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Thursday, May 8, 2014. People talk about the stages of dreaming. From my life experience I suspect that there are life stages of dreaming, as well. I certainly know that my own dreaming has changed over the years. At least there is a major change in the dreams I remember. VERY few.
It was in 1999 that I remembered the last of what I now see as my early life dreams. Never mind I was 48 when that dream showed up. I didn’t know that morning that it marked some kind of a major transition in my life. I sure know that now.
Here I am 15 years later having made the decision to try to let my dreams touch me in some way at this current stage of my life. I know I DO dream. I just remember nothing.
So yesterday when I walked the baby in the stroller over to Wal-Mart I spent $3.88 on a kids’ closet-sized light with a switch on it and three AAA batteries inside of it. Never mind it is in a baseball design. I put it on a shelf near my sleeping area last night with a small spiral notebook I found to record SOMETHING of SOME dream within – if I might be so fortunate as to capture a few images or words from the lost land of my nights.
Inside that book I found two dreams I recorded in there three years ago. Evidently I had this same desire, but only got this far that time:
6/13/11 — picking up cut-glass spheres from a field — all colors — waited until after everyone else got theirs
6/15/11 — no home — wandering w/o talking — young woman commented on my “ancient” haircut — nobody spoke to me — a man told a girl she had come back full circle
6/16/11 — troubled about book
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What I remembered as I woke this morning was going on right at the tail end of the night’s dreaming.
I somehow found a “lost” woman in need – as a therapist I took her with me – driving around looking for a place — it was dark, night – found a house with an “open house” sign in front – door unlocked – we went inside.
Furniture within, dim light, saw no windows. We went from room to room, looking. Shelter. I told her lots of hard winter driving stories, took me a long time to remember the “name” of the 1973 Olds Cutlass Supreme I once had [when I went to art therapy graduate school]. Woman was small, very softly spoken. I was her “therapist” – trying to help her?
At some point in the middle of the night the real estate agent walked in – not happy to have us there but not mad – he left before we did. The woman — did she have a name? – took with her a bag – it had yarn in there and other stuff — that she said she COULD take because it was given to everyone who looked at the house – we left as equals — but to where?
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I have a sense that as I make this choice to eavesdrop, to become a kind of voyeur of my own dreams, as I barge in on an area of my life that might be off-limits for some very good reason — I am taking a risk. This process might change the nature of some of my dreams just because a part of me will know I am watching. Part of me might be perfectly capable of choosing while I am sleeping what details of which dreams I can – and therefore will – carry across the darkened threshold.
Maybe “fake” dreams will be created that are completely separate from my true dreams. Decoy dreams?
Do I trust myself to treat myself better than that? Would such a pattern of dream awareness actually BE in my best interest?
Do we NEED to keep some things apart as mysteries to self? Is there a self-higher wisdom that intentionally protects us from dreamscapes?
Is dreaming an escape area for me, free of what troubles me in my waking life, free of what confuses me and complicates my waking states? What filters dreams? Who within us censors them?
Is dream remembrance something like shopping in Wal-Mart? What I pick off the streaming shelf, toss in the cart, haul out the front door in a bag…. Will I choose what might be useful, helpful to remember? Leave behind what might overwhelm or scare me? I have never been a person to remember nightmares. Sure, there have been a few powerful disturbing dreams but very few.
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Why now in my life am I trying to trap some part of my dreams on sticky paper?
I feel like I have come to the end of a leg of a maze that leaves me at a dead-end. A box canyon without escape. Blind alley. Traveling in the utter pitch blackness without a future vision of where I want to be let alone why, or how I could get there.
Decisionless – except – moment by moment….
A great sense of impermanence. Nothing is ever permanent in life. But I just moved away from the only place on earth I have ever found (stayed 14 years) that felt comfortably like home to me. Just no family near or even able to come visit me. So now I am living in THEIR place — so NOT my own.
Nobody forces me to stay here or not to leave. I am here by choice. But I firmly believe that choices happen with great difficulties for severe early trauma survivors. As Dr. Martin Teicher’s research presents, our brain simply did not develop in ordinary ways because of the effects of trauma. How do we discover what those differences mean in the way we live, the way we decide?
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I didn’t use my little light last night to scribble down some words about this dream. I was able to remember the bulk of it — or at least the part I was aware of as I awoke at 5 am. I know I work hard in my dreamtime. What happens there is too big to stuff through the window of waking. It is too bulky to drag along with me into the morning light. It is this gesture I am making for myself not to leave everything back there inside of me that seems to matter. I want SOMETHING to come through.
This single piece of this single dream gives me a lot of information to ponder. Who was that small woman who seems to have no name, the one who needed big-therapist-me? Not too hard to “get that” part. She seemed very resigned at the same time she was open to learning something new, something different, something significant.
Together we DID find a small safe place. Safe at least for a few moments in dreamtime. A place we could explore quickly. Not a place we could stay. We had to wonder away yet again. True.
She insisted it was perfectly OK to take that bag of gifts. It is I who spends my days in between the constant caring for a very large, very active 21-month-old cooped up in a room working with yarn I spun years ago. Trying to make something useful, beautiful, salable down the road. What else was in the bag? I don’t know but I think there was a spiral notebook in there.
For the writer in me.
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Moody Blues – The Other Side Of Life –
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Here is our first book out in ebook format. A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono (we are still waiting to hear that he has accomplished this job – I think we will have to find an alternative!). Click here to view or purchase –
It lists for $2.99 and can be read by Amazon Prime customers without charge. Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site
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Stop the Storm 