Seeing

The dreams below come in the context of a number of dreams recently where I am “witnessed” or seen by the Archetypes in my sensuality. What is it like to truly “see”, not with the eyes, but with the heart? What blocks us from being able to see?

Dream:

I am at a huge barn with a woman where Vanessa’s and my sheep are being watched by H (another farmer we know). A woman who runs the farm is there. She says there is a problem with a lamb and that is why she called me. I look into the barn and there are a whole bunch of huge animals, moose and horses and possibly others. I ask her what they are doing in there with our sheep and she says that they belong to her husband. I feel afraid that the animals are so big they have harmed the sheep and that is why she is saying there is a problem with a lamb. I tell her that I wish H had told me about this. I go in and work my way through the enormous animals to find the lamb. It is a large white lamb and it is down and rolling its head around. Its mother is no where around. I pick its head up and see that it has a long flap of skin coming off the top of its nose and I think that when it tries to breath, the flap covers its nostrils and that is why it is flailing its head around. It keeps licking its nose and I think I will need to call Vanessa and that we can trim off the flap and it will be OK. But then I realize that it has no eyes and that it has some tentacle like things coming out of its mouth. I think that this lamb is probably deformed and won’t survive.

The lamb can't see because he has no eyes. This lamb represents what it is like for me when I am in the reactive place of my trauma. When I am the lamb, I am flailing, licking my lips because I can't breathe. I am alone in the moment. And even more alone because I can't see. The Archetypes (the moose) are all around the lamb, yet the lamb is blinded because it has no eyes. This is what PTSD is like. At its most intense, PTSD symptoms are a manifestation of a completely irrational place of trauma fear and I am completely isolated in that place. When I am in my trauma reaction, I can no longer "see" Him. In the dream, I am projecting as I believe there to be something bad that has happened. And then, like the lamb, I don't "see" the moose; I have no time for the moose. There is only a fleeting moment of Wow when I first see them, and then I am in the place of trauma needing to find and help the lamb, believing it to be deformed and not likely to survive.

This dream shows me how trauma reaction completely cuts me off from Him. When I am in my trauma, I become blind. I am completely cut off from the love.

Dream:

I am with a young girl, about 6 or 7. She has a toy of some kind that I think must be a Halloween toy. She attaches it to her two front bottom teeth and it makes it look like she has an eye where her mouth is. She shows me this and then she tries to pull it off, but it gets stuck. Then she gets it off and the lens from the eye falls in her mouth. She spits it out into her hand and then smiles at me and I can see two black smudges on her teeth where the thing was attached.

The theme of seeing and speaking is here. The girl doesn’t speak in this dream, but she sees and she knows and, as is often the case for me with the girl, she is definitely attempting to show me something. There is something here about seeing and speaking from the place of “seeing”. I wonder about the type of seeing that doesn’t involve eyes, that which comes from intuition, a place of knowing that comes from being in relationship to Him and to the soul, which leads to the second part of the dream:

I am in a crowd of people and we are shuffling along. C is there guiding a blind woman, but the blind woman gets ahead of her and I think that she is about to stumble down the stairs. I grab her arm and tell her that I know I shouldn’t be holding her arm, but I was afraid she would fall down the stairs. I think a blind woman should be holding my arm (as opposed to me holding hers), but she wraps her arm around my waist and wants to walk with me. I wrap my arm around her too. I feel very close to her, like we are best friends. We walk along and then come to a narrow board which crosses over water to a building where we are going. I tell her what I see. I describe the board over the water which is 12 inches wide and the building on the other side which has a glass front and the water goes inside and there are stones. It is very cool. I think that she will move behind me and hold my arm to cross over because the board is so narrow, but then I realize that she wants to just walk across with me side-by-side. Even though it doesn't make sense, I am OK with this. C is behind us saying that it is dangerous. The blind woman pauses and says that this is the trouble with C, that she always wants to control what she does. She seems happy that I don’t feel the need to do that. I see that she seems to know what she is doing and I feel excited about being with her and going wherever and however she wants to go.

I feel complete trust in this woman, who is the Anima. She is “blind”, but she can “see”. Only, she sees through an inner knowing that does not require the use of eyes. I feel relational and close to the Anima and I trust that she knows what she is doing even though outwardly it appears she is blind. This is the faith. When I am in my faith, I am totally relational with Her. I know she sees and so do I. The demon would like to move me out of the relational place and have me be "in control" of the situation. This would be an easy place for me to go.

The dreams have an amazing way of separating out the truth of who we are from the falseness of our ego persona that has developed to cope, manage and control. I believe this is the promise of the work, coming into a deeper knowing of ourselves through our relationship to the Archetypes and ultimately through that which I refer to as God. This is to say I can bring more of the true me, that is of my own soul as held by God, into my daily living.