Awake and Dreaming Again

Three years ago I nearly sliced through the base of my left pinkie finger in a (completely avoidable) kitchen knife accident. The cost of the surgical repair (no health insurance) put us in more debt than we were already carrying. To make matters worse, I was beginning to lose private clients for various reasons, all of which were out of my control. So I abruptly ceased seeing my Jungian analyst, Dr. Donna Cozort, while I updated my resume and started looking for a full time job. I couldn’t justify the cost of even semi-regular sessions. I miss her.

And so I gave up part of the motivation to regularly record my dreams. The other part of that motivation slipped away with COVID, along with most of my motivation and interest in writing much of anything at all. All of which happened to coincide with full blown menopause.

But an early COVID dream featured a tiger or leopard trying to break through a film of plastic sheeting, like cellophane, that was a barrier between the interior walls, ceiling and windows of a room of my house and the space of the room itself. Very soon after that dream, I did a Zoom class with Tias Little at Prajna Yoga about dreams, where we were asked to share one of our own. I shared this dream and it was one Tias shared with the group. He commented on the cellophane in the dream and the newness of restrictions that required us to distance from one another, to seal ourselves off from community. It struck him as particularly potent for the moment we’d found ourselves living in. It could also have been read in a similar light as symbolic of the “veil” between conscious/unconscious, material/spiritual, waking/dreaming realms and experiences therein and of how such boundaries are thin and fragile.

These past two-plus years I’ve witnessed a shift in myself, in my own yoga practice and in the way I teach yoga. During a time where I have, on the one hand, felt a little fallow, shut down, empty, flattened, in a sense “unconscious,” I am simultaneously getting to the essence of something in me. In alchemical terms perhaps, a “distillation.” Part of this is aging. Getting rid of the chaff — anything that doesn’t help me understand myself better in the time I have left and the things that used to seem important that no longer carry much weight. A good friend I’ve known since childhood recently talked to me about her many, many friendships and there was much the same impulse in her to shed this weight — in her case, of relationships that don’t offer the very basics of what a friendship should.

What I have been doing a lot of during this time when I have not been writing very much are crossword puzzles with Michael. I go to Barnes & Noble every couple of months a get a spiral bound volume of 50 New York Times Sunday puzzles and we work through them together. I imagine we are on about book number 6 or 7. I was there recently and while browsing the very tiny Barnes and Noble “Science” section came across this title, “The Oracle of Night: The History and Science of Dreams” by Sidarta Ribeiro. Then, one recent Sunday afternoon I heard the author on an episode of the podcast “Throughline.” Amazon let me read the first several pages of Chapter 1 and I hit “Purchase with 1-Click” and 2 days later I was in deep.

Ribeiro shows, with a wealth of recent scientific study, that dreaming is a way of unconsciously reinterpreting experiences and our memories of those experiences. Dreams are a survival mechanism that show us possible solutions to problems we face in waking life. Dreaming is also, potentially a way to direct unconscious contents, as in “lucid dreaming.” In essence, dreaming and dreams have the potential to drive the evolution of consciousness forward, something akin to what yogis and long time meditators have understood for some time.

And so I hope I might be inspired to start recording my dreams again.

I think I’d come up against a kind of wall in my self-directed study of Jung, dreaming, yoga, consciousness/the unconscious — all of that. Perhaps I’ve come to a new vantage point and I’m looking back on what I’ve wanted to learn, how I’ve wanted to learn it and who I’ve wanted to learn from. It has at times been a confusing mess of good instincts coupled with “ought to’s.” Or I couldn’t extract any sense of assurance from what I wanted to know and was learning versus critique of what I wanted to know. Was Jung a doctor/scientist or mystic/loon? Is yoga art or science? Is my ability to see both sides a liability and an excuse to ride safely through the middle of things? Or a surefire way to give up on any path at all?

I’m having a lot of dreams lately about weddings: I’m marrying Michael again or I’m player in someone else’s wedding. Often there is some obstacle or tension in these dreams: I get lost going from one venue to another, I run late, or as in my most recent dream, I’ve chosen the wrong dress and pissed off my sister, the bride, then I get lost AND I’m late.

Weddings can be read as symbolic of union, of the integration and the potential of something new or whole arising from the combining of two formerly disparate entities.

I could interpret the frustrated union in these dreams as symbolic of anything that stands in the way of my efforts to move my own consciousness forward. I get lost: in daydreams and fantasies, housework, social media. Sidetracked toward the easy and the mundane. The essence of procrastination. Evolving my own consciousness takes work and discipline and commitment — time in meditation watching my own mind, creative work, conscious relationship with others, study/read/write, get absorbed in nature. I’m running out of time: I am on the downhill side, as far as human life span goes. How can I make richer use of the time I have left? Finally, am I doing what others expect of me, or am I doing what I want? Are dreams of frustrated weddings an opportunity to examine a different path? Am I moving toward external expectations instead of my own instincts, or is taking a wrong turn in the dream symbolic of a real life sidetrack? And how do we even know how to answer any of these questions?!

Jungian-trained analysts and dream experts talk about “dreaming the dream forward” as a way to encourage dreamers to engage with the dream from the conscious standpoint. “Active imagination” is a technique of taking the contents of a dream — objects, people, archetypes — and creating a dialog between the dreamer and those contents. This can be done by listening/speaking, writing or and other kind of visual or expressive art.

Meditation also seems like a particularly fruitful space in which to engage dreams/unconscious contents. Particularly when we dream the “big dream” — the one that hits at deeply emotional experiences or relationships, or that plop us down into foreign or fantastical territory. These are the dreams that wake us up, both literally and figuratively. They demand we remember through their intensity, their vividness. Can we in a meditative posture hold on to the image long enough for it to speak for itself? We practice staying present by holding our attention to something else that is present with us: breath, sounds, felt sensation in the body, thoughts as they arrive and dissolve. Why not take a dream object, image, experience as an object of meditation?

I think it was Thomas Moore who differentiated “spirit” from “soul.” Spirit manifests in our waking lives, soul in our dreaming, sleeping lives. The work of bringing soul to spirit, bringing unconscious contents “up” from below (or taking spirit down into the underworld) is a project of unification, or individuation. Who doesn’t want a more “soulful” waking life, in whatever way that makes sense to you?

I’m new at this. I struggle to stay consistent and disciplined with meditation. It’s harder still to make myself remember dream contents, or to wake up enough after a dream to write it down before I forget it. But in an effort to make more of the time I have here, the most of my own evolving consciousness, I need to start. Make myself a student of the dream again.