the call home...
Our dreams want to help us remember who we truly are...not who we think we are.
They do that by showing us who we became through conditioning and ways we learned it wasn’t safe to be our true selves. For many this ‘conditioned self’ (versus true self) began forming at an early age in response to a world that is cut off from soul and especially the quality of soul that feels it all...the love, the pain, the joy, the sorrow, the belonging, the loss...the soul feels it all.
Our dreams show us how we have shut down our feelings, numbed ourselves, misunderstanding that this is what it means to be strong, that this is a true way to be. They show us how we have lost our connection to soul and to inner support.
Our dream’s deepest desire is to call us back home, to our soul, to our connection with the divine, the inner father and mother, to the inner support they provide. As I’ve shared before, in dreamwork we see the soul manifested in our dreams as a boy or a girl. How we are in relationship to them in the dream reflects how we are in relationship to this deepest part of who we are...do we love them, can we be them? Or are we angry at them, rejecting out of fear this vulnerable and tender self that is our truest self and thereby rejecting the call home?
There is an exquisite and poignant scene in the film, “Blood Diamond" that brings this alive. Dia, age 10, is kidnapped by the rebels, abused, violently trained to kill, to be ruthless...and something in him seems to die, becomes soulless. When his father, Solomon, finally finds him, he is met with Dia pointing a gun at his head, empty-eyed, ready to pull the trigger and kill his father.
Solomon speaks: “Dia, What are you doing? Dia! Look at me, look at me. What are you doing? You are Dia Vendy, of the proud Mende tribe. You are a good boy who loves soccer and school. Your mother loves you so much. She waits by the fire making plantains, and red palm oil stew with your sister N'Yanda and the new baby. The cows wait for you. And Babu, the wild dog who minds no one but you. I know they made you do bad things, but you are not a bad boy. I am your father who loves you. And you will come home with me and be my son again.”
It is as if Solomon's voice reaches down into the abyss, evoking the son he loves, evoking a return to soul...and we see the light rising in Dia’s eyes...a re-membering...the return to his soul, a return to the boy who is his father’s son.
Our teachers come to us in this way in our dreams...they call us back from the darkest of places, where we were shattered and something dark came in, pretended to be us and stood between our soul and our inner teacher, our inner connection. Like Solomon, our dreams speak to the deepest part of us...calling us home to our capacity to feel it all...that even in the midst of bad things that happened, we remember who we are...soul boy and soul girl, children of the divine.
Mary Jo Heyen is a Natural Dreamwork Practitioner working with clients throughout the country and abroad in person, phone or Skype. Learn more about her work with dreams at www.maryjoheyen.com or www.thenaturaldream.com