| …Tell
me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver
From: The Summer Day
MY
FASCINATION WITH DREAMS actually began nearly two-and-a-half
decades ago when, seemingly out of nowhere, a torrent of unusual dreams
roared into my life. It was as though somewhere deep in my psyche, someone
had opened an inner floodgate. Even though I was unable to interpret
this inner, symbolic language at first, my intuition told me that these
dreams were far more than just my brain purging residues from the day.
They contained thematic images, symbols, and dramas that moved through
my life, leaving strange tracks, exotic fragrances, tearing down old
buildings, setting fires. I was captivated. I committed myself to understanding
their real meaning and gradually filled five dream journals with thousands
of dreams, all the while voraciously reading everything I could find
on dreams, symbols, the imagination, and theories and techniques of
dream interpretation.
In the late seventies, I began working with others’ dreams and
with numerous dream study groups, filling several filing cabinets with
fascinating examples of individuals’ dreams. I realized early-on
that dreams held many valuable keys to understanding life and especially
the choices we make or avoid making that inevitably chart our future
course.
From struggling to understand thousands of dreams over the years, I
discovered a something quite remarkable about dreaming: Our dreams are
continually nudging us into our life, into who we really are—the
life we are meant to live. This means that our dreams, when understood
and applied, are extraordinary tools that we can all use to help create
a meaningful, authentic life. One of the ways they move us into this
creative adventure is to relentlessly identify those essential, extraordinary
qualities that make us unique and authentic individuals. At
the same time, dreams are ruthless and often shocking in exposing influences
from others, from society, from family, from groups, from ideologies,
that threaten our ability to fully live our own lives. In fact, the
more we are unaware of the damaging effects of even one self-defeating
idea or comment we are telling ourselves, the more likely our dreams
will respond with some very graphic images like these actual examples:
cutting off the arms of an infant, being chased by a serial killer or
other threatening figure that wants to do away with us; examples of
dream shock therapy, startling wake-up images that are telling us how
we are killing our own potential.
Any dream interpretation techniques that ignore this powerful dream
dynamic is like a child playing in the shallow end of the pool—safe
and secure but missing something tremendous, a priceless tool
for helping us to avoid living someone else’s life, a life without
passion and creativity, a life of depressed potential, a life
of little or no value to the world we live in. It is ironic that this
characteristic of dreaming also happens to stop many people from seriously
looking at their dreams, which is understandable. It can be pretty uncomfortable
to face ourselves and what we have settled for in life. And it’s
true that even a destructive status quo often feels more comfortable
and safe because
it is known. Dreams propel us into creative space, into unknown territory,
which always creates some tension, fear, and anxiety. But it is precisely
this dream-inspired, healthy tension that can ignite our creative
fire. In this sense, our dreams create a life-changing conflict, a tension
between who we think we are and who we could become.
Dreams are adept at exploding obstacles by making us aware of what we
are really doing to ourselves. I remember a client, Diana, who was struggling
with complex family problems, while working long hours in a demanding,
exhausting job. She felt stuck, trapped economically in what seemed
to be a labyrinth of impossible circumstances. Just when things were
blackest, she had a scary dream, one she called a nightmare:
I am in a foreign country,
probably Turkey. We (my husband was with me and several others on
an outing—it’s dark out) go to a huge deep lake and begin
swimming. Two boulders provide the only underwater footing, yet even
if I stand on one of them the water is up to my chin. Also they are
some distance apart, maybe forty feet, and I’m not a strong
swimmer. I suddenly become aware that a lioness is swimming nearby.
She is gradually becoming more and more menacing. The others are some
distance away and seem to be having a good time, but I am beginning
to panic.
Many dreams that at first feel like a nightmare unravel, often turning
out to contain real treasure. It’s an interesting dynamic of dreaming
that the “me” in the dream— what we can think of as
the dreaming ego— nearly always reacts literally
to the dream drama; this is the situation in Diana’s dream with
her sense of panic. At one point, as we were working with her dream’s
images, she said, “That’s it—my life feels like I’m
just keeping my head above water.” She added, “It’s
scary. It (the lioness) might make me have to move off that boulder.”
I asked her to describe a lioness to me assuming I had no idea what
such a creature was. She explained, “It’s a large mammal.
It can be ferocious. It’s powerful, impressive, protective, wild,
unpredictable.” I asked her if she saw or felt any of those qualities
in herself. She hesitated, “Not much any more, except for my ‘ferocious’
anger about society and world problems.”
Diana’s “lioness” turned out to be a valuable part
of her authentic nature, a powerful, capable, instinctual creature
that was after Diana’s “just keeping my head above
water,” hanging onto the status quo, life. She began to feel
her lioness nature in her waking life, to make space for her “lioness”
nature, and she began to act and “move” her life off the
immoveable boulders of her circumstances. She now knew, as the lioness,
that she could swim through and out of that “deep” water.
When I last saw Diana, she was well on her way to dramatically changing
her life and her circumstances—her inner lioness nature was moving
her off the boulder, transforming her life—all from a dream!
Exploring the dream:
• Diana imagined the two boulders being her job and her family
problems; ironically, the qualities that the lioness represents are
just what’s needed to “...make [her] have to move off
that boulder.”
• She described the lake as a “passive force.” We
can glean a lot more information from the image by looking at how
such a “huge deep lake” would form with a likely scenario
going something like this: A deep, depressed area gradually fills
with water, probably from rain, from melting snow, or from some inlet,
a stream or runoff emptying into the depressed land.
• As the lake, there’s a feeling of just passively taking
it, the water, all in, accepting without protest whatever you’re
given; as the lake you are inactive, dependent on the weather, the
elements. You are not proactive and nothing at all like the lioness.
Watch out!
Thus our dreams can become potent tools guiding us through the process
of really living our own lives with courage and passion. Dreams are
the ingredients creating the healing elixir; Dreams are the gateways
into the Royal City, and they are our passport into a meaningful life
that makes a difference.
© John
D. Goldhammer, Ph. D., 2004
|
