Hi all!
I know I write around the big picture of dreaming and ideas – for me this process really nourishes me as a dreamer in terms of my own work.
It also nourishes, informs and grows me around my work with the amazing dreamers I get to work with every day. Sometimes you don’t know what you know until you try to articulate it.
So, thinking about closed vs. open systems around quantum physics and how that works around narrative structures in our inner lives and as embodied in our dreams is so integral with how I work with dreams and dreamers every day. Every single day!
So, I thought I would offer an example that recently arose with a dreamer I work with. First, to be transparent, I asked for permission from the dreamer to write about some of their work here and they happily gave permission [thank you dreamer!!]. Second, in order to honor the dreamer’s anonymity and sacred process, I am only going to speak about the dreamer and the dreams in general terms and use the pronoun of “they” when referring to the dreamer.
So, don’t get thrown by the pronoun “they” – it is not meant to gesture to any gender, it is for keeping a sacred container for the dreamer and their work.
The reason I want to speak about closed narratives and open narratives in relationship with this dreamer’s work as a generalized example is because it is really a gorgeous process and I feel and have felt very inspired by the dreamer’s work they have been doing recently and for the many years we have been working together.
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Here we go – the dreamer is in a major life transition and the last few years have been incredibly challenging around this transition for many reasons, some of which were out of anyone’s control.
Part of the challenge of transitions for folks, I think, is that transitions are where many of us have either suffered traumatic events or experienced being thrown into transition because of traumatic events. This makes transitions tricky spaces to navigate because our old narratives of trauma survival – of the closed system of survival – will want to rise up and, well, control the narrative of the moment.
The other day, in the middle of this time of great change and big decisions to consider, the dreamer had a moment where they were worried they would get “triggered” by part of a necessary decision and process around the change in their life. They were ready for pain, for tears, for being scared. They were ready to be thrown back to being a child who was scared and isolated, told they were “broken”.
They were braced for it.
What happened in the moment instead was not pain or terror – what happened was they felt joy.
Not the crush of trauma, of impossibility, of feeling alone, of feeling incapable, of feeling lost.
Joy.
One of the things this beautiful dreamer has been growing and learning in their work through the last few years is how to navigate the difficult and how to build trust in their own intuition, their own heart as the guiding light. To be their own reference point.
Again, this is such a difficult process to learn not just for this dreamer but for many of us because when we experience trauma and we do not have room to process it, when we learn to survive and create those closed systems in order to survive, then we often lose the ability to hear our own intuition and then, if we do, to trust it.
How to trust ourselves? Especially, like with this dreamer, when they were told they were broken when they were a child. Especially when we are told by our cultures that if we have suffered trauma in our past that we can never be healed, never be whole. That we are tainted, in some.
How to trust something we are told is not trustable – our own hearts.
In this moment for the dreamer, then, when a transition came and their experience was different – because they have been healing and the dreams have been guiding them and they have let themselves be guided – it was amazing.
They even had a dream that showed this – part of their dream was that a roofer came to their house and basically blew the roof off of it.
Literally blew the roof off of an old closed system, an old narrative system, to let the house be open to sky. To show the dreamer that “the sky is the limit.”
I love this so much.
The dreamer can begin to unbelieve the story that the child inside is “broken”, which is the old narrative created for them and shoved down their throat. The dreamer can begin to believe and learn and embody that they are not broken and that there are parts inside that may actually be unbreakable.
Of course, this is not to say that when we are open and opened to new narratives, when we realize we have healing in us, when we are living new narratives, even, that we will not experience old hurts, that we won’t be “triggered” on occasion.
It can mean, however, that these moments are less charged.
It can mean that they are just moments and not life times.
It can mean that we can learn to be in relationship with our lives, with our hurts and wounds, in new ways. We can have new stories and new narratives about the heart and soul of who we are.
Just like this beautiful dreamer is learning and living into who they are now and, even, who they have been. Through all of their hard work, willingness to weather storms and be open to other possibilities than what the old stories about them had been.
Like this dreamer’s dream, our dreams want to come and blow the roof off of any closed system we have been forced to inhabit, any closed system that threatens to suffocate us, any closed system that does not let us grow, thrive and discover new parts of ourselves.