Hi all,
Last week, we explored another “step” around how our dreams can change narratives we believe about ourselves and the world based on our experiences in said world.
And we are going to explore another “step” in this process, but I wanted to talk about the idea around “steps” first, for just a quick moment.
There are so many ways to work with dreams, so many different processes that so many people have come up with over human history. All interesting and all, usually, tied to the time and culture from whence they emerged. Many of these “ways” of being with dreams offer “steps” to help work with our dreams.
Just as I kinda am doing here.
For me, though, “steps” of any kind are useful only when they are useful. Meaning, when I offer “steps”, they are not concrete, not universal, not meant to be anything but useful if they are useful.
I say this because, again for me, the way of being with dreams that is best for you is finding your way with being with dreams. Maybe steps can help, maybe the way someone has come up with a “this then this then this” method is intriguing for you to try. Maybe mixing and matching different pieces from different ways is your jam.
I am using the idea here of “steps” just to help give a simplified overview of this very intricate process of changing narrative through dreaming.
Dreams are so intricate and exquisite – I do not really believe there is a “this then this then this” logic. If there are “steps” at all to our dreamwork, they are more steps of a gorgeous dance that is unique for you.
Step Three [Hundredish]: “Practice”
Why is this important? Because the last “step” in this dance is not the last step at all, but a turn and a round.
For just because we learn something once in a dream and even bring the learning to our consciousness with great clarity, it does not mean we know how to live the new narrative.
In the last article, I wrote about a dream where I finally realized that my father was not going to really be able to see me and, in the moment of my sadness, another male/father figure came into the dream and met me in a beautiful way.
Gorgeous, sweet, tender. Revolutionary for me.
But that did not mean I completely received, fully and in my body, the offering of the dream. A few months later, I had this dream:
Dream:
A sweet man calls and asks if I am going to come work for him now. He tells me all I have to do is walk across the square and into the cathedral where he is waiting for me. I feel scared and, as I stand in the square, I realize I do not know how to enter the building because I do not see a door. Just a wall that is many stories high.
Again, this is after the dream where I am happily and clumsily working with the man.
When a new narrative is offered to us, we usually do not know how to live into it, especially after living in the old ones for most of our lives. Especially since many of the old narratives were introduced when we were children and so feel almost “natural”.
It takes practice to live into the new. It takes conscious practice and repetition. Not just in our waking lives, but our dreams bring us back to these lessons again and again. Because we need to unlearn and learn.
Learning and unlearning take practice. Just like learning a dance takes practice.
In this dream after the sweet dream with the man in the office, I am scared, and I cannot see a way into the building where he calls me to enter. All I see, in the dream, is a wall.
Here, the man is inviting me again, but in this round of the dance, I can see no way to reach him. All I could see at the time was a wall.
Does this relate to my father. Yes! At one level because – in part – my father was like a wall to me. Old stone, solid, stories high, impenetrable. There was no entrance into being with my father. He was in a fortress of his own making.
An important piece that deepens this dream is about the dream’s landscape – the place feels very much like a city in Italy with a cathedral sitting at one end of a town square. Old, ancient. My father, as many of you know, was first generation Italian.
When I was in Italy, I really felt my heritage there and felt how sad it was that my dad never went to Italy. I also loved wandering the old cities and towns with their gorgeous squares. How everyone in the community gathered in those squares. I loved exploring the cathedrals and small churches that are everywhere. Everything felt so familiar in some way.
And also impenetrable because, although I have Italian heritage, I am not Italian born. I do not understand the culture; I do not know the appropriate or inappropriate ways of being in that world. I felt a strange sense of home in Italy and also the familiar sense of being outsider.
When my grandparents came from Italy [separately – they married in Chicago], both sides of their families were determined to have their children and grandchildren “not” be Italian. When my father was a child, being Italian in the United States meant being open to incredible discrimination and prejudice. My father, too, was very determined that we be considered “American” and not “Italian”. He truly wanted us to “pass” as white European.
Which meant I was shut out from my Italian heritage. My grandparents spoke Italian but forbade my father from learning or speaking it. My grandparents and father kept us from other extended family because they wanted us to be distant from our Italian culture. There was no way for me to enter.
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Even with the invitation so clear and happily offered, the dream shows another round of learning for me. Part of the lesson shows where my “block” around feeling welcome still asserted itself – that impenetrable wall.
So, when a male figure in a dream cheerfully says, “Come on over”, my old narrative is still haunting me because I did not know how to keep stepping toward. In the dream, I deeply feel my desire to cross the square, my desire to be with the man. But I can see no way because I had been blocked in many ways in my life from finding a way in.
The dream ended with me feeling paralyzed, just standing across the square looking up at the ancient building with all its history, feeling the impossibility. I did not know to just move toward the building. To maybe begin circling it to see what I could find. To explore the square, the building. To trust that, if I stepped forward, I would find a way.
I still did not know how to trust myself that there would be a way, even if the old narrative presented “impenetrable”.
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The dream also adds another layer with the landscape – that of the cathedral. The fact that the man invites me to enter the cathedral to “work with him” brings in the layer of spirituality. Which adds another whole kettle of fish to the dance. Let’s explore that next time.