The Dream Factory
I spent yesterday at a seminar about everything dreams. We heard a presentation about how dreams are a gift, and that we should receive them without judgment. A couple spoke who do dream work and they said that dreams give space to locked battles and old hurts. I did a writing workshop using the bridge dream that shook me up so much a few summers ago in Spain and inserted a character I had made up on the fly – a mature man, spiritual healer, age 50ish, salt and pepper curly hair is the one having my dream – now that was fun! We heard a panel discuss what dreams are for, with Rodger Kamenetz riffing off of a NYT article that Michael Chabon wrote called “Why I Hate Dreams” – and we also heard from a person who believes that there are other beings here on this planet that are chaos and we are light – I wish I could have had the chance to explain to him that we are all chaos AND light. It seems like someone already did – as he was sporting a black eye.
I also had a one on one with a dream worker about a dream that has reoccured many times in my life. It began during my marriage and continues today, but one of the latest was so richly detailed that I couldn’t shake it. I told her about the dream that turned into another dream, and she turned it around on me – I became the person who is indifferent, who I was dreaming about was the one who is hurt, I am the “ex”, and the quiet man observing is not unimportant. I was listening to her and then it all sort of hit me, the way I’ve narrated the story to myself and others, and it took on a different direction, which made me suddenly start crying.
Even in my dream remembering, I still assign the same roles, cast the same characters, assign the same blame, and end up wanting. We’re told our dreams are a gift, they are a full-fledged play performed for an audience of one – ourselves. We need to be open to what we receive from our dreams because they peel back our layers, they tell our stories, they develop our characters or as Rodger said, they educate our intuition.
A woman said her husband doesn’t want to hear about her dreams – they’re nonsense he says – so she doesn’t tell him the dream, but she does use what she learns about herself in relation to him. He may not want to hear her dream, he may assign dreams to the same place that miracles and divine grace go for some, but he can’t not be active in her dream work.
As a creative – a writer – the process that guides our dreams is similar to the one that guides our art. We think sometimes it comes out of the ether, but it actually bubbles up from the wellspring inside of us. Why not plunge deeper into its meaning and learn what is being said? Why not allow one more cue to our existence, one more layer of meaning, one more chance to revisit the stories we tell ourselves? None of us want to keep getting it wrong.
And yet there is no right. Rule #1 of dream work, there are no rules.
