Dreams, Aha!’s, and “I think I know what it means”
Do myths and dreams, those messages laden with story and symbol that come to us out of the corner of our eyes, do they provide us with ‘the obvious answer’? The one we already know?
Or do they offer the difficult answer? The one we either can’t see, or don’t want to see?
I’ve recently stepped up my work with dreams, mainly with the support of my friend and mentor Linda Neale, using the dream interview model as innovated through Gayle Delaney’s work.
Some major realizations have broken through of late. In my history in working with my own, and others’ dreams, I’ve seen a pattern of an “I already think I know what it means” mindset.
The ‘aha!’s seem to come when we shatter those first impressions.
I think this stems from our need to conserve energy. Living beings love to conserve energy, by taking the easy route, and repeating the habitual act. Looking around at all the life, I know this must work to some extent, as a way of moving through the world.
And then you have dreams, myth, and heroes’ journeys.
They seem almost to wholly purpose themselves to break us out of habit and the ‘easy’ route, when needful.
So when I have a dream, and ‘I think I know what it means’, I purposely set that aside. More often than not, I shatter that first impression to pieces, with an ‘Aha!’ moment. I see an unlooked for angle, experience an unexpected insight.
So, whenever you dream and already you ‘think you know what it means’, consider setting that aside. For, why bother to dream if no insight awaits? Why do we need intuition if it only will say the easy-to-see thing?
Perhaps dreams naturally balance our habitual natures, through their chaos and color. Like the Hanged Man in a Tarot Deck, they dangle us upside-down for a moment, and if we fully let go, we can see around a corner, into hidden places, that our habitual minds walk busily past.
February 25th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
What a coincidence–I’ve had dreams on my mind of late, too. In Perception of the Environment, Tim Ingold writes about the traditional view of dreaming. Since traditional cultures don’t separate the human mind from the more-than-human world, they don’t presume that dreams simply entail the human mind looking into itself. Rather, they expect dreams, like any of their other perceptions, to report a different perspective of the world they dwell in, just like sight, sound and touch report different perspectives of the same world. So they pay close attention to dreams, because dreams tell you things you might not perceive with your other senses. Since then, the tracker journal I started on Jon Young’s suggestion in the Kamana program has become a dream journal, too.
February 26th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Absolutely. As one-who-tracks, I expect and accept the intuitive and dream-space perceptions, whether awake or asleep, as an inseparable part of my ability to interact with the world.
As I’ve said before, our Dream-self never goes to sleep, but our Waking-self does every night. Who really runs the show?