The Narrow View and The Wider View - An Etymology of Dreaming

Hello all,

In this series of exploring the difficulty of leaning into possibility, I find myself turning again to speak about trauma, about wounds we carry from our past and about how many of us live with the difficulty of daily life in cultures that would and do control who we are and who we can be.

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There is a current news story here in the U.S. about a male public figure accused of committing violence against his now ex-wife and their young daughter [violence against a family member is quaintly called “domestic violence”, but really it is just violence]. The man took to social media saying that just a few days after one of the “incidents”, his ex-wife had been very nice to him, offering to cook dinner for him and saying something about how glad she was to be on friendlier terms. His argument went something like, “If something bad had happened, then why would she offer to make me dinner? Why would she be so glad to be friendly?” For him, this was his proof of innocence.

Of course, many of us know that one way to survive in a situation where there is a threat of violence is to “make nice”. Is to create a scenario where maybe the threat will not escalate to another assault against us or our kids or other loved ones.

The term some use for this is “fawning”. There are other ways people respond to difficult situations in order to survive – we can fight, we can flee, we can freeze, we can forget or pretend, we can deny, we can hide, etc.

These kinds of survival techniques are often, well, successful. A woman trying to keep an ex on “friendly” terms so maybe he won’t be violent to their children when the kids are with him. A Black person who has been pulled over by a racist police officer who does not lose her temper when verbally assaulted in order to survive the pullover. A boy who flees from other kids who would bully and harass him. A woman being harassed walking home alone employing any techniques she knows to get home safe.

Survival techniques are important to have – because we are often in need of them.

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Part of any survival response, no matter what mode, is that we need to narrow our scope and our scope of possibilities to focus on what is necessary in the moment to survive. A woman dropping off the kids to an abusive ex for a weekend visitation narrows the scope on what she can do to keep the kids safe for another few days. Maybe she will make meals for the weekend, for example. A man pulled over by a police officer for the color of his skin narrows his scope to being as non-reactive as possible so he can drive away unscathed.

We narrow our focus to what needs to happen in a moment of danger or threat. People who have been in battles speak to this – sometimes even how and what we see narrowing to only what is directly in front of us.

What often happens, though, is that the ways we survive becomes the ways we live, even when circumstances are not threatening, even when we have found ways to have some safety.

The narrowed focus that is helpful and crucial for survival leaves us often living narrow lives, believing we need to live narrowly all the time to stay alive.

In this place, we may not have the luxury of a wider view, a wider range of possibilities. We may not even be able to imagine having any possibilities other than the narrow way of living/surviving. Especially for those of us who live under daily possibilities of violence personally or culturally because of race, gender, sexuality, disabilities, etc.

Which is why living into possibilities can be so damn hard.

When we begin to stretch our wings, our survival selves begin to screech about keeping quiet or keeping up the damn fight or just smile and move on, etc. When we begin to come out of our narrows, our memories and fears of what has happened happening again come with us.

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Of course, we may not even realize we are living in narrow ways. We may not realize we have gradually lived into smaller and more rigid daily practices. We may not even have an outer world life that looks constrained.

One of the ways our dreams can help us is to show and give us experiences of how we may be living in narrow, survival ways beyond what is necessary.

How our dreams show this varies wildly, because we are all so wildly unique in our souls and our experiences. For me, I had many dreams of living in very small places – small, one room apartments or dark basements. I also had many dreams of living in dilapidated houses that were not really fit for anyone to live in. Walls crumbling or in total ruin, rotting ceilings and floors. I have dreamt of living in prison-like conditions. I have never been in prison, never lived in housing that small or falling apart.

But I have lived small and in my own narrow survival ways. For me, one way to not be a target of my mother’s rage was to just not be in her way – to hide in my room, keep my head down, ride my bike for hours when I was younger, just be gone from the house when I was a teen. Another way was to mask by “acting big” – hiding my fear and doubt behind big talk, confidence. In high school, I was voted “Most Mischievous” my senior year, for example. I learned how to hide in any way I could.

My dreams showed my narrow inner life and why I felt I had to live this way, sometimes in frightening dream experiences.

They also showed possibility before I could even turn toward possibility. Also early in my work, even when I was having dreams of my narrow places and my fear of living outside of them, I had other dreams. Like this one:

I am in a wide and lush field – the grass is thick and fresh and so deeply green. I can’t even see the ends of the field; it is that big. I feel that even the dirt is lush. All around where I am standing, there are balls of paper on the grass, and I get the sense that I only have to pick up the paper and see what is there. I feel excited and not overwhelmed, not scared at the big open space.

I am not in any narrow, constrained place in this dream. It is a wide-open field – fresh and lush and full of possibility. I can still feel that dream, the quality of the light, the touch of the grass and wind on my skin. The possibility of what is on the paper – maybe things I threw away but I get to have. The thrill in my body.

I was given, gifted, an experience of being safe and being able to be in a, literally, wider viewpoint in this dream. Even as I was also having those dreams of small places, scary dreams of being attacked and shot at, all the ways I tried to hide to be safe.

We don’t know what is possible, often, unless we have experiences of it. We don’t know what is happening, how we are living, unless we have experiences of how we are living in an inner way.

My dreams showed how I was hiding, staying small, living in narrow ways and showed me that I wanted and maybe even could live otherwise. Because, no matter our circumstances, there is an otherwise, even if it is only within us and how we live our inner lives. It is always possible.

[Next Article – How Dreams Can Show Where We Learn Our Narrow Ways and Offer Different Lessons]