Hi all!
Hi all!
Last article, we explored how scientific materialism has and still does influence how we, as a culture, think about dreaming. And since the idea of explaining, categorizing, measuring everything is part of the idea of materialism in scientific “thought”, how this kind of measuring and categorizing and explaining around dreaming actually works to separate the individual from their own dreams.
How this way can separate me from my experiences and teaching from my own dreams. Yours, too.
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Last January, I started the year off with the idea of working with dreams and mythology – but we landed instead on this crazy year-long exploration of narrative and dreams.
From personal narratives to family narratives to cultural narratives to scientific narratives. It has been surprising to me that we could have gone the whole year with this – and also not surprising.
Because we are made of story and we are made of narrative. Which is why our dreams, of course, work with narrative to work with us. Because story is us.
Story and narrative are both how we learn and grow. Story and narrative, too, are ways that we are repressed, hurt, traumatized, ignored, not seen. Individually, yes, and culturally, too.
Story and narrative can be used against us based on our gender, based on our economic reality, based on who and how we love our partners, based on the colors of our skin, based on the food we eat, based on the shape of our bodies, based on the abilities of our bodies, based on where our bodies come from and live, based on so many stories.
So many narratives based on the circumstances of the body.
Your dreams, as we have been exploring, work with narrative and story in two ways.
Since narrative is used in harmful ways against us, against our bodies and our souls, dreams work to identify, name and then offer possible paths for healing/integration around these narratives.
Your dreams show and embody the narratives you get imprisoned in. Your dreams show and embody what it feels to be imprisoned in these narratives. Narratives that maybe you did not know were actually cages or, worse, weapons against you.
Because narratives are used as weapons. And narratives are being used against you.
Dreams do not just identify the harmful narratives we are born into, they do not just embody stories we think are true to show how they are not true – the other way dreams work with narrative is to show and embody true narratives about you.
About you and no one else.
Your dreams create beautiful narrative scenes and storylines not just as possibilities but as a way to bring you into the truest narratives of who you are and who you may want to grow into. These possibilities are not crafted in some universal way [though there can be universal elements], they are crafted inside of you based on you, your heart, your hopes, your love, your soul and all you have experienced, including your hurts and trauma experiences.
This is why there is no real way to categorize dreams, to quantify what things mean in dreaming in some universal way. This is also why materialism fails when it comes to dreaming.
Because your dreams are not quantifiable in some way that is equal to all other humans on the planet. They are only for your heart and your heart alone. Your body and all that it has been handed and experienced. Your way of experiencing and processing. Your imagination and your magic.
As we wrap up this year and, I think, open our articles to more than just narrative and story, I think it is important to really state again – and again – the power of how your dreams are truly, so truly, yours and yours alone.