Hi all,
Last article, we explored how dreams help us with our tangles by first showing us the tangles. And showing us that the tangles even exist.
So, let’s see how the dreams were trying to help me all those years ago.
Acknowledgement of the True Narrative
I want to begin by expanding a little on what I ended with in the last article about the importance of acknowledging what is true when working with our histories and our narratives.
Acknowledgement of the existing stories and tangles we carry is crucial because sometimes we do not know about our tangles. Not entirely. In my work, I knew I was all tangled up inside, but I had a story that I was in a tangle because I was not a good person, not because of what I had experienced in my life. I believed I did not deserve a love of mutuality and deep respect because I was not loveable enough. This is what I believed was my core issue and the reason for my tangle.
I mean, I was also told this. Directly by people in my family through words and actions and also by my culture. The suburban life of the 1970-80s in the U.S. Midwest was not, well, committed to changing narratives for women or people of color or other people “on the margins” [or pushed to the margins].
The one part of the narrative that was true was that I was, indeed, all tangled up.
But the two dreams together worked to really show and have me feel the starkness between what I believed and what was actually true.
The stark difference between a “nice” version of part of the tangle – just being a caddy on a golf course [even if there was no love, golf courses are pretty and it felt normal anyway] – and the other version that showed the truth. Without my filters or ideas, the other dream showed exactly what it felt like to be a child and young adult in the environment where I lived.
Underneath my desire to be a caddy, the dreams showed me, was a refugee living without safety, without being seen, without unconditional love.
Important to know this because it helped to loosen that tangle in me. Because I felt the truth of being a refugee. To just know it to be true, to not pretend it was not true, was an enormous relief.
This is how the tangles come untangled. First, they get loosened.
This acknowledgement of the truth of the reality for my soul was important in the process of healing, yes. Of course.
But it was important because I was also dreaming of other landscapes and possibilities unknown to me. Both literally and emotionally.
Step Two: Other Possibilities
Around the same time I had the dream of being in a post-apocalyptic landscape of my childhood, I was having other kinds of dreams, too, that seemed just as baffling.
Which is how dreams will work with us sometimes, especially when we have difficult dreams. There are other dreams, other possibilities.
Here’s a dream from that time same period:
Dream:
I am at a football game where my father is the coach. I wait and wait for him to notice me, there on the sidelines, but he never does. Never acknowledges my presence. I feel so so sad.
Switch
I am working for/with a sweet man in an office. I want to go back to my father, but he keeps distracting me, saying we need to find something. We search, opening doors and cabinets and even eventually driving around. Slowly I feel confident with him, knowing we will find whatever it is we need to find. Then we are back in the office and I realize I do not need to go back to my father, who will never acknowledge me. I can be here, and I want to be here. I am suddenly nervous and clumsy, knocking things off the man’s desk but he just laughs with deep love, and we laugh together.
Such a different dream, right?!
The dream begins where I had always been with my father in so many ways – ignored, not seen. Just like the golf dream. In this dream, it is football because that was, in fact, my father’s sport. He played in high school, was awarded a football scholarship for college before an injury made that impossible and he did coach little league when my two of my brothers played football as kids.
His sport, his field. I am still not seen, not acknowledged.
What is different here from the caddy dream are a few things. First, I am not trying to be in the game anymore. I am not cheerleader or watergirl or anything. I am just on the sidelines, sidelined.
Another difference is that this situation does not feel normal to me anymore. Meaning, I am different because the dreams were taking me through/showing me the reality under my narratives, having me feel those realities. Giving me space to feel what was underneath.
Instead of feeling normal to be ignored, I feel my grief and sadness.
This is the key in the dream. I was sad.
When I was a kid, I was also sad that my father, when he divorced my mother, did not say “we are leaving”, he just left. He did not take me with him. When I was in high school, I had this hope that he would let me live with him, away from the old stories, the old way of living. But he never offered. I never asked. I knew not to ask.
My sadness around my father, the grief around the post-apocalyptic dream were changing me because I was feeling what was true.
Without the story that it was my fault. Without the narrative that I was the cause of the desolation. My father was desolated before I was born. My mother, too. I was born into that landscape.
When my father left, he did not believe there could be any other landscape besides survival. He did not believe he could be a father to anyone. He carried his own deep shame that kept him in his narratives.
But my sadness and grief changed everything. Which is why the dream changes, too. As I feel my grief, another father-figure emerges.
He is sweet and funny and so attentive.
And is he smart, this archetype because he knew he could not approach me as a “father” – I had too many narratives around “father”. Also, because he knew I was still living in survival mode, in the “I can be a helper” mode, as a way to “earn” love, he came to me as someone to work for and/or with.
So specific! So specific how this archetype met me in a way to not scare me off. I was not ready for the all-enfolding love of a father back then. Oh, hell no. I would have run for the hills.
Instead, he came in the dream with another possibility. Like – look! We can work together! Look! You don’t have to be perfect! You do not have to be caddy! We can be co-workers!
I mean, makes my heart sing even these years later, this gentle step toward me in a time when it was all I could receive.
He does not even shame me for wanting to go back to my father – of course, I wanted to go back to my father. He had been the only possibility for a different story for me for a long time. I was still in a healing process.
Instead, he distracts me with “work”. He says we need to find something, which catches me. I knew how to be helpful. So, I help him search.
The search part of the dream, though a seemingly small part, is actually really vivid in my memory. The colors were bright, the light of all the various scenes, so lit. Everything felt lit.
The searching, too, felt so familiar. Because it is also what I had been doing. Searching for a safe place.
Just like in the desolation dream. Searching for a safe place.
But also searching for myself. Searching for my connection to the archetypes. Here, in this dream, the search is sweet because, well, I have been found, in a way. Or, I have found the place. Or, I have found him. All of it.
And the archetype helped me to find that I had found the place, that I had also already found him. It is a funny, the searching that goes from drawers to cabinets to other rooms to finally just driving around. It is like he is showing me that this place, with him, is not desolate. It was so so lit.
Of course, then, when I feel confidence with him, when I feel sure about the finding, we are back at “the office” and I feel the truth. That my father will never acknowledge the heart of me and that I have another place to be.
I can even be nervous, clumsy. In this place, all the parts of me are welcome. Of course, I am fumbling! I do not quite know how to be in such a place. With such love.
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Just as the dreams were working to show me the truth, to help me to feel the truth so to find my feelings, they were working to show this other possibility.
That there was a place. That I could have my sadness and my grief and my need.
That I could be met where I was – in the lexicon of my survival still of being a helper.
So tender.
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Next Article, we will explore another part of this process – how it takes practice.