In the last couple of posts, I wrote some suggestions about working with your own dreams, and now I’m going to give you a personal example of what I’ve done with an impactful dream I’ve been carrying around with me for the past month or so. Other dreams have come and gone, but this one has stayed with me. It feels like a big dream, the kind of dream worthy of extended time and attention.
Evolution Dream
I am driving my blue Audi (which often appears in my dreams) and nearing the peak of an ever-steepening mountaintop. I am almost at the crest and gun the engine but can feel steepness of the pitch is too much for my car. Just as gravity is about to pull the car back and down, I turn sharply to the left, like the perfect hammerhead turns my dad used to do with me in his little aerobatic biplane. I see a patch of grass about a mile down below me in the valley. I no sooner think this, when I am making a soft spongy landing on this bright green patch of grass. I have somewhere to get to, and ditch my car to start swimming toward a vague destination I imagine as a very exclusive cocktail party in a house perched on a cliff. My car follows dutifully along on the roadside, which is a gorgeous narrow European waterfront road with old stone retaining walls. I am swimming with a large, twisted stick that offers just a bit of flotation, and also slows me down, but I keep it with me because it will get me further in the long run. It’s getting dark and I still haven’t reached my destination, am resigned to get out, get in my car, and head back the other way, try again another day.
In the dreamwork with Robbyn, she suggests I don’t give up, but keep heading to my destination. Then I am Gollum, a small black lizard-like human emerging from the water at the base of the cliff on which the house is perched. I imagine starting to climb the cliff and as soon as I do, I am there, dressed up and standing in the cocktail party, surveying the view from the large front windows. There is a buzz of communication in all directions, many conversations at once. But then it dawns on me: no one is drinking. And no one is talking either. They are all telepathic and in the dream I think: I’ve found my people!
The dream gave me an expansive feeling, and I was content to carry that with me. This is what I mean by carrying a dream along in your body. At times I imagine swimming with the stick that takes me further though it’s cumbersome and wonder what that’s about. I consider the Gollum-figure as the earliest phase of evolution; I have an association to the idea that we evolved from the sea and at one point crawled up on land. Which makes me think the telepathic people represent the other polarity, a higher form of evolution.
I’ve worked with the dream for a good couple of hours with my dreamwork partner, and am very lucky to have someone so empathic, intuitive, highly trained and loving sit in the soup with me and my dreams. The process has stirred up such aliveness in this dream that I will keep working the material. I also recently attended the annual conference for the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) and planned to don an aviator’s mask and scarf along with some webbed scuba gloves and a black hoodie to retell the dream as an enactment at the dream ball on the final night. I arrived late from dinner and the parade of dreamers had begun, so I chose to stay and watch rather than chase up to my room at the far corner of the 900-year-old Dutch abbey where the conference is held every few years. I did tell my dream to some friends at the ball, and again to my daughter. It seems that this is one of the purposes of having such dreams – to marvel at them, linger with them and then to share them, which immediately takes conversation to a deeper level of intimacy and connection.
In the future, I may paint the dream, continue to embody its most mysterious places, and possibly even talk about it in another dreamwork session. It’s clear I won’t be done with this dream for a long time, but it feels more like the dream is not done with me!