Incubating Dreams with the Goddess
Recently I incubated (requested) a dream, asking a Celtic Goddess, Niamh (pronounced Neeve), from a card I had drawn after meditation, for guidance on how to work with a client and her dream. The name of Niamh’s white horse, Embar, translates as "imagination," and she rides him over the waves of the ocean from her otherworld of youth, pleasure, and peace to world of humans.
As I incubated my dream, I imagined riding a soaring white horse of imagination, while my client rode hers, as we leaped together over the sea. Incubating with strong emotion and visualization, the language of dreams, helps the request be received. Sometimes it takes time to understand how the dreams that come relate at all to the request. Sometimes the dreams come with the additional gift of clarity.
This is the condensed dream I had in response (Penny is a neighbor, not the client, and her name has been changed):
Pirates’ Cove with Penny
I meet up with Penny for a walk. We each have a dog. Penny has Felix, small and foxlike (not her dog in waking life, but they both have auburn hair). I am with Leo, fluffy and white . . . and two of my grown children. Penny is lagging as we walk down Bear Skin Neck. I am not sure where she is. My kids and I take the almost-hidden side alley down to Pirates’ Cove Beach. I keep looking back so I will see her when she passes by the entrance. Soon enough, I see Penny, with her auburn hair and auburn dog pass. I call to her from the entrance, “Do you want to duck down here— a little Cove?" She nods yes. “Yes? OK, isn’t it great?!”, I say as we walk onto the little beach with stones and rough sand, rust-colored both from the granite and from the runoff of iron drainpipes, and a scattering of smoothed porcelain shards. I tell Penny, “I used to bring my kids here when they were young, and we would hunt for beach glass— easy to find! Once a shopkeeper leaned from the pier above and scattered more glass from a pouch” (—the events in this quote happened in waking life too).
In this dream, I felt the Goddess’s guidance through all the dream elements: encouragement to bring intuition (dogs) and the creativity (auburn/orange-hued) of child-like wonder to the dream inquiry session, and to use a technique that was like finding and picking up all the shards (dream images) from the edge of the ocean (unconscious) and investigating each of them with curiosity (children), as if on a treasure hunt (pirates, in a good sense). The Dream Inquiry session with my client flowed naturally and effectively, as I stayed true to the guidance from my dream.
In the morning, before the session, I encountered Felix with his owner in an unusual location for me to see them— approaching Penny’s house on our street. And a couple days later I saw Penny, after not having seen her all summer. This phenomenon of dreaming of encounters with beings, things and events before they occur is another level of dreams which I will address in another piece. It is affirming of a larger awareness beneath what is typically perceived by the waking consciousness.
In this piece, I want to express how supportive dream incubation, using my decks of Goddess cards, has been to my life. My dreamwork teacher Tzivia Gover once said in class, “If you want to feel heard, listen to your dreams.”
So often in our lives, especially if we are of a certain age, we heard the male perspective, at home, in religion, in school with the books we read and history we studied,* and in the workplace. In high school, I heard a man’s voice narrating my papers from inside my head, and I asked myself, what is he doing in there? Later, in my first year at divinity school, in the middle of praying to a male God and his only Son for help, I asked myself, why am I dependent on exclusively male helpers/rescuers? How does this cultivate my own self-esteem and strength as a woman? What was I hearing and what kind of ear was hearing me?
I grieve the loss from history of the original inherent practice of seeing existence, while sparked and nourished by the sun, as fully infused with Mother Earth, the all-provider and Essence, flowing though us all as we rise and fall back into Her. I grieve the loss of the pre-patriarchal, dual-gendered partnership, the vestige of which leaked even into the Hebrew Scriptures in one pronoun, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us” (Genesis 1:26, italics mine). Balance and reverence existed before the suppression of half of the partnered whole, before the split of humans from the whole of nature, before they were “given,” by the rise of patriarchy, dominion over sacred Mother Earth and all her creatures (also Genesis 1:26). To become whole in ourselves and on our planet we all need to restore this balance within ourselves and our world.
And so, I have turned to my incubation practice of the Goddess, as she manifests in her myriad forms, to balance out the significant male energies that still prevail. Many times, I have asked for guidance from my dreams and received a response that is sometimes cryptic, but upon investigation, helpful and reassuring of my direction. I dream of animals, instincts and elements related to the Earth Goddess. I dream of women helpers so much more now than ever before. And sometimes I dream of the Goddess in an even more mythic form. This practice deepens my connection to the Goddess and to Mother Earth, it elevates the qualities traditionally associated with the feminine that have been suppressed and belittled, it bolsters my sense of strength and efficacy as a woman, and it deepens my relationship with the Voice of Wisdom and its Source, which ultimately is beyond gender. This Way helps me feel heard, seen and held. When I need to source Help in difficult waking times, I call on the Goddess in the forms in which she appeared to me in my dreams— my own Helping Spirits.
* (In his school, my son reads a lot more books written by women and minorities than I ever did. So, some tides are turning.)
Goddess Dream Incubation Study
I want to know what it would be like for you to take on the same practice for two weeks, Monday through Friday. What themes, figures and scenes arise in your dreams? And so, I am conducting a study of incubating the Goddess in dreams. I hope you will join me and perhaps it will be helpful to you and become a practice you keep alive in your life.
To see the details of the study, go to my Events page. To sign up, go to my Contact page.