By Mary Reddy
Dreams have guided me for as long as I can remember. Occasionally, they mystify me but isn’t that true for many of the channels that bring us wisdom? Some dreams are clearly inspired by events and feelings from the recent past. Those help me tease out a deeper understanding of my layered inner responses to what’s going on in my life. Others come to me from beyond myself, lighting fires under my feet or lightly grazing my cheek with bird feathers. Still, others are explicit messages from the postmortem world or from that timeless world from which the future casts a shadow.
In all my dreams, but especially in the dreams from the Beyond, the Big Dreams, I know that I am in communication. I interact with an inner Self, or a larger Self, or Others who know how to reach me in the dreamworld.
Of course, many people have written about theories and techniques for understanding dreams. When I was young, I read a lot of Freud and am familiar with his interpretation of dreams, though Jung’s sensibilities spoke more to my heart. I am familiar with Robert Moss’s work but I am not drawn to the practice of lucid dreaming—not as a goal in and of itself. To be more conscious is always my desire; to be more in control, less so. My interpretation of dreams is a DIY approach. I follow the same paths I take when absorbing the meaning of a painting, a poem, or a symbol. I relinquish some degree of rationality. I allow myself to wander, to feel, to listen, to take time. I free my heart and soul to uncover the subtle meanings.
Several years ago, my friends and I began a dream group. We meet often. Each woman takes a turn recounting a dream and the rest of us begin to ask questions about the beings or symbols or settings in the dream. Associations are explored. The dreamer moves more fully into the dream environment. And without fail, this leads to some “aha!” that opens the dreamer’s eyes to a message or meaning she had not yet discovered.
Here is a dream I once brought to the group.
I stand behind a dark-haired man, to his right, and watch as he ceremoniously gives some objects to a young woman. He even moves in a ceremonial way, holding the objects out in his two hands with his head slightly bowed. I suddenly realize that one of the objects he’s giving away is my Celtic cross brooch. I am dismayed and filled with grief to see it go. Does he not know it is precious to me? But I somehow feel that it’s a done deal. I cannot ask to have it back. Time passes, but in a fast-forward way. Suddenly, the young woman comes to me and gives me back the brooch. I am so happy to have it but I see that a part of one of the stones has broken off. I ask the woman if she found the sliver of stone when it broke so that I can glue it back on. I wake up before she can answer me.
My friends asked who was the man who ceremoniously gave away my precious brooch. Did I know him in real life? Did he remind me of anyone? Was the young woman someone I know? Why did I think it was inevitable that the brooch would be given away, that I could not stop the process? What is the brooch like in real life? How exactly was it broken in the dream? Is it an illusion of mine—that this brooch is a sacred object—and do I need to let go of that illusion?
With these questions, a generous space opened up for me to wander through my dream. The man and the young woman in the dream were not related to people I know. I associate the man’s looks to a journalist whose work I admire, but his back was always turned to me, toward the young woman. And the young woman never really took on a specific appearance. Their roles felt archetypal to me, not personal.
I considered the brooch. In real life, it came to me in a Wisconsin second-hand store forty five years ago. It was pinned to the lapel of a woman’s wool coat from the 1940s, a beautiful dark green coat with big padded shoulders. The coat and the pin together cost me 25 cents. The coat aged and fell apart from repeated wearings but I’ve kept the brooch close to me ever since. I don’t often wear it. I keep it on my altar instead.
By the time we finished discussing my dream, I had threads of meaning to follow. The primary thread is about giving away what is sacred to us and in doing so, it returns to us. And it does not return to us unchanged. There may be sacrifice. Loss. But the spiral completes another turn and we go on. Other threads are evocative of lineage. I am reminded of the two sides of the coin, possessiveness and generosity, that live in the ties between mothers and daughters. How passages can be painful, how ceremony creates safety while facing change. I may even find more as I continue to ponder the imagery, activities, and mood of my dream.
The group's questions are especially effective in uncovering the trickster element in our dreams. What is that element that you don't want to look at too closely? Where is the shadow and what is it doing in your dream story? Is that thing that terrifies you the thing that you actually long to be with?
A fascinating side effect of doing this work in a group is that we seem to be building a communal dream space. I sometimes feel the beings in my friends’ dreams hanging around us, ready to interact. We joke that we’ll start dreaming each other’s dreams. We tap into a collective consciousness in our dreams. And it feels as though there are local pools within that great ocean. Recently, when one of our members described a beautiful and moving dream, I was amazed to recognize how nearly identical it was in theme and message to what I and a few other friends have been seeing in our meditative journeys around working with Gaia.
Ultimately, I love this dream work because it’s so subtle. It feels like a fractal of the imaginative communication lines which open up as we work with subtle world energies or inhabitants. It’s the same open-ended, sensitive, inquisitive, wondering approach that strengthens our connections across the worlds.
One of the cards in John Matthew’s deck, The Sidhe Oracle of the Fleeting Hare is the Dreaming Hare. The message from the Sidhe for this card includes this: “In sleep and dreams you will find many of the answers you seek. Even if … you cannot remember what you have been shown, know that its wisdom is still present within you. … The source of these dreams is a mystery even we do not understand. We envy you, for we do not dream.”