Have you ever had an especially vivid memory of a dream? When I go for a season without remembering what I’ve dreamt, I just go on with my daily round of routines. My thoughts and emotions stay essentially within the same boundaries. The amplitude of my energetic waves- the points at which I interact with the world, shaping it and being shaped by it in turn- is about the same. But- there’s something startling about remembering all or even part of a dream. The sense of portent… the sense of déjà vu… the sense the SOMETHING needs to be discerned. Is it a warning? A metaphor? The aftermath of an ill advised cocktail or dinner entrée? WHAT?
So- two days ago, in that realm between full sleep and wakefulness, Orpheus began to prophesy, speaking in pictures and patterns that made no sense to me, They were out of phase with where my life is. My creative mind, of course, jumped in to fill in the gaps. Let’s pixelate that puppy! I remembered being back in high school, though at my current age. Only high school was also college. And I was having difficulty registering for classes or finding space in the dorms.
There was something about the height of the ceilings of the main building for dorm rooms and tramping off to different small rooms to see what would fit and where. Somehow, my sister was also faced with the same dilemma and I associated the two together. The scene swam in and out of focus between high school, which was boarding school, and college. And the plot crescendo was that these classes for which we could not register and these rooms where we could not live were irrelevant. It was discovered that we had already graduated.
I wondered to myself. Was the Divine sending me a message? Was I sending me a message? Should I just have avoided that second helping of dinner? I feel that dreams are significant in that we are often working out the tensions, stressors and difficult places of our days during this phase of sleep. I concluded that something (or some One) was trying to tell me something.
Well… Going over the same ground. Living in the same time frame. Working with the same resources. Dealing with the same deficits of the system as it played out or of my own character as it acted out. But- this scene, this act- should have been over long ago. I took away from this the idea that my past may be incomplete. It’s not fully integrated and I haven’t processed every last morsel of trauma or wrung every last drop of wisdom from the experiences I’ve had or the solutions that I’ve tried. Okay. But it’s time to move ON.
That’s the message that I took. Sometimes the universe writes a message and sends it out in a bottle. I’m not a pantheist. I don’t believe in a living universe. But I believe in the connection of all beings, all systems and all time. Turns out- this message in a bottle was significant for me because I gave it import, meaning and weight. Oracles do still speak and perhaps it’s a matter for theologians and philosophers as to whether quality, quantity or provenance of given message is of first priority. This momentary overlap between the states of wakefulness and dreaming gave me something to ponder. Which, in itself, is valuable.
Look for your own message in a bottle. Serendipity, synchronicity- whatever you call it. When we wrestle a bit with an inscrutable Other, the whole of the systems that we partake of, that’s good. We grow. Even if we get it wrong in terms of interpreting the significance of any given message, the processes of reflection and contemplation help to connect us to the larger whole and help us with some of the work of mapping the whole. Let me know if you’ve any crazy dreams lately. Maybe you’ll discover your own message to interpret.