A Bumper Crop of Dreams

The Night before the New Moon in Libra:

1) In a store a haughty and cold blackwoman took a bag of soap balls that I had in my hand, supposedly to write down the code becz it was the last one. There was another white saleswoman with her, as if serving a superior. They never came back so I charged into a meeting in the backroom yelling. They were sitting in classroom-style and she, the accused party, was sitting in the front row. I was loud, angry and indignant.

2) I went to a large group event with Michael, tons of people. It was some kind of spiritual convention or something to do with ecstatic energy. When we got there I had to go to the bathroom. The men’s room was packed, although it was the size of a closet. There was even a couple of young men in the women’s bathroom, with several pairs of shoes stacked on top of each other. I had to push everyone and everything out of the stall, and asked some women coming in to give me a minute alone, cuz I can’t close the stall door due to the clutter. Eventually I lost my shoes, purse and Michael, but I had on a saffron-coloured short coat. So I went out barefeet with the group. Out on the street a young girl (Marlowe from my ad days) lost her money and I found it in a puddle and gave it to her. It was four $5 American bills. I thought about asking her if I could borrow some and buy a pair of flipflops or something from the dollar store, but I didn’t. I found my shoes and purse in the end but not Michael.

3) I am in a corporate office at Sean’s desk. His colleague, a big beefy and friendly guy, was there to receive me. Sean had died and his stuff was still there. Several electric guitars were hanging on a partition wall behind his desk with other things cluttered around them. Around the corner was a panel display with tarot cards in 3 piles, each inserted into a plexiglas holder made for them. The deck was called Issues, the word was printed on the back of the cards. The man asked me if I will pick up his stuff, I said if no one closer to him will then I will, thinking that I don’t even know when he died. Sean was a young man married to my sister and had bright red hair.

DREAMWORK:

1) My shadow, my arrogance and superiority, is abusing her authority, though I do not yet know how it manifests in my life, for she is still ‘black’ and obscured to me. How am I arrogant and superior? When I am made to feel powerless, when my pride is hurt – for example, when an injustice is done to me – my anger is triggered and demands an outlet immediately. The anger masks the fear underneath, a worse admission, that I am indeed powerless, not in control, and cannot always get what I expect – even when I believe it is rightfully mine. It is my knee-jerk reaction to being made to feel small. The small person’s big anger.

In those volatile situations I cannot maintain objectivity, never mind being empty.

I know this is something I’ve inherited from my mother, but I did not see that this is why I’ve always had the impression she is bigger than life. So much of it is empty posturing, hot, puffed up air, creating an illusion of dominance. At the moment I cannot see my mother as being anything but that in-your-face, taking-up-all-available-space presence, throwing her fractious energy like daggers around her like a shield. But I can feel it is imperative that I see her as her real self, the vulnerable girl-child inside, before she learned how to armour herself… I will drop my mother into my body…

She wanted more than anything else to learn, to go on to higher education, but was denied and abused for her desire, for over-reaching her station in life. She accepted her fate but it made her feel lowly, inferior, and powerless inside. It didn’t help when my dad would call her ignorant and uneducated when they argued. So she became louder and shriller than everyone else to be heard, to be respected, and to stay ‘on top’. And it’s true, many people are intimidated by her fireworks. As a child, I was in awe, and completely powerless.

As an adult, I see the tenderness and soreness inside of her, and inside of myself. We are women who did not have fathers who taught us how to choose our battles, that we don’t have to wear armour into every situation, and not everything that shoots at us is an arrow. The Art of War for Life does not call for over-reactions.

So I bring my mother and myself to the Great Masculine now, the Wise Father, for some lessons on strategy and play in the war and battles in the world. We will heal our wounds together, shed our armour for a change, and let our true selves show their shining faces to the world.

2) So far Michael and I have been traveling the same spiritual path together, along with countless other people, and a huge amount of energy is fulminating. But I still have personal work to do before I can join the collective. I have more emotional release and detoxing to take care of. I see that many more men are in need of this work, and have overflowed into the women’s territory. I got rid of them but there is still things blocking my way: the many pairs of shoes neatly stacked vertically are the heirarchy that have spilled into the feminine domain from patriarchy. And at the moment I had to find a way around them. So I asked everyone to leave, carving out some space and time for myself, my own needs.

But in the process of joining this spiritual revival (I see that this is what the energy was about), I had to lose my shoes (my personal standing and sense of direction), my purse (my identity: my most personal belonging), and Michael (the other half of my strength, my comfort). The only thing I still had was the short, saffron, padded jacket, similar to winter jackets Tibetan and Chinese children in the north wore, but this one was beautifully made with embroidery and shone with the glory of a royal origin. This speaks to me of my roots, my heritage, of Buddhism and Daoism, the only thing I will need, the only thing I’m left with, on this journey.

So I went out into the world with bare feet, and in my naïve effort to be practical, thought I could just grab a quick pair of footwear to get me through. That is not to be; there is to be no quick fixes on this path. Marlowe was a innocent young woman with a cloud of beautiful blonde hair, a virgin goddess personified, but new in the world (she had just graduated from college). I think she was actually 20 y.o. when I met her. She is that innocent, young part of myself, unruffled yet and full of open goodwill. But she/I lost her sense of self-worth along the way, her most valuable currency for dealing with the world, and I rescued it and returned it to her, myself. I see this as a sequel to the soul retrieval from 2 days ago, where I got a new skin for my selfhood. Marlowe is my selfhood, now restored, but still young and tender, though not without her own quiet balance and strength.

There may have been more that happened at this point in the dream, but I don’t recall it now. All I know is that eventually I found my shoes and my purse, but not Michael, perhaps I will not need him as my strength and comfort by that time.

3) Sean (shone?) is my masculine ambitious, passionate and worldly self which had died when I resolved to leave the corporate world and its trappings. But he is still my sister, my feminine familiar, and we are still related. His colleague, my animus, is kindly showing me what’s left behind, what still needs attention. The electric guitars, which I see as a favoured creative expression for the young masculine, but not my cup of tea because of its raucous, raw and forceful way of expression, was nevertheless a legacy left to me, and what I need to reconcile as my own. How to love something that feels so foreign and abrasive to me?

I think it is a likely match for that angry, volatile and loudly venting persona from my first dream, as a female. Playing music on an electric guitar is a better outlet for that kind of powerful emotion. It is certainly what a lot of young men and boys take up at that stage of development. I will need 2 or 3 guitars according to the dream, I have that much emotion to let out! The guitars looked a bit on the small side, so I guess it is childhood stuff I am facing.

Somewhat less obvious but not entirely hidden are the 3 groups of issues I need to address, past, present, and future, already grouped and set up for me to work on. It will be through the language of symbols, such as Tarot, specifically, and dreams generally.

I thought I was more or less done with healing my masculine for the time being, but clearly there is more work coming up, now that I have asked for healing of my selfhood. It will require the participation of a healthy masculine. I need to revive Sean, as a new being, a new and improved part of me, and let him shine forth into the world together with my feminine, in a more wholesome union.