Hello all,
Recently, I was working with one of my dream groups and a dreamer requested to work with a dream in the group. The dreamer was very shy in the asking. When I asked about the shyness, they replied because the dream was not a recent dream, but a dream from 30 years ago.
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What I love about the particularity of dreaming is that our dreams come with such weight around where we are in our inner world, our outer world dilemmas, the joys we are working with in our current lives. They are immediate and responsive to both our daily lives and the larger context of the fullness of our life stories.
My dream from last night is powerful because it works with what I am working with in this moment, maybe even from the context of the very day I experience the dream. Immediacy and contextual and powerful – even when we do not immediately understand how immediate the dream is. Meaning, even when I dream about something from my past, the dreams bring me there because that moment of the past is effecting me in this moment of my now.
Not just the obvious difficult issues like trauma that need attention: this also includes parts of ourselves that are our gifts, our passions, our joy. When I dream of being a girl before the age of five for me, the dream is pointing to a kind of innocence and wonder I carried at that age. Maybe because that innocence and wonder is blooming in me again or blooming in new ways in my current life. The dream comes to both acknowledge and honor this and to grow this innocence in new ways.
Our dreams weave the past and present with such intricacies that I do not believe we fully know or will perhaps ever know all of the layers. A beautiful dance, an everchanging weave of the mysteriousness of our lives.
11th-12th Century]
That weave of the tapestry of who we are does not move just in linear time, of course, but in many ways. Just as our dreams from last night, last week, work with our now, there are always layers that work with the bigger picture in every dream.
The weave is both timely – and timeless.
Which means when I work with a dream from last year, from last decade, from when I was a girl, I am still working with parts of me that are timeless.
For example, I had a dream when I was a girl where all I remembered was a kind of ecstacy, a kind of joy that was new for me. The dream was immediate to my life at the time, something awakening in who I was as a child experiencing the world in new ways. I think of the joy and freedom of riding my red ten speed bike, for example.
And I can return to that dream and be with that feeling now and explore how it has changed and grown since I was that girl. For the joy in me, and how I experience joy, is part of who I am whether I am 8 or 25 or 58. I can work with that dream now because it is part of the tapestry that is me now and always.
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So, when the dear dreamer brought their dream to the circle from many years ago, we worked it with immediacy, we worked it as if they had both dreamt it last night and dreamt it all those years ago. We worked with all the dream brought from the time they had the dream and how it is still weaving in the dreamer now.
It was a profound experience, both for the dreamer and our entire circle. How the threads from all those years ago are still alive and weaving, how the tapestry is always being created and recreated and created anew.
It is all part of the magic of dreaming.