Hi all,
Finally, as promised, I am going to explore specifically how dreams can help us around breaking narratives we believe to be true so that we can be open to new ways of being, especially inside of ourselves.
A few articles back, I wrote about the way narratives, both true and not-true, both personal and public, shape our outer and inner lives. In particular, how the tangledness of these stories can and have affected my own work.
Okay, but how do dreams help us with this?
Nitty Gritty. It’s how I think of the way dreams work with us – they get right into the heart of where our narratives and stories are intricately tangled together.
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Tangles. One of the best ways to approach a mess of a tangle is to first identify what is in the tangle. How many threads, what are they, etc. We need to see what is looped around what and what is tucked in and knotted where. If we just start pulling at random threads, it usually just tightens everything more tightly.
This is true of the narratives tangled in us and it is one way the dreams begin to help with the untangling.
Step One: Identify the Tangle and Name the Threads
Thread One – Surface Behavior
In combing through dreams for this article from my own work, it is always so so striking to read dreams from my past. Just like watching an old YouTube Video Bill and I posted 10 years ago where I talked about a dream that I had not remembered at all. Always tender and a little strange, honestly. And it is always so amazing and touching to feel how the threads in past dreams are still woven and part of the threads I am working now.
Dreams are time-sensitive, timely and timeless.
Anyway, in looking through past dreams, I found a few dreams from early in my work that feel obvious [now] in how they worked to do this first step in untangling, meaning to identify the threads. Here’s one of the dreams, a pretty simple one:
I am chasing after my father and my first partner [from when I was 20] on a golf course because I am their caddy. They are cold and indifferent, just focused on the game, and want nothing to do with me.
So tender to find this dream again because it is what I have done in response to believing I did not belong anywhere. I did not believe I truly belonged with my father and not with my first partner. Or was good enough to belong with them. My narrative was that I had to chase after the people I loved, I had to be their “caddy” in order to belong or deserve love.
Which is, indeed, exactly what I did. With my father, with partners, with my brothers, with teachers, with friends. With my father, which the dream is focused on, I ran after him especially after my parents divorced. He had broken from the family, had said truths and I think, in my 14-year-old self, I believed I could have a place with him.
But he was elusive, with so many secrets, as a way to survive the traumas of his childhood, the traumas of being married to my mother and having children at an incredibly young age.
Elusive with his feelings, his true heart. Not surprising, then, that I chose partners who were just like him in this way. Like my first partner who was elusive with his feelings as a way to survive his childhood traumas, too.
Elusive with me chasing after. Which, in a way, is what my father wanted, for me to be his good daughter, trotting after him, carrying what he could not carry. Which is what my first lover wanted, too. For me not to ask questions and to just be there and be helpful. To be caddy instead of daughter, caddy instead of full partnership with a beloved.
Which is what love had become for me.
So, first thread was to identify how I was living. And what it felt like to live that way.
The dream gave me not just the image, but the felt experience of being caddy. And how it felt in the dream was complicated and layered – I felt desperate and literally exhausted. The chasing and carrying of what my father did not want to carry was physically tiring in the dream. Golf bags full of clubs are super heavy. I also felt that “at least” I got to be on the course with them, in the game. Even if my father or my lover was cold and dismissive. At least I was allowed to be there. I felt a little excited, too, to be on the course. A little hopeful.
And I did not feel overly upset about the coldness, the dismissiveness toward me. It felt normal.
All of these are pieces of the thread of how I believed love was going to work for me. That “at least” I could be on someone else’s course. “At least” I wasn’t alone and had “a place” to be. “At least” there was a little excitement and I got to “be in the game” in some way. How it was “normal”.
Fun fact: Neither my father nor my first partner played golf very much, if at all. I also did not play golf, though I had a few times. The person who played golf in my life, at that time, was my current partner. So, little gesture for me to ask the question if I was still chasing and being the caddy. Oh, yes, I was.
Thread Two – What is Under the Surface Behavior
I had another dream in the same time period:
Dream:
I am in the area where I grew up, in a crowded and chaotic theater where people are scared and running around. I spot a childhood friend. I feel scared, too, and not sure what is happening, but I do not ask her for help. Instead, I keep trying to catch her eye and waiting for her to see me. She does, miraculously and smiles. Without a word, she leads me out of the chaos to a place in the back where she gives me a place to write.
Later, she leaves, and I feel I have no place to go, so I wander out of the theater. It does not occur to me to ask for help or that I could have gone with her. I spend the rest of the dream wandering my hometown that is in absolute devastation, as if bombs have hit it. I am in terror. When I see a few of my brothers, my mother, some of my mother’s family in the distance, I run away from them as fast as I can. There are refugees everywhere. It all feels dangerous and that there is no safe place safe because there isn’t. I feel exhausted running around trying to find some place that is not dangerous but never finding it.
Oof.
The first thing I notice in this dream after looking at the first dream is how my father was not in this particular desolate landscape even though other members of my family were present.
The threads of this dream show what it was like for me, growing up. Not literally, in a physical way. I did not live in a warzone, the way so many people have and do. There were no bombs raining down in my city, no occupiers coming to either take my house or destroy it. No bulldozers razing everything else to the ground. I grew up in the Midwest, mostly in the suburbs.
Since this was not my physical reality, why the devastation? Because this is exactly what it was like for me on an emotional and spiritual level. Devastation and nowhere that felt safe. Living as a refugee. My brothers were not safe because we were all wild, my mother was not safe, my mother’s family. No haven. To not have a safe clan, a safe place, to not have anywhere I could just be is what it was like when I was a kid.
No wonder I ran after my father and then lovers, happy to be caddy. I thought I was running from the desolation to have a place somewhere. At least, I rationalized, I was on a course, even if it was not mine. Maybe I could be safe there.
And the exhaustion of the first dream was not just years of running after people who did not know how to love me, but also years of running away, too, from love that was dangerous.
Which, of course, is another thread. The running from. The dream begins, of course, where I encounter a sweet friend from when I was in elementary school. She was sweet and smart and funny, and she had a great family. Parents who loved her, supported her in doing all the things she wanted to do.
The dream begins with me unable to ask for help, even though she does give it. Even though she encourages me to find words when I am in a wordless place. But when she leaves, I do not ask to go with her.
I have, in many ways, run away from love, too. Scared to be vulnerable and open because what if the person really is just like my father or old lover or worse.
Now What? What is Step Two?
So, okay. Now what? Now that a few threads are identified, now that the threads are a little teased out so that I can really see and feel my behavior, the narrative, where it all came from, what now?
For me, part of the “now what” is simply acknowledgement. No wonder I ran after partners and friends [men and women] who did not really know how to be with me, who really wanted me to either chase them or be their caddy. To be helper or sidekick.
To acknowledge that some of my ways of being in the world that carried shame came not from some core “truth” about me as being unlovable, that I was not born broken. No. I was born into a broken reality where people lived with desolated hearts and love was conditional.
Just this was, is, such a huge step in the process of changing narrative. The dreams show the truth of the narrative, not the ones we believed.
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In our next article, we will look at some of the dreams that offered hope and a change of those narratives.