Whole-Cloth Mystery
When we have a night dream, something special happens - we are given access to unusual images and powerful emotions brought together in a careful orchestration the greatest literature seeks to emulate. When presented with these mysterious stories, fragments, and juxtapositions, with characters we may know or not, we feel their seriousness and importance, like rare gifts are being offered us. We receive such gifts best when we approach them as the paradox they are.
First, we must fully accept there's a mystery in front of us that we will never fully understand. If you've had a child, you might have looked down at your baby when it was born and recognized the great mystery of its presence, wondering "where did you come from?" And of course there was an explanation, but it was still mysterious - where DID YOU come from? What magical array of your cells, organs, and spirit have combined to produce you? And it's like that with a dream: why is this particular, remarkable array of experiences, images, and ideas being bundled together and presented as something of importance to my emotional life?
Perhaps the strangest paradox about a dream is that when we first come into contact with it, it's as though it's already happened; our first conscious awareness of it is after it's already passed. It's therefore totally understandable that most people would equate the dream realms to a study of the past, but the other remarkable paradox about dreams is that they really are a projection of the future, a die cast, if you will, as to what we might imagine is coming next. Dreams offer predictions and solutions as to how we might co-create to the future yet to come. Sure, there's an alchemy of the past: we may see people we know from other experiences gone before, or be reminded of situations and scenes resembling others we've seen already. But the dream often asks us to inquire into not so much what has already happened, but rather to make sense of what the future brings; to prepare us to unfold the yet-to-come, and hopefully, liberate us from what snagged us before.
So that really is the first approach of dream work: offering ourselves to the mystery. The second is allowing the potential to unpiece the tangle we've been given - of the past with the present, of the possible with the impossible. Dreams tantalize us with a relentless desire to unpuzzle, interpret, arise the tangible. So we find this tension/balance of opposites, wherein we must be satisfied with the never-ending non-fungibility of a dream, paired with the seething possibility that we might actually plumb sense from it.
When we plunge deeper into this paradox, there's this curious invitation: that we may be made anew as we understand our own mystery and appreciate our own unfathomability even more, well enough even to make friends with the idea that we don't make any damn sense... and, isn't that a beautiful, wonderful thing? To embrace the opportunity for acceptance that we can't make sense. Yet, every time we piece together one bread crumb to another, we track a trail; we get a bit closer to an understanding of what the conscious mind would have never been able to conjure forth, without the help of the unconscious mind, that is. And that's the magic of dreams - the marriage between the knowable and the unknowable.
This paradox is what I'm always wrapping myself in when I work with a dream. I never want one end to fold neatly to the other, neither want to fathom the depths of unknowability to extract perfect knowing, nor to forgo a thread of knowledge in order to seal the totality of unknowability. I want the yin to simply seek; to sweetly yearn the yang. Embracing that tension fully allows us to relax into the taut hammock of these enveloping contradictions, which are quite warming, quite titillating; nay, quite freezing, quite frightening. That we could make sense of something that tweaks us in our midnight gloaming, wakes us to such a bizarre world, impossible to explain to another human being with any certitude - what a strange kind of loneliness presents there! But one that brings us into greater intimacy with ourselves. When we fully receive the gift that dreams that can't be fully explained, we embrace our own special relationship to our profundity and simply love it: we hold whole cloth our dream experience as it arrives to enfold us, and become us. May it be so!
