Unseen Ripples

Why do dream work over time? What's the benefit of continuing to show up for your dreams every single night?

When I first started my practice of remembering my dreams, I did not remember them; in fact, I spent more of that first month reaching out toward the void of memory then I did actually writing down dreams.

Although the dreams did begin to show themselves, when I look back at those first months of pages when the practice was juddering, at best partial, in many ways it was not that different from how it is now with much more experience.

Last night, I remembered only very little, nor could I bring myself to scrawl down everything I did remember, so comfortable was my bed and so slow my creaky arrival to consciousness.

I don't always remember, and usually what I've dreamed is much more than I recall. Yet, the reason why I try every single day is because just like any other practice of days when both more and less happens, the important thing is the gesture of reaching toward the void.

And why is it so important for a dreamer to reach, even if nothing is touched? The first reason is simply that we do not need to remember our dreams to benefit from them. Their medicine supports our unfolding even if we remember only a very small fragment of what was happening under the surface of our experience. We benefit because the dreams are always working us, and the working isn't just at the intellectual level - frequently it isn't.

The work of dreams has everything to do with the energy bodies and emotional bodies being drummed at a subtle level.

When we take the time to ask, "What did I dream?" and we reach and find some kind of answer arising, such is a gift that knowing will amplify, yet, it is not required for us to know what the gift is, only that it is there.

It's a little like our relationship with our ancestors: we don't need to recognize our ancestors' presence in our waking lives either to benefit from or be impacted by them; so it is with dreams - we don't have to understand them to be shaped by them. We will experience the effects, unseen.

You might well wonder, if our dreams have an impact on us either way, why bother recognizing them, then?

Wouldn't we be better off just letting dreams do their inevitable business in the darkness, and in the light of the day, move forward without a memory either way? Certainly, many people already do just that and might even argue that they are no worse for wear for that choice.

But I don't think that's the case.

I see that people who tend their dreams have a more comfortable relationship with the unknown.

Even though they are reaching for knowing in the form of remembering and perhaps knowing in the form of understanding (since many people who try to recall their dreams also desire to understand them), they who reach for their dreams tend to be more at ease with the things they do not understand. But if someone is trying to know, why would that same someone be more okay with not knowing? It's paradoxical.

It seems to me that holding paradox is very much about acceptance.

People who don't remember their dreams but who tend to imagine they are doing okay, also tend to attribute that state of "okayness" to being awake; they don't, conversely, ascribe their wellness to the unknown.

On the other hand, those who wake and try to remember dreams, even if they mostly forget, their acknowledgment that something down below has happened that might be worth remembering allows them to hold with grace even that space where something might move that can't be held.

So much of what we depend on in life is unknowable. We live on this vast planet but don't see everything that happens on it; we see just a tiny bit of its surface, and yet so much depends upon everything that's happening across and within our world that we cannot see or know, in order for this exact moment to be exactly what it is.

When I stop to recognize how much the unknowable shapes this known moment, I feel with humbleness a desire to embrace the greater whole with more fidelity, care, and respect.

Dream tenders are more conscious in ways non-tenders are not. The attitude of putting the ear to the ground to listen, to wonder about what isn't known - to constantly try to reach into that space where the unknown also reaches for us - it's much like it was for me in those early days of starting my dream practice.

Reaching for dreams, I saw, as though looking at the surface of a silver sea, the ripples from where invisible fish of my unremembered dreams gently kissed the hidden undersides below the surface, come up from depths where I could not penetrate with my mind's eye to any memories, and yet I saw the topside of their ripples spreading from the epicenter of each kiss.

I knew and trusted these ripples carried forth vibrations of energetic and emotional healing unseen dreams had sent to me.

As do fish spiral the waters, so do we reverberate the surface of the Earth. Our footsteps impact each place we tread; each "kiss" of our contact with life has that ripple effect. We each are constantly kissed by ripples moving outward from others as well as kiss others with ripples of our own. A veritable chaos of kismet!