Saturday Mornings with My Dreams
Saturday mornings I have enjoyed pouring over my dream journal, rereading the dreams of the week, giving them titles, engaging with some more deeply, and creating an index so I can find them more easily. It isn’t always easy. Sometimes they present parts of me I can want to ignore. And I have to remind myself that this time spent on my inner world isn’t selfish.
Someone mentioned to me recently that they wondered if the ego clouded dreamwork, so much so that we can’t really get the true message from God (or Spirit/Self/Universe). It is a good question. In fact, I can be so suggestible, that long ago I veered away from becoming a Jungian Analyst because a classmate (in a class on Carl G. Jung at divinity school) once told me that the people she knew who were into Jungian analysis were all self-absorbed. I didn’t want to be (seen as?) self-absorbed, on a fool’s path, nor inaccessibly esoteric. So, I told myself “No.”
Life has a way of spiraling back, with the increased perspective of lived wisdom. I sometimes lament my earlier choice, but I embrace the lessons harvested on my journey.
Ego can come in the form of suggestibility — needing to define oneself according to how others perceive one, always seeking external validation, never living according to one’s own center — not even knowing where or what the F*#* that is. This can be especially true for women, but men can experience this too, perhaps according to a different set of cultural standards.
So how do we ever know what is ego, and what is Source (God, Spirit, etc.) — unless the answer is validated by some external system which, while with the intention of truth at its core, often is interpreted by, and mired in, its own cultural/historical layers of human power structures (ergo, ego)?
Dreamwork allows us to witness ALL the parts of ourselves, as presented by our cast of inner characters: the dream ego, the props, the setting, and all the players. “All the world’s a stage,/And all the men and women merely players” some famous playwright once said — with amazing gender inclusivity. And the same can be said for our dream life: it is the “stage” of our inner selves, and not with “merely” players, but “amazingly” with all of our own players — often unacknowledged.
Once we can at least consider that the annoying person in our dreams, that mirrors the same one we know in waking life, is actually a part of us, then we can begin to see how perhaps we have neglected this part, seeing it only in our outer stage of reality. At night, our eyes are closed, our outer senses are basically off-line: there is no person in that dream moment “out there.” They are fully our creation— unless we take a shamanic perspective, which I won’t, right now, because it is always important to know oneself first. As Lau Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching, “Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom” (Trans., Stephen Mitchel, 1988, p. 33).
By recognizing and accepting all of the ways our inner energies manifest, we help tame the tendency to blindly project those energies onto others, without acknowledging that we, too, possess them. What remains in the shadows has a power over the ego we can’t recognize. It can leap out like a venomous snake; it can cower, causing us to deflate. And it can cause us to judge.
Of course, this perspective comes from yet another system. But it is one that honors the inner teacher. I can ask a question before I go to bed, and receive an answer, however initially mysterious. I begin to disentangle from outer validation.
Where is Source in all this and how do we recognize it? How can we ever verbalize the answer to that question with complete clarity? But once we begin to know and, yes accept and LOVE, our whole “self,” and see it arising in its myriad energies from the endless Mystery, we can come to recognize the visitations of the night as gifts, lessons, strength, and messages lovingly sent to us from a Center far beyond our finite ego.