first dream session...

“I am in a familiar feeling craft room.  I open a letter, addressed to me but the country is India.  There are two young Indian women sitting at the table working on something.  I ask them to help me translate what the invitation says but they say they don’t speak the language.  It is an invitation to a wedding in India.  I feel that it must be for a different Mary Jo and that there is some confusion; I must have gotten it by mistake.  Especially, since the invitation is also to be part of the wedding party.  I don’t know anyone in India.  The invitation included a soft padded cloth square with a little pocket sewn on it, very sweet.  

The problem is…I’m being asked to make these squares for all the wedding guests!  Since I feel I’ve received this invitation in error I’m very worried that the true recipient won’t get the invitation, the packets won’t be made and it will affect the wedding.”

This is one of three dreams worked in my in very first dream session. My earliest challenge, and it lasted quite a while, was to feel what was happening in the dream. I couldn’t. I never thought one of the hardest questions I’d ever be asked was, “What are you feeling?”  I had nothing, or if even an inkling, I didn’t think my feelings mattered.  So, here in my dream, I am being invited to a wedding and I can’t feel anything, excitement, fear, sense of adventure...nothing.  I go right to my mind (the square packets) and all I see is a problem to solve, that if I go to the wedding, of course I’m expected to do some task.  Rodger Kamenetz, my dream analyst, asked me, “Who gets an invitation to a wedding that includes a task you have to do?”...me.  My unconscious knows I have this way of thinking and is showing it to me here.  This is part of what we call the intention of the dream.  It’s not coming to judge me, criticize me, but to challenge who I think I am, how I have learned to be in the world, what I have come to expect, how I am not aligned with my soul. So, this was the first of many dreams that showed me how I believe that I have to somehow earn my way in to be included, that I can’t just be a guest, that I’m not worthy to just be included...no expectations to be other than who I am.  In the dream I am invited to a wedding in archetypal India, and don’t even realize that I’m already in India with the two Indian girls.  I think it’s a mistake, it must be a different Mary Jo.  The invitation is very likely inviting me to be the bride, to be connected to the divine and to my soul and I won’t allow myself, really don’t even know how, to feel this excitement.   Rodger asked me to feel into this excitement, I tried...and said, “I’ll be very honest with you here.  I feel off to the side of this, that there will be an expectation, that the other shoe will drop.”  As we would come to find there is a feeling underneath this, so very many feelings, but it would take more dreams to begin to open me up to parts of myself, my soul, that I didn’t even know I had. 

In dreamwork we get a homework, a place to feel into from the dream, to return to for just a few seconds every hour.  Returning to the dream moment, feeling it, a type of vertical movement can happen, where we deepen into our feelings and begin the descent to our true selves, our souls. My homework for this very first session was: Feel into receiving an invitation to a wedding in India.

Mary Jo Heyen
Archetypal Dreamwork Practitioner
mjheyen@gmail.com
Dream sessions in person, via Skype or on the phone
website: http://maryjoheyen.com/