Thursday, February 10, 2011

Just managed to salvage a couple of dream bits… first was an image of paintings or coloured photographs on stones, apparently my sister had made them. I was very impressed and thought it a great idea to silk-screen photos onto stones… second was a scene filled with mud, deep, sucking mud everywhere, and a yellow digger was trying to dig or move itself out of the spot it was in. But instead of a scoop it had 2 prongs like a forklift. It moved forward so the fork sunk into the earth, and I thought for sure it’s gonna get stuck, but it managed to push up and out somehow…

DREAMWORK (4 days later):

First. I’ve been fascinated by stones since meeting them on the beach last summer. Something about them awes and expands and delights me. And I’m still not quite sure why. My sister, my shadow familiar, had put these beautifully and meticulously rendered images of people on the stones, perhaps for the sole purpose of wowing me. It is Miss Artifice again… alas, and I fell for that scintillating first impression, again. Then I take that first impression and blow it up into a fantastic possibility, pushing the limit as far as it can go, feeding on the brain candy of the thrill of sky’s-the-limit, getting high on the soaring and the speed and the rapid firing of the synapses in my head. How fortunate I am that my brain can produce the substance I need to supply my addiction. Is there an AA group for this, I wonder?

It’s pathetic really, like baiting fish in a bowl. Something catches my eye’s fancy and I fall hook, line, and sinker. I think possibly I came back to working on this dream after watching a couple of movies last night that were cinematically sophisticated, but not much else (The Illusionist, and Orlando). They were like strings of TV commercials, nice visuals to look at, lovingly birthed from the artistic director’s ego. But the thing is, the thing that my dream wants to remind me is, that I used to, and still do, fall for that skin-deep glam and glitter. In my advertising days, which included my art school days, that was the milk of superficiality we not only grew up on but venerated as a source of genius.

It sickens me a bit now to remember that I thought Orlando was a movie I liked from those days, I couldn’t even watch the whole thing last night. I guess it’s true that I have to find out where the outer limits of something is before I can know where I stand. It is the learning style of the boundary-less.

Second. Mud, is water and earth. The emotional blended with the material. It sounds like a good thing but I am afraid of it, afraid of being mired in it, afraid of the difficulty of moving in it, even though I am a digger in the dream, made for the task. It is sticky and messy, threatens to swallow me whole, and there’s no end of it in sight. What, in my life is like that? My debt. (which I wrote about 6 days later, 4 days before working on this dream) But even though I seemed to be equipped to dig myself out, I was surprised to find that I didn’t have the conventional tool used for the job. Well, I shouldn’t be surprised really, so few of the bones in my body are conventional. The real surprise to me was that the tool I had, which shouldn’t have worked, worked. And it struck me this very moment that my intent in the dream was actually to ‘lift’ myself out of the mud, not to ‘dig’ my way out, as one would assume automatically on perceiving a digger. In fact, digging would have made me sink deeper. So what happened, though unconventional, was the best thing that could have happened. I have the best equipment for the job after all. And I am a forklift, not a digger.

This last discovery bears some contemplation. If the field of mud is my current financial outlook, at least how it presents on the surface, as a quagmire of anxiety and fear and threat to survival, then what does it portent if I am to lift instead of dig? Ah, I see… instead of digging down into my psyche, the way I have been, to get at the ‘source’ of the fear and whatever block there might be, the better way to attain the desired result—freedom—is to lift myself up and move on out of there.

What might that look like in my waking life, to lift myself out of the sucking mud of financial woes? Do I need heavy machinery such as a forklift, some seriously heavy-duty strength to equal the gravity of the job? But I AM the forklift, I have it already in me to do this. But, oh but, I am not the driver/operator, therefore I have to wait for the moment when the juice is turned on and flow begins. So I wait, as the tool, as the vessel that I am.