Hello all,
In this article we explore some of the “How” dreams help us recognize when we are in our narrow places and also offer different experiences and possibilities around living outside those narrows.
First, though, I want to speak to a wider view around the process of healing and growing. Wider and, I feel, a little wilder.
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In current conversations around healing, especially around “trauma” work, [and, oh there are sooo many conversations], there are many opinions, many studies, many theories, many ways that turn into programs into standardized steps or actions for people to follow, try, have maybe “measurable results” – so, so many things.
Often included in those many things, is a kind of surety or conviction that the particular thing or way or theory or program is the best way to process trauma and healing. There are offerings and therapies and programs; weekend, week-long, year-long retreats and communities offered. There are somatic offerings, a gazillion kinds of therapy offered, movement practices, sacred medicines, EMDR and suggestions like – try surfing or birding!
I even know folks who work with dreams who believe that dreams – and the way they work with dreams – are the only thing we need to know ourselves, to grow, to heal, to blossom. [No, I do not believe this myself, just to be clear. I don’t feel the need to be “competitive” around healing and dreaming!]
For me, this all falls into the realm of how we can want a magic bullet around anything that we lean into – a singular bright answer that will help us through our narrows, through difficulties, through even the difficulty of becoming.
We, as humans, love our simple “answers”.
What I have learned, am continuing to learn, in my relationship to working with dreams is that this is not only not true, but dangerous.
We are incredibly and deeply complex beings, we humans. Our experiences of our lifetimes weave with the echoes of the experiences of our families and ancestors; our experiences of the various cultures we live and have lived in weave with the profoundly unique ways we live, learn, process as an individual; our experiences/relationships with what is happening in the world around us from an environmental reality to how our particular politics affect our daily lives weave with our choices around relationship with the world, others and ourselves.
How can one theory, one process, one way of working work for every one of us? Even work for us all the time, in all the phases of our lives?
We are much larger and wilder than a reductionist way of thinking and hypothesizing about some median way of being human and having human experiences.
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As a dream practitioner, I do not assume that dreams are the way for every person in every process of their lives. Have I had my moment of wanting to believe that – oh, sure! There was a time I did want to believe that dreams were all we needed, all anyone ever needed.
Instead, what dreaming continues to teach me is that it is imperative for each of us, every single unique glorious one of us, to find what works for us in any given moment. That there is no “magic bullet” – but there can be and are things that can prove helpful in our process. Maybe for forever and maybe just for a time. Even different ways of working with dreams. Even birding!!
Most of the dreamers I am privileged to work with have other practices, other processes, even other kinds of “therapies” that they work with that work for them or that they at least explore as possibilities.
For me, this is core to being human and core to who I am when working with dreams – helping dreamers, including myself – find what sings for them and what does not. And even having space for this to change.
Why is this so important? Oh, for me this is the most important part of any process we engage in in our lives. That it is our process, our way, our learning and experiences that most count.
And I believe it is a core offering of our dreams to us.
Because how our dreams show us our narrow places and where we learned to live in our narrows is very different from dreamer to dreamer, of course.
How our dreams work with us to bring us into our wider, wilder places is also different from dreamer to dreamer.
[Sidenote: Even having a dream of being in a literal narrow canyon does not necessarily mean that the dreamer is speaking to some way the dream is in a narrow place. What if the dreamer is a rock climber or a hiker and a narrow canyon is their most happy place?]
So, how do dreams show us our narrows and our wide/wilds? Or how do your dreams show your narrows and wide/wilds?
Short answer is through the experience your dreams bring you into.
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Hmmm. Sometimes, the best way to show! So, another story from my own process. Here’s a fairly recent dream:
I have been doing something and a car arrives with people who look like police. Then, they leave. I assume I am under arrest for whatever it was I was doing and so get in my car and follow them back to the police station. Once there, no one looks at me, talks to me, even when I go up to the counter. The place is really quiet. I wait and wait. I even fall asleep on a bench for a while. I wander around the mostly empty building. Nothing ever happens.
Such a great dream about a place of narrows for me – a place where I am convinced I have done or am always doing something wrong.
Many people who have experienced trauma as kids will feel that what happened was their fault. One of the ways I carried “it was my fault” was around my parents’ volatile marriage. Some part of me knew, when I was a kid, that they were trying to stay together until I, the youngest, was out of the house. I blamed myself for their wrecked marriage, which did break in a very messy way when I was a freshman in high school. I blamed myself for my father’s breakdown of the time. I blamed myself for my mother’s anger.
Part of my deep experiences as a kid was to take blame for things that were not in my control. So that even my presence made something my fault. It was a way of explaining the confusing world around me. And a way to have some “control”. If it was my fault, i could be “better” and maybe things would change.
I have worked with this issue for most of my life and my dreams, of course, have worked with me on this, as well. And it is an echo that still arises for me, especially as I step toward something new, step into owning my voice at another level.
I had this dream around when I was moving my newsletter into the more public realm of Substack and also around really wanting to settle into working on the book I am writing about dreams and dreaming.
During this process, I felt worried and anxious. I felt the old places of “being wrong” and hearing the voices telling me to just be quiet. That even making a simple gesture of putting my work in a more accessible place for people to find, people who have been asking for this, really touched this old wound in me.
So, I had been walking around feeling, in an unconscious way, that I was doing something wrong. And the dream, with great humor, showed me this. Having someone who looked like a cop just pause in their car near where I stood was enough to start the old, familiar story in me.
To me, the dream is hilarious. It shows how the story does not carry too much traction – I mean, no one is actually arresting me. But that my belief in the story is still a narrow I can slip into.
Which is true – especially when stepping into something that is a wider/wilder place. Easier, instead, to go to a comfortable place of “something is wrong with me” or “I have done something wrong”. The old echo of the past. Easier to hang out and not speak than speak…
It has been helpful to be with this dream. Helpful to acknowledge the fear and tenderness which sits under the “I am wrong” or “I did something wrong” place. Easier to be at the police station than to be out in the world, just being me and being uncomfortable.
This dream is so made for me in this moment in my process. This moment where nothing terrible is happening, where good things are happening but I want to retreat to a comfortable, ever-waiting-not-doing anything place. I mean, this dream still makes me smile.
When I had dreams many years ago, however, about the places where I felt I was just wrong – well some of those dreams were not funny. Some of those dreams had people screaming at me or telling me off about how I was wrong. I did have to face not just how I had been told the story. I also had to face how I created situations that made the story true – where I did do things that were wrong. Which, of course, I have done.
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So, the question is how do your dreams show your narrows, how you feel in the narrows and maybe even how comfortable you are in that place. And how your dreams are also inviting you, over and over, to have another experience.