Coming to Our Senses – In Our Dreams
The Gift
Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.
~Denise Levertov (Sands of the Well)
I love the evocative delicacy of this poem, its quiet sensuality. So much to experience here: the stickiness of a web, the warmth of a songbird egg, the soft subtlety of butterfly wings. The images in this poem are tactile as well as visual, and anticipate an auditory component: we wait, almost holding our breath, for the birdsong that is not yet with us. “The Gift” calls me to close attention. I feel the egg and the butterfly in my own hands. If I hold them too tightly, their delicate life gets squashed; too lax, the egg rolls to the floor and cracks. My whole being participates in this poem - body, heart, and imagination.
This is also how I approach dreams as a Natural Dreamwork Practitioner. If I stray into symbolic territory, I lose my connection (to both dream and poem). We are meant to feel the opening and closing of the butterfly’s wings with childlike wonder, not generate an equation of meaning, however sophisticated.
In Natural Dreamwork, we encounter images as living presences. We allow the images to ‘speak’ from the particularity of their being. These encounters are the gateway to deeper feeling and deeper knowing. Dreams present us with many questions, but sometimes it takes the gentle presence of another to even hear the questions. Levertov’s poem suggests that the questions of others draw us deeper into experience. Without another’s gentle questioning gaze, maybe we wouldn’t be drawn in so deeply. Telling a dream to another gives us a chance to revisit the dream, hear the questions a little differently, look more closely at what the dream has to offer, appreciate it in all its sensual richness.
Though dreams offer many questions, we also trust our senses to provide certain facts about the dream.
Not everything in a dream is a question. Dream images have a specificity and a vitality that needs to be honored - even when seeing their truth evokes discomfort and pain- or the love and joy we dare not approach, lest we be disappointed. We may go to great lengths to avoid the specificity of an image, glossing over dream figures that unsettle us.
Sometimes this can be very dramatic: A dreamer speaks of a polar bear taking food from her refrigerator, then shifts the conversation to her annoyance at the ants crawling in her sink. None of us are immune from this kind of distortion because coming to our senses can feel like death.
It took me over a year to come to terms with one particular dream figure. I dreamt, I am at the edge of the woods. Something flies by, I see some birds, but also skeletal ram’s head, a hollowed-out log with a short person inside female, girl or woman? The dream continued, and I chose to focus on the latter portion of the dream. The figure inside the hollowed-out log felt elusive and for a long time I told myself that she wasn’t as important as other aspects of the dream. Then, many months later, I retold the dream to a friend, who expressed curiosity about the person in the log. As I stepped back into my dream, really encountered her, I took in the facial features of a woman, the body of a girl. I finally saw what I hadn’t wanted to experience: the parentified-child in me, the one who had worked too hard to be a grown-up before her time, and later (having missed the freedom of childhood) felt stuck between. The knowing was deeper than the sensorial details of the dream figure, but it took immersion in the details of the image to begin the descent to deep layers of feeling - the loss and grief - carried by the girl -woman stuck in the log.
When we see things as they really are, we are forced to give up false notions of ourselves, forced to let go of the roles we believe we must play in order to be valued. And that can feel as if it’s the end of our existence. So we purposely avoid, shade or distort the actualities set before us; in our outer-life as well as our dreams. We use language that hides rather than describes our experience. When asked to describe the details of a dream ‘baby’ we discover it has claws, teeth and a tail: it is a rat. The hat that falls into our hands may not be any old hat, but the cherished cap of a beloved friend, or the iron gladiator helmet that gives us migraines. A dreamer finds herself in a house. Within the dream, the dream-ego plans for the future: how she will make this dreamhouse into a comfortable home, paint and replace the curtains and plant a garden. When asked to describe her dreamhouse, we find crumbling walls and ceiling, and a dirt floor. It is a shack set in the middle of a highway. Exploring the dream together, she recognizes how often she has lived her life trying to make a bad situation into something tolerable. Seeing things as they are sometimes forces us to give up the false hope that we can continue doing what we have been doing repetitively and compulsively and expect a different outcome.
Sometimes it’s the luminosity, the real gold of a dream, that gets overlooked, rather than the pain: We don’t believe that anything truly nourishing will last. The same dreamer who dreamt of the shack also dreamt of a spacious, bright house near the bank of a river with a beautiful garden. In that dream she noticed it was dusty, disregarded its potential. Until we spent time wandering through this dreamhouse, she hadn’t appreciated its value. It was as if her psyche’s wariness of believing that anything really good could come to her had made her vision dusty.
Dreams offer us a great opportunity to come to our senses. As we expand our ability to see, hear and feel in our dreams, we also strengthen our capacity for deepened presence in other aspects of our lives. Opening the questions of our dreams takes courage, but what better time could there be, to make a commitment to living a more embodied, attuned, open-hearted life? If not now, when?
Dr. Keren Vishny is a psychotherapist and certified Natural Dreamwork Practitioner. She is also a teacher and workshop facilitator affiliated with the CG Jung Center, Evanston Illinois, and the Marion Woodman Foundation.