“It’s important to reawaken the mystery of dreams that visit every life. They have much to teach us about where we are on our journey.” Writing to Heal the Soul by Susan Zimmerman.
I’ve been reading Susan Zimmerman’s book in preparation for a writing workshop that several of us are offering to the survivor community this spring. When I reached her chapter on dreams, I started hoping that I would be visited by a dream that would expand the quality of awareness in which my conscious mind is carried along. But morning after morning, all I found when I looked into my not quite awake thoughts was the cycling of a mind little different than my waking thoughts. I mentioned this to a friend who has explored a thousand dreams and she helped me feel that dreams are there if I can just relax enough to notice them.
Then last night, I got up twice and jotted down fragments from two dreams. The first was around midnight and felt a bit nightmarish. Here is what I wrote about it:
“A man beats a girl, breaking bones. A boy sees this happen and calls the authorities, who arrest the man. The man wonders why the boy doesn’t visit him in prison and learns that the boy has killed himself, because he was the one who committed the infraction. There is a feeling that the man may now take his life in prison.”
The second dream was recorded four hours later at 3:45 am:
“I’m at a new educational institution, trying to find a space to store my belongings. Later, I encounter the institution’s programs through its learning guidelines, and I feel a desire to be a good and honest student of knowledge while maintaining the values present inside me.”
I am encouraged that I encountered a dreaming consciousness guided by a moral compass. In the first dream, the dreamer doesn’t have a world which provides the supportive environment he would have needed to find a place for himself. In the second dream, the dreamer, still young himself, finds himself in a young world that is supportive and allows him to innocently reach out with interest and a desire to grow and learn.
The dream landscapes I encounter last night, both in their own way, painted a picture—rather like the world in which I now wake up as an older person—in which an inner being feels a moral responsability to his outer experience.
It encourages me now, hours later, to notice that I view myself and the world that surrounds and supports me as worth caring about. As in those dream fragments, I view myself as a small actor in a vast field full of commotion in which I am free to seize whatever arises with a spirit of willingness. Even though the role of the actor is a small one, the waves that keep rolling onto the shore come from far across the horizon.