complete our turn and drive back to the land I saw and commented on.  We drive into the property and I say that I wonder if I, being in a wheelchair, can handle this terrain.  He says this will not be a problem.  The dream fades, and I begin to come awake.

In this dream another level of integration takes place.  A gentle process that I need not avoid nor fear.  We have together found this beautiful, gently rolling property.  The part of my psyche that I have needed, especially since my stroke, has reintegrated with me, and together we will handle the terrain of my future.

I have gone down the rabbit hole - via my stroke (post 11/6/14) and have  returned.  The reclaiming of myself continues.  Dreams create a healing power by which lost and separated parts of me return.  This dream tells me that the past is not determining my present; only I can do that, and this integration with this lost male self furthers this reclamation.  My dreams connect me to the most treasured part of me, my instinctual self, where wisdom arrives slowly out of the dawn of an unknown ocean.

   

  

  

Winter's Dark

Silently moving into winter's dark I am drawn to the power of story.  Shorter daylight, a fire in the fireplace, the cold weather, and the silence of falling snow sends me toward reclaiming and living through my story.  There is a special quality in this season of darkness when we await the rebirth of the sun.  

The early and longer darkness moves me inward to home and hearth and into the cave of my own psyche.  This is the time of year that I plumb my depth of self understanding and self awareness.  It is from this that my self stories arise. My personal myth and legend come forth from the time spent in psyche's cave.
This is the time for dreams and dreaming; a time to reclaim lost parts of self, and what better way than through story.  

I dreamed a lost part of me returned.  A young male part that I had pushed away early in my marriage to accommodate and not compete with my young husband's energy.  Roger's energy compensated for this young male energy that I had shelved in favor of our marriage.  It wasn't until after Roger passed away that I experienced missing this part of me, and begin to want it to become a more conscious part of myself. 

This young male part begin to appear in my dream-time a year after Roger's death.  This energy assumed various roles and faces as it teased me to wake up to an integration of this back into my conscious psyche.  This energy danced in my dream space and through the faces of several famous young men.  Men that in my dreams I danced with and related to, and in a dream I even married one of these young men.  

Then several years after Roger's death I dreamed of a strapping young man, clad only in a breech cloth, standing on a mountain, blowing a Shofar, and I woke up to that primordial sound resonating inside my head.
  

This young male energy part of me was coming much closer to my waking life. 

A few nights ago the face of the symbol for this energy popped up in my dream-time.  He had changed; older, wiser, and a more balanced energy.  I did not recognize him at first.  His wife, a woman with long red hair, brought him to me; she offered this energy to me.  She said this energy had been created through the two of us, it was a sacred energy, and was something I needed, and must accept, at this place and time in my life journey.  I then recognized this energy as the face that had danced through my dreaming space years earlier.  We spoke, the first time since I had ask that he no longer be a dream symbol to me, and in this new conversation a healing and an integration began.

A reclamation of a lost part of me is occurring as a result of this dream.  A dream that is important to the process.  The brash, young male energy; the energy that could not fit into my marriage has matured and returns with a greater awareness and understanding of both of our energies.  He arrived via his red haired wife, through whom I recognized him, and began to assimilate his energy with my own.  This has taken time as I have been maturing toward this energy since Roger's death.  

          
   
This recent dream has awakened me to the thought/idea and the experience/feeling of this energy integrated into my conscious self.  It is an energy that can easily throw off my balance so it has gently and subtly reintroduced itself into my waking awareness.  This energy's feminine side  introduced me to this new and matured part of my younger male energy.  Her presence made me aware of the scared and gentle nature of this energy.  No longer brash, no longer the strapping male blowing the shofar, no longer the young men of fantasy, this energy is stable, steady, solid, and can be relied upon.  This is an integral and trusted part of me as I come to accept and utilize it within my energetic space.  

Some years ago, on the longest night of the year, I awoke in the morning to the primitive sound of the shofar.  It brought me wide awake into the new day.  A few days ago I awoke from a dream of integration with this part of me that had been awakened by that sound.  This young male energy has matured, mellowed, and has gently, quietly, and comfortably become a part of me.  So as we enter this time of winter's dark I find myself moving easily into another integration with me.  It is good.

     

The Importance Of Stories

As I sleep Sherman Alexie dances through my dreams.  To be exact his words, poems, and stories dance through my dream-time space.  He teaches the importance of the story where anyone can create a story from life that shows the importance of the daily, and sometimes seemingly mundane, happenings of waking, sleeping, and waking again.  I add Sherman to the list of teachers who have impacted my life.

A story that is woven through the fabric of daily life becomes a living story; a seemingly ordinary event becomes important by its weave in the story.  The man who is falling down drunk, the parent who abuses their child or the woman who leaves her man are each an integral parts of this weave.  From such occurrences the myth of life is created.

Each of us have our own myths, legends, and weaves that are the fabric of our lives.  When the weave of our lives intersect the weave of others lives a richly colored and interesting fabric is created.  To know, understand, and remark upon these stories insures the continuation of each life through the stories that appear in the fabric of this weave.  We validate each other’s lives.

Gathering stories is important for the survival of culture.  The collecting, keeping, and sharing of these stories allow us to see and understand ourselves in the larger picture of the family, community, culture, and world.  Stories connect us to past and future and allow the present to culminate in the wisdom of being here now.

Preservation of stories and through this the preservation of culture often is done by the least likely person.  The preserver of stories is not the heroine/hero, but is the one who takes the place of the witness; the observer, who watches without judgment and reports the events that make up the story.  In Sherman Alexie’s movie “Smoke Signals” the character Thomas Builds-the-Fire is the story keeper.  The little, nerdy guy, the seeming misfit of the reservation, who by being the outcast has a vantage point for recording/remembering the stories that brings cohesiveness to his tribe/community.  Thomas’ willingness and ability to do this for his friend Victor allows them to reach their goal.

Our stories, individually and collectively, are necessary to our survival both locally and globally.   The world around us is filled with all that we need.  If we become still and listen we will hear the heartbeat, the rhythm, the song of life.  Stories, our stories, surround us; we need only to pay attention to life as it moves through and around us.  Our paying attention is what will make us all the story collectors, keepers, and tellers in our lives.

A myriad of events and experiences present themselves daily.  If we are mindful and pay attention these things become the fodder to feed the stories in life.  In my family of origin my great grandmother, my grandparents, my parents, aunts and uncles were the story tellers to me.  I would ask visiting relatives to tell me stories and would clarify my request by saying, "not from a story book, but from your life".  As a child I was preparing for my adult career as a therapist; I was collecting stories of peoples lives as well as my own history.

Because we are all different our memories and recall are different, but a story recalled from different perspectives adds richness and texture to  the fabric of life.  My sons recall the history of events in our family slightly different from each other and from me.  Again this creates a unique weave as our memories are woven together.  No one is right or wrong. Memories are made by our own perceptions and are remembered and shaded in different colors making life interesting.  Accepting that when nothing is for sure then everything is a possibility we create an abundance in our lives that certainty robs us of.

We learn through stories of our humanity.  Stories told by Sara, my great grandmother, to my grandmother, to my father, to me, to my sons are the makings of personal legend and myth.  The characters in these stories that are told and retold take on the markings of myth.  They are alive and live through the retelling and the being heard and reheard.  When Thomas Builds-the-Fire tells Victor the memory of Victor's own life a small legend is being created.  When my relatives told me stories from their own lives I began collecting the legends of my history.  When I weave these stories into my sons lives these legends live on through them and through the people who have been shaped by the stories being told and retold.

Like ripples in a pond our stories reach out and touch the next ripple, and the next, and the next, and...  A living story will do this.  From ancestors to future generations is how this thread is past through the loom of life.  As stories are woven we can change the thread and the texture as the fabric of our lives unfold.  This is why these are living stories.

Our presence gives them life.  Remembering and telling these stories makes them our personal history.  Story telling, like history, is an oral tradition, and it lives through its being told and passed on to others.  As long as there are those who have voices to speak and others who have ears to hear the stories will live through their many incarnations. 

 It is good - mitakuye oyasin