Shift of Change

Dream:

I am working with a bunch of people on a project. A woman keeps calling and telling me I have to put my dog on a leash or she will report me to some man and I will get in trouble. It seems that every time her little dog sees mine wandering around, she barks which annoys the woman. I think that I should comply, that somehow these are the rules, but I am busy and either forget or ignore her each time. Then I am in the HOWL kitchen with several people. The woman comes to the door with her little dog and says I better put my dog on a leash because the man is already in the house and he is coming. I turn and Oakley is at my feet in the kitchen. It makes no sense to have to leash her. I have the leash and I know I am supposed to leash her, but I don’t want to.

I feel the shift of change. Something is happening. Old patterns are either falling away or I am refusing to take the bait. This shows itself in the dream when I do something different. Here, I don’t leash the dog, even though I think I am supposed to. In the past, I might have leashed the dog out of the projected fear of my trauma. Something bad might happen if I don’t leash the dog. But, pathology is clever. If it can’t get us one way, the demon will suddenly morph into a new idea.

Dream:

I walk into a large hall. I see a band of young black boys. They have low slung jeans and are bare-chested. One of them is the singer and the other four are playing instruments. One is playing a stand up bass that looks unusual because it is round instead of viola shaped. He plucks the strings with his finger. There is a lot of energy and they are awesome. The crowd loves them and so do I.

Then I leave and I think it would be fun to do music like that, but then I think I am too old and no one wants to see old people. It is a young people’s thing. I walk outside where there is a café and I see some people I know. I wave to them, but they either don’t see me or ignore me. Down at the end of the building, I see a man on a horse. The horse appears to be struggling and the man seems to be trying to calm it. When I get to where the horse is, I see it lying on the ground next to a platform. There is a woman on the platform with an infant in a stroller that she is tending to and a toddler girl who is standing in front of them near the edge of the platform. Then the toddler falls off the edge of the platform and into the legs of the horse. I think she is going to be hurt and then the horse kicks its legs and the girl who has now turned into an infant flies up in the air. I look around thinking maybe I can catch her, but then I see her fall on the pavement on her head. Me and another woman run over and pick her up. I look at the infant’s head and see that it has an old wound on its skull. The crown of its head looks like it was split open and never healed properly. I don’t see any new wound and there is no blood. I look at its face and one of its eyes is closed with some goop in it and its mouth is open. I think it must be brain damaged. We tell the mother that she needs to call an ambulance, but she seems unconcerned. She acts vague and distracted asking us if the baby fell from higher than shoulder height. I feel very angry and can’t understand why the woman feels no sense of urgency. We say yes and hold our arms up in the air saying she fell from way higher than that. Then I see that the infant is now a little girl and she is mimicking us holding her arms up in the air.

Our pathology doesn’t like it when we get close to our essence, our soul. It might seem like the Hydra of Greek mythology, but it is also akin to a shape shifter, one and many. The boys in the band, of course, represent my soul, the boy energy in me. The crowd loves them, and so do I! But I leave, the voice of pathology trying to convince me that I am too old, but I know this is not the truth. So pathology morphs back to my trauma. The dream shows where I have thought that my own passion, my libido, my singing boy on the stage (the horse) is the thing that caused the trauma. It is the bad thing that I must avoid. But this is not the truth. The baby has a wound, but it is an old wound. When I was attacked in the place of my singing boy, it was because someone else’s pathology drove them. Knowing this and allowing myself to feel what this means are two different things. But, again, the dream shows the truth. The truth is there in the scarred infant, now turned girl, who stands with her hands up like a gymnast, “ta-da!” She is fine. Why is it so hard to believe this?

I feel the tug of the tethered girl being pulled through the underwater tunnel, Him, on the other side, pulling me through (my homework from last week). This is the way the dreamwork moves me. The dreamwork is the hardest work and it is also the easiest work. I feel the pull now more regularly. Faith is like a pull, a tug, a drawing of the soul, desire.

My dreamwork homework is to be the shirtless, lean black boy in the band playing the unusual stand up bass or singing and to notice when the dark mother comes and tells me to leash my dog.

When I do this homework, I feel the intensity of the grief of how I have not allowed this in my life and I feel the joy and gratitude of finding it now. The feelings are so similar in my body that the grief and the joy are together as one and carry the physical sensation I have come to associate with deep feeling.



This is reason enough not to leash my dog.