A Stormy Forecast

DREAM & DREAMWORK:

I have been waking up in the middle of the night for the last few days, after having what I felt to be long, convoluted dreams full of imageries that were difficult to describe once I’m back in this plane. At least that’s my excuse for not forcing myself to record them then and there, so by the morning they are usually quite evaporated. The impression I have been left with is one of great unrest, upheaval, emotional upset, of being uprooted like a younger person without time nor poise for reflection, driven here and there, just tossed about by the current of events. No harm ever come to me in the dreams, but the scenes around me were full of things macabre and ghoulish, the kind I imagine a bad hallucination would be like. Two things seem to press with more urgency on my waking consciousness.

One is the theme of life and death, not life or death but life-and-death as one ‘thing’, though the flashes of scenes I do recollect are ones of death and dying, often of animals. I was bereft and heartbroken as well as shaken up. I remember most vividly one of holding the limp head of a dying animal (not an earthly one that I recognize but not alien looking, kind of a cross between a bird and a beaver or otter) in my hand, looking at the light fading from its eyes, and not knowing what to do with my grief and distress except to keep it to myself. It did not occur to me to wonder about a cause of death. And yes, there was powerlessness, but it was accepted without special notice or rancour; there was no railing against the hands of fate.

I have accepted life-and-death as two parts of a whole, the parts observable in their states, but interdependent of each other for existence. You can separate an Oreo into icing and cookie, but each part does not an Oreo make.

So what is this feeling of shock, grief, fear, and deeply stirring disturbance? I have the feeling what was happening in the dream was bigger than me, my concerns for my self, but not on an apocalyptic scale. There was still a sense of some kind of boundary close by. This turmoil then, is or will affect those close to me, my personal relationships (though not my family), my spirituality and my worldview, my associations and my home life, my work as well as my livelihood. Parts of these parts of my life are dying or will die, as a series of small animal deaths. And there will be grief and mourning, heartbreak at the suffering and loss, but it will not overwhelm me.

Another piece of the dream is surfacing as I wrote the last sentence... I am in a half-lit room and suddenly notice that the floor is flooded. The water is half way up my calves. Immediately I want to call for help (to a plumber most likely) but a man nearby said something must be blocking the drain and went to investigate. In a moment he returns and says it was blocked but he had just cleared it. The water is receding as he speaks.

So the emotional overflow will find an outlet, with help from my Animus.

The head of the dying animal looked wet, as I recall now, like a beaver’s or otter’s, but I did not feel the wetness in my hand. However, it is the death of my intellectual (bird-like, of the air) and emotional (water animal-like, wet) attachments that I have witnessed in the dream, culminating and emerging into my life in the near future.

The other of the 2 themes is the sense of unrest, a kind of rootlessness forced upon me by circumstances beyond my control, as if there is a war going on in the immediate background, and I am buffeted by the forces of whatever’s erupting from the earth. Although the power of destruction was immense, it did not feel like we were under attack by human enemies wielding military weapons. It was more as if the earth was throwing up, acting out, bursting forth from its depth, and a surface dweller like me could do nothing but run from one discharge to another, even knowing there is no place of safety.

But somehow this is but a personal apocalypse, not a global one. And I feel the same kind of fear as I did yesterday in my dreamwork, when I realized that the changes coming my way will mean changes in my relationships, the very few I still have, and I don’t want to lose them. I hear now from that fear what it is: the fear of being alone. Another ‘new’ fear that I would never have admitted into my consciousness, nicely disguised by my professed love of solitude.

What is at the bottom of this fear then?

I see myself, 7 or 8 y.o., huddled cross-legged in the dark, looking up at a light shining down on me, just big enough to encircle me, and I know it’s telling me that the light is always with me, has always been. I have seen this ‘scene’ many times before in visions and journeys and dreams, but have never felt the comfort it gives me now. It has always been the darkness and emptiness that dominated my attention. That light, my namesake, came into this world with me, will never leave me as even my closest and most cherished relationships sooner or later will.

I have the sudden insight that it was this light that was the ‘something’ in me, that told me to get up off of the kitchen floor that cold October night 10 years ago, and choose living over dying.

So courage, my self; tempest ahead, but I have over me my light, my animus beside me, my shadow sister in the lead, and all of us lovingly held in the palm of the Divine.