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.

The Call of the Bamboo

DREAMBITS:

I was straightening and putting a long row of stuffed animals into some kind of visually pleasing order. They were all different sizes and colours and types. I was moving quickly because my brother was covering them with a long scarf or cloth right on my heel, so to speak. The stuffed animals were lined up along the top of 3 tall book shelves, which reminded me of the ones we have here at home. The height of the shelves was not perfectly even, and there was a small gap between 2 of them.

My grandmother was there somewhere…

Somehow I was on a bamboo swing with my brother and he wanted to swing harder and harder. I was thinking the 2 of us must weigh at least 300 lbs. and the bamboo crossbeam doesn’t look that thick. We were swing along the same axis as the crossbeam, unlike a conventional swing. I was getting more and more scared as my brother pushed the swing to go higher and higher but I couldn’t do anything about it…

DREAMWORK:

My brother is the part of my masculine I have already claimed and do not have to ‘attract’ or bring back to myself, as with the masculine parts in my amorous dreams. Stuffed animals are childhood or childish desires, drives, and instincts, which I’ve been busy making sense of. But the masculine in me is chomping at the bit to be done with that, for they have now become superficial. The books on the shelves are ones I’ve accumulated over the years but mostly unread. I don’t need them anymore either. Books have been a source of knowledge that makes up a big chunk of my foundation in this life, and though my foundation is a bit uneven and gappy, not perfect, and will likely never be perfected by my own doing, it is enough to go on.

For what I must do, my grandmother, the Wise Feminine, is there to support me.

As this dream involves my real brother, grandmother and a symbol of my Chinese heritage – the bamboo – family and lineage must be of significance…

First, the swing, is yet another reference to childhood play, but outdoors, active, and high energy, compared to playing with stuffed animals, which is more out of our feminine nature. But this is the stage I’m at: still a child, but with more command of body, mind, and spirit than a toddler. There’s more courage and capability for risk-taking – the yang energy is rising and it is so ambitious as to be almost aggressive, even though I, the ego, is forever assessing the situation and fretting with fear.

But the bamboo is stronger than it looks, one of the most resilient material in nature, and symbolizes the renown yet understated resilience of the Chinese. It is humble and common, fast growing and easy to propagate, light-weight and mostly hollow, yet able to bear weight beyond its proportion because of its uniquely tensile strength – because it gives. It embodies the wisdom of the Middle Way, the Dao.

Most interesting is that we were swinging along the crossbeam, the main support of the swing set, which is made of a whole, long piece of bamboo. This means that we can only go as high as the beam, and not higher. So whatever ambition and drive I and my masculine have, will be capped by this limit. It is not unlimited vertical growth, the kind we worship and aspire to in the west like a false god.

I see that the swing is also my own process to find the Middle Way, coming in from the outer swings of extremes to gradually find more and more balance, to hopefully circling the centre of stillness in the middle. But there is a rushing sense of freedom and joy in riding a swing to its limit, in a very simple, childlike way, like a practice of stretching your wings before taking real flight. This is what I will engage in imminently, my novice test flights with training wheels (and wings), a period of finding and working with my latent and inherited gifts and strengths, and experience of pure, simple childhood growth and enjoyment.

I wonder now if this dream was brought about at least in part from my connecting with my original culture through the story of the Taiwanese Buddhist Nun Master Cheng Yen yesterday (http://thehealingspiral.blogspot.com/), and my recent desire to know the stories of my forebearers and where I came from. As I look back now I see that the call to return to our roots has been there for quite some time now, but I am just beginning to hear it…

A Seminar Abroad

DREAM: I was with a large group of adults somewhere abroad for a workshop or seminar... can’t recall a lot of the details now because there was a lot happening, but there were scenes of chaos and disorder such as pile-ups of big boulders and broken concrete slabs that I had to climb over, although it wasn’t difficult... Vivi was there but not in sight, and someone said something about her daughter (who was not there), the gist of which was some message that needed to be communicated to Vivi from her... then a person beside me told me about an upcoming workshop because this one is about to end, but she said it will be in September, I said, September? That’s next year! She said, yes. I took out a little notebook and wrote down the date: September 11: Constellation (as in family constellation)...

DREAMWORK:

There is still that ball of scratchy steel wool inside my chest made of anxiety, about the unknown future and uncertainties in my life, and lately it seems to chafe more and more... this is the same two-feet-up-in-the-air feeling in the dream...

This is about higher learning for me but also for the global collective. This feeling of restlessness is being experienced by all of us who seek greater maturity, but we have not yet come together for the purpose of this cause, because in the dream there was a feeling of a big divide, even though we were supposedly a group. And Vivi was on the other side of the divide from me. That means to me that I have not yet crossed over what separates me from society, for Vivi is the keeper of all things sociable to me, the spirit of hospitality. I know, of course, that this is true, but the dream is telling me this is an obstacle requiring immediate attention, at the same time it is not insurmountable. It looks more daunting than it really is. In fact, I am making a mountain out of a small rockpile about the whole thing. All of this worrying and fretting is a small pebble casting a huge shadow on the wall because I haven’t got the right perspective. I’m too close up, need some distance.

What should I do then, my body? Read Marion Woodman’s “Dancing in the Flame”. I think it’s about dreamwork and healing for 3 of her patients. I will take it to read on my walk.

I sense though, this fractious energy has also to do with the scrambling (or descrambling) that’s going on inside of me, even if I don’t know what it’s for.

The last part of the dream seems prophetic: an upcoming family crisis or event that will be locally devastating but not as big a deal as we make it out to be in the big picture. The order of love in my family, physical and otherwise, will undergo a complete shake down and all of the old structure will collapse down to the foundation. Will this really happen in less than a year’s time? Maybe I should consult astrogrrl on celestial constellations for next September?? Hmmm...

My Man in Helmet

DREAM that I was holding hands with a guy wearing a white safety helmet. He was an engineer...

DREAMWORK:

I felt at peace with him, my beloved who was more or less the same size as me. We weren’t cuddling or joined-at-the-hip intimate, just holding each other by the hand in ease and familiarity, strolling along. He was wearing a helmet to protect his head, my ego, out of vulnerability, because it knows that its control-by-engineering days are coming to an end. But I love him still, ego, fears and all...

Healing by Grandma

DREAM: I discovered a lump on my back, in the middle just left of the spine. Everyone agreed that I should go see Grandma. I knew she was busy but when I got there she saw me right away, and even before I started to stammer out the words she knew. Her hand went under my shirt straight to the lump. She prescribed “R & R”, by which I knew she meant “Rest & Recreation”. (not relaxation) A man in his 50s or 60s with white hair was hovering to the side, watchful and neutral. There was also an image of a frog, and the words “frogs and amphibians” came to me, as if they were part of the prescription...

DREAMWORK:

I am seeking help from the Great Feminine in the form of The Crone – Grandma – and even though I felt intimidated and shy, she attended to me right away, as if we were equals. In fact, she didn’t look that old, maybe in her 60s, short black hair, body straight and slim. She exuded quiet confidence and poise, and was obviously deeply intuitive. She got straight to the point without wasting a single word or gesture. I revere her and aspire to be like her.

Rest & Recreation (but not relaxation)... my first thought was that I’ve already done lots of that, and that’s what the last 3, 4 months were about. When I told Michael the dream he said he thought recreation meant re-creating. I could feel the truth in that.

When I dropped the word “Rest” into my body I sensed a great and deep trust around it, as if in order for me to truly rest I need to be enveloped by that much trust. Like a baby in its mother’s arms, it carries nothing and cares for nothing, it is not even responsible for itself. It is pure being. In that sense I have not fully rested. In fact, my lower back is achy and stiff for the last few days... from carrying and caring, needlessly, no doubt...

“Recreation”: The act of recreating, or the state of being recreated; refreshment of the strength and spirits after toil... (Webster’s) I think part of the toil includes the work I have been doing on myself. But what does it mean to re-create myself? I have a body-sense image of being taken apart and re-assembled, a kind of rebirth from the pieces of my old self. Like taking apart something made with Lego blocks and making a new one. But in the reconfiguration a new being is created. It is more than re-membering because there is a synergy that comes out of the pieces being in a new relationship to each other, and this new energy presents as a new ‘face’ to the world (refreshed), but the core of my being, my higher Self, my soul, remains the same.

So it is to the ever-available, wise and loving Great Feminine that I can rest in, supported by her consort, the Great Masculine; all I have to do is surrender. I want to just jettison my burden and climb into her lap, but something holds me back... My fear of losing control, of what burdens me, my responsibilities and obligations... what shall I do, my body? Grandma? She says, bring it with you, all of it, my lap is big enough, and just rest, baggage/backache and all. The only thing I ought to jettison is that part of my ego that fears losing control. I give it to Grandfather, the Great Masculine, to hold for me.

As I climb into her lap I think of the hot springs in Costa Rica, a treasure deep in the moist and sunless rainforest is the nurturing and healing warmth of the Mother, dark and fertile. The Great Water and Earth that can hold me like nothing else can; there I found loving rest inside and out. The frog and amphibians are a bridge connecting water and earth. Water moistens the earth and brings forth new life; earth enriches water and nourishes the new life.

Frog as a Totem means Transformation:

The frog is the totem of metamorphosis.
It symbolizes coming into your personal power.
It reminds us not to become bogged down with day-to-day living.

It is the totem of water.
Its voice calls forth the rains.
Emotions are associated with water and
a frog totem may be telling you to get in touch with your feelings.

People with frog medicine give support and energy
where it is needed.
They can cleanse the negativity from an environment.
(from http://www.linsdomain.com/totems/pages/frog.htm)

I am deeply grateful, beyond words...