I Remember, a Dialogue

The dream wants us to re-member ourselves. We are often fragmented psychically, emotionally, physically. We become comfortable in a state of spiritual obliteration. What was once know becomes forgotten. We often do not even know that we have forgotten. But the forgetting is really a turning away. This is not to say we choose this, or that we should berate ourselves for forgetting. But we compensate, cover, and find all manner of ways to protect ourselves from the devastation of our separation and fragmentation. We feel lost and abandoned. We become self-will run riot.

Re-membering through the felt experience of the dreams helps us to re-integrate, sublimate, and ultimately transform. In the words of Aristotle, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." This is to say, the result is often unexpected. The approach is one of faith, or reliance upon something greater than one's self. Once we establish this connection, we realize that has been a missing energetic force that can bind us back together. Through the dreams, the Archetypes seek to guide us back to our faith, our higher self.

In my dream writer's group, we explore various writing forms and techniques for conveying our experience of the dreams. In my recent class, we explored the dialogue.

In this short piece, the setting is from a current dream I am working with where I enter a beautiful glass house by the sea with my father. I am a girl, 14. I feel vulnerable because it is "Her" house, a woman who I am not quite sure about (an Anima figure), and yet safe because I am with my Father (Animus figure). The dialogue is imaginal, containing content from many of my dreams.

I REMEMBER

I: Father, who is this woman who lives here?

Him: She is your mother.

I: Why do I not know her?

Him: You do know her. You have forgotten her.

I: But why would I forget her? Does she not love me if she is my mother?

Him: Yes, she loves you dearly and will do everything in her power to bring you back to her heart.

I: I feel sad that I have forgotten her.

Him: We all forget. It is a condition of our existence to forget. But then, if we choose, we may remember again.

I: So I remembered her before and then I forgot again. If I remember now, does that mean I will forget again?

Him: Yes, for you could not have remembering without forgetting. Remembering would have no purpose for you without the forgetting.

I: Father, did I forget you too?

Him: Yes. And then you remembered. Do you remember?

I: Yes, I remember finding you in the garden. You picked me up and spun me around and around. It was pure joy. I remember I fell into your arms and you held me like a baby. You are a potter, a woodworker. You took me into your house and I remembered that it was my house too.

Him: Do you know this house we are in now?

I: Yes. I remember this house. It is her house. It is beautiful. I can see the sea. There is so much mist. I can be here now because you are here. Without you, I could not be here now even though it is beautiful. I would not have been able to see the beauty or feel safe coming in here without you.

Him: You speak the truth.  Do you remember when she first came as the Yellow Spinner?

I: Yes, I was frightened. I ran as fast as I could because it seemed she was hurting the boy. Then I saw her planting the field with garlic. I remember being with the Yellow Spinner next to a pond. She was sitting on a rock and I was sitting at her feet, a small girl, frog legged on the ground. She was talking to me and showing me something. She said that I must be careful how I speak of these things. She pulled out a piece of metal that was very old and pitted and black. She said “we are like this piece of metal but we can be like this” and then she wiped her hand across the metal and I saw that it was polished smooth and was made of some rare earth element that gleamed like nickel or titanium. She said that many people will come wanting this knowledge but very few understand the difficulty in attaining it and they become frustrated.

Him: She is wise. It is not easy to remember. There is pain. Do you remember the pain?

I: Yes. I remember the pain. There is much pain and the pain has made me very angry. I have been afraid of the pain and the anger and I never wanted to feel these things. Perhaps this is why I forget.

Him: Yes. Do you remember when she opened your heart?

I: Yes, I was brought to her in the wood. There was a fire and we stood in the fire together. She fed me porridge. I was very afraid, but I did not try to leave. I did not leave even when I saw the knife. The fear was incredible and somehow I stood there with her and she put the knife in my heart and I understood pain as something different than what I thought it was.

Him: Yes, you stayed. This makes you special.

I: I will stay now, in her house with you.

Him: She is here with us now.

I: Yes, I see her by the curtain. She is beautiful and I remember that I love her and that she loves me.

Anima by Red Pool

To find out more about the dream writer's group, visit: http://suescavo.com/classes.html...new meeting dates to be listed soon.!

The Girl

This is a story about my Girl as I have experienced her in my dreams over the last four years. It was written as part of an dreamwork writer's group that I belong to.

The Girl

The world was a dark place and the girl was silent. There was really no fear because the darkness was so familiar. Anger was familiar too. It was a writhing deep anger that filled the girl and filled the darkness too. In fact it seethed with a opaque rage that spoke of injustices unfathomable. Truths that couldn't, shouldn't be spoken.

Every now and then a brief flash of light. Hope, but so dazzling the girl was befuddled, confused. It seemed  that there was heat in that light, possibility. In those moments the fear became visceral and rose in a bloom of passion and desire and terror. But there was fire and the girl feared the fired. Somehow the fire of her passion would become the oven of death or perhaps a funeral pyre in which memory and knowing burned blisteringly bright with pain and then subsided back to a stillness, a pulsating in the dark.

One day the girl awoke to a place of waiting. She knew the waiting as a place outside of the anger. Something was happening, there was a stirring. Her whispered prayers finding their way up through cracks in the stone. Someone knew she was here! Not just someone, but The One.

The one who she remembered. And in the remembering, the door opened. Light burned down on her shell-shocked face and she skittered out of the corner and took the light full on. Hands lifted her and carried her up.

There was magic in the forest and wild beasts clamored for her attention.  And then she found herself on a flag-stoned plaza. It was night, yet day. She looked with wonder up at the sky and saw three red planets stacked up in space. The stars were brilliant and there was the sun emerging in furls and explosions of fire from behind the darkened silent moon.

A Cry to Heaven

Dream: I see two train cars side by side. Both are filled with people. I can see their hands, fingers curled, reaching out through wooden slats like the Holocaust trains. I feel like they are desperate, trying to get to each other.

What does the dream bring? What depth of feeling does it want me to remember? What teaching and what medicine does it offer?

To be on the train is to know devastation. It is all of my life’s blood and hope and love turned to a wrenching anguish, loss, anger. It is wails of pain and rage and why’s. It is shaking, shock and anticipatory fear. It is alone, frantic whisperings. Chaos, disorder, loss, desperation, anguish. A cry to heaven.

Where is Grace in these moments? Others must have know God then. Perhaps not I. And even if it was true that I knew, did doubt not ride in on the darkness? How could faith raise a sword to the dark horseman of suffering?

Anguish (artist unknown)

In this moment, I am alone.  No family, no people in this moment, isolated even in a train car full of people.  Inability to speak, ask for help. Don’t draw attention. Even comfort would be too painful in this place.

Did I know what was happening? In the train car, do I care what is happening? Or am I lost in an inward spiral of doubt and pain and suffering....alone. There is psychosis in trauma and anguish is a physical sensation, a yearning to escape the body.

When we follow the dream, we turn inward, find the support of the Animus, the Anima. It is an inward journey back to the love, following the intelligence of the dream, even into the most devastating moments. In trauma reaction we turn inward too, but it is an inward turning of isolation and separation. Part of the descent is back to this place where all is lost to find ourselves again and our connection to love even in the suffering. The dreams can help us.

The Warrior's Journey - Interview with Archetypal Dreamwork Analyst Laura Smith

Please feel free to read this article about my creative journey within Archetypal Dreamwork published recently in Collective Dream Arts Magazine, 2014 Launch Edition.

Linked here with permission from Kayla Bowen, Editor, Collective, Dream Arts Magazine.

 The Warrior's Journey - Interview with Archetypal Dreamwork Analyst Laura Smith

Please note that the images on the PDF link above are not of good quality due to the file share limitations. Consider purchasing a copy of this incredible 108 page, full color publication filled with dream-inspired art. 

Thanks. Love, Laura

The Bird and the Spider

Copyright © Estate of Françoise Taylor, All Rights Reserved Used with Permission

Transformation is not linear. Imagine it like a mandala forming, but if you were looking at it from above, it might appear as a boiling caldron, each bubble blooming into existence to form a place in the mandala. The moment of the blooming is an awareness flooding, a new feeling opening, or perhaps alchemy happening. The mandala as transformation, becomes the love. Like nature, it is chaotic and unpredictable and yet still forms to an incredible, beautiful rendering of the soul. The human mythologies ripple through it, the cosmos tilt and spin, the natural world comes alive. One can feel the deep mystery at work. Now, imagine as you are looking at the mandala, that it shifts and reforms in a never ending bloom of transmutation of itself. And now you see that at the center is the still point, the girl/boy soul, which is infinity, unchanging, constant, whole, undifferentiated oneness...the boy/girl united.

I had the following dream while on an Archetypal Dreamwork retreat at Rowe Conference Center last month. The archetypal imagery of this dream is astounding as it presents a larger mythology of the journey of the spiritual warrior. The ultimate battle between good and evil which plays out in us all as individuals and as a collective. But it is my dream, so it is very specific and personal to me and my own struggle.

Dream: I am with a man and a woman. Suddenly a bird flies into the woman's mouth. And when she turns her mouth is sealed up like with skin that looks like scar tissue. Then I see her in profile and a huge tarantula crawls out of her mouth and lands on the floor. I feel terrified and run. Then we are in some underground sterile chambers that are small like berths on a ship but maybe some kind of surgical pod. I sense the structure is massive extending deep into the ground. I see the tarantula and it is being chased by the bird, but it is trying to get me. I start trying to get away from it and each time the tarantula tries to get to me, the bird dodges it away. But it is singularly focused and I realize that it will always be trying to get to back in its host and lay it's eggs. I think we will have to go deeper in the catacombs, but then I think there is no place deep enough that we can get to to ever truly be safe, that it would always find a way in because it is so singularly focused.