In Celebration Of A Long Dream Arc

The Orion Nebula

I am writing this reflection after reviewing last year’s dreams. A periodic review of my dream journal helps me retrace the soulful growth that my dreams help bring. The past year was more challenging than most, with a long discernment leading to a clear decision to end a once deep but increasingly imbalanced relationship. During the gradual stages of this ending, my dreams brought steady affirmation that I was growing and healing. As unsettling waking life changes occurred, these dreams brought me courage. 

In my dream journal, I also collect the contemplative dream moments that arise and become “homework” after each dreamwork session. Reviewing my dreams and these contemplative practices brings them alive again and activates further healing. As I engaged again with last year’s many sacred dream encounters, I re-experienced the support my dreams gave me through a generous dream arc - a series of rhyming dreams that unfolded over the course of several months. In this arc images occurred of being revived from buried, severed, collapsed, or asleep states, and then moving on toward new health and freedom. In some of these dreams, the one reviving was myself. In other dreams, it was a snake or a firefly.

 This year’s dream review also reactivated my awe for a dream that rhymed beautifully with a pivotal dream from decades ago, when I first started exploring dreams. When I first felt the connection between these two dreams, I felt awe for how dreams can arc across more than half my entire lifetime with such intimacy. But in the ensuing hecticness of waking life as the year progressed, I forgot about this experience. If I had not read through my dream log, this very important long-term dream arc would have been lost. 

I am writing this reflection now, to express this awe and to appreciate how unwaveringly committed dreams are to the deepest callings of the soul over the course of our lives. 

The story of this arc begins with a dream that came 38 years ago when I was 24 years old when, like now, I was navigating relationship losses and complex life changes. Then, I was just beginning to find my adult path, and this stage of life was further complicated by a spiritual awakening experience for which I, a nature-loving atheist at the time, had no context. Late one morning in Oregon, where I had moved, knowing no one, after a painful first breakup, I stood on a windy winter beach, very alone and existentially lost. And suddenly a wave of energy that was infinitely alive and loving was rushing through me in all directions - from deep within and from every point of the universe’s circumference. This, I knew instantly, was reality, ultimate reality. And then that wave of energy faded and I was left, body trembling, more lonely and lost than before. I had been jolted for a moment into the center of everything. Now, immediately afterward, I felt confined within an immature and still developing “self”, which I was only just beginning to grapple with. From then on, growing that personal self would feel secondary to living in response to that larger reality. A question that was as big as the cosmos was now mine to carry, but I had no clue where to turn for help. 

Several months later, I met a Jungian psychotherapist, and began my first dive into personal therapy and dreamwork. I brought to him the confusion and longing this experience had activated in my young adult life.  He was sensitive and caring, helping me start to recognize my childhood traumas, conditioning, and wounds, yet also validating the spiritual search I was on. I still remember several of the healing dreams we worked with. But one in particular has reverberated throughout my life with unfading energy, guiding me toward soul’s longing:

The Feast and the Living Canvas

I am sitting at a feast table with several other people. There is a delicious variety of food. The people know each other intimately and are continuing a conversation for which it seems that they gather regularly. They speak with a depth, creativity, and wisdom that goes beyond any conversation in waking life. They are poets, storytellers, dancers, philosophers, scientists, who welcome each other’s voices. They are celebrating the life of the universe. I feel awe. I want to join their conversation, but I don’t know yet what I can contribute. I leave the table and walk down a corridor, entering a room that I know to be a sanctuary of a church, though it has no traditional symbols or furnishings. It is a very simple room with a few rows of chairs facing a table covered with a white cloth. Above the table, a blank white canvas hangs.  As I look at this canvas, it blooms with changing bursts of flowing colors. Ongoing creative energy. I know immediately this living canvas is an image of God.

 After this dream, I took some graduate courses at a nearby Christian seminary, but without belonging to any organized religion, I felt like a lost seeker there. Meanwhile, I also explored writing poetry, telling stories, and creating visual art, all forms of expression I had loved as a child. I remembered promising myself as a girl that I would never let adult life disconnect me from my imagination. This dream affirmed for me that the creative arts were how I might add my voice to the conversation at the feast. I began to explore, and then commit to, expressive arts therapy as my career path and my way of being an apprentice to imagination for the rest of my life.  The vocation of a therapist also enabled me to serve love as the center of the universe by responding to the suffering and woundedness that separates us humans from that love.

    My experience of sudden spiritual awakening as a young woman, and this life-guiding dream which came soon after, did not exempt me from being a slow learner on the spiritual path, a confused and hurt person learning how to live and love among other confused and hurt people. Yet, periodically, a fleeting experience will occur in waking life that assures me the flowing energy of ultimate reality is still reverberating through my life. A poem will come my way that describes another person’s experience of love at the heart of the universe. A retreat center will provide a delicious feast, and a conversation with others about Creation. Or in an art therapy workshop, the group is invited to place generous splotches of paint on a large canvas and then blow through straws to make these colors bloom, connect, flow and blend and I will realize we are collaboratively making the living dream canvas come to life. These experiences always surprise me. 

 Along the way, a chance encounter with Rodger Kamenetz (founder of the Natural Dreamwork community) led me to Natural Dreamwork and for the past 8 years, this approach to dreamwork has been an essential spiritual practice, continually teaching me how imagination aligns with the creative love at the heart of reality. Again and again in my dreams, this love reaches out through my clouded perceptions to embrace me. This year, at 62, I had the following dream:

At the Feast Table with a Natural Woman and a Dreaming Poet

 I am walking with a woman with short graying hair. I feel we met recently while on a trip together and we became hiking buddies. I feel strongly connected to her and I feel sad, thinking the trip is ending. As we approach a hotel building, I say to her, “You were the person I was supposed to meet on this trip, I hope we stay in touch.” She says she feels the same way. Inside the hotel I lose connection with her as I worry about not having my room key and thinking about when my flight leaves and where my daughter and I will find her car in the airport parking lot. I am trying to get to another floor and an aerobics class is blocking the stairs, so I join in for a while, then hurry on my way. Then we are all in a tour bus and I accidentally make a song start to play from my phone. I think no one will like it and hurriedly turn it off but someone in the front says they want to hear it and I try to find it again but can’t.  Then we are walking up to an old house in what feels like a small Alaskan town.  I ask the young man next to me, maybe the tour guide, “Who lives here? Is this her house?” meaning the woman I really liked who I now feel is also a naturalist guide of our tour group. Inside, the house is small and cozy, and the kitchen has soft wood and cabinets painted different colors.  At a table covered with a variety of food, I stand talking to a woman about dreams, the universe, time, saying something about where dreams come from.  Rodger (my dreamwork mentor) is nearby and overhears. He recites by heart a beautiful poem in which the poet says something similar.  Then, I am holding a book of poetry, looking through its contents, hoping it has the poem Rodger shared and planning to ask Rodger for help finding it if needed. 

 I am amazed how this new dream so simply and graciously forms an arc with the dream that helped me as a young woman 38 years ago. I still have some doubts about sharing my voice and my song, and I still feel lost and disconnected at times, as the middle of this dream shows. But I do not stay there. I come to the feast table and I connect with a woman I love in an easy yet deep conversation about dreams and the universe. In affirmation of my joining this unending dialogue, my mentor gives a poem from his heart and I am also given a book in the dream that promises my learning will continue.

In waking life the past decades have often felt tangled with questions, obstacles, and clouded perception on my part. Yet this dream arc assures me that the path was always there and I have always followed it. It shows, with the immediacy of images, that I have really grown. I am not unsure and voiceless. I am at the feast in the conversation now both in my dreams and in real ways in waking life, such as in my learning from my mentor Rodger. And secondly, it shows me that 38 years may feel like a long wandering in human time, but it is nothing in dreamtime. There, time is both timeless and eternal. Every moment connects immediately with every other. The creative flow of love is constant, intimate, and far-reaching. And the dream beings are always at the feast table singing, dancing, and sharing poems in awe and love for the life of the universe, and present in every dream to help us heal so we can join them.