When I recently wrote my post on dreamwork, I didn't talk about the fact that sometimes the subconscious mind's metaphors can be hard to discern. There are times when, despite much pondering, I don't understand my own mind's message to me. At those times, I like to turn to a meditation technique called Active Imagination, which allows one to talk directly to the subconscious mind. This technique is useful for understanding and moving beyond past events, but I typically prefer it for dreamwork, and I used it yesterday to understand a particularly disturbing dream I had two nights ago.
In Active Imagination, you quiet your mind and enter into the dream that you are trying to interpret. You feel it again. You see and hear it again. And you actually talk to the people in the dream and/or let the dream play out beyond the point when you awoke. With my dream, I stood in front of the older man who was trapped in an altered state of consciousness within a machine that put him into that state.
I asked him, "Who are you?"
His eyes snapped open, and he said, "I'm a part of you."
Given that I'd already accepted a Jungian interpretation of this dream, I replied, "I know that. Which part?"
"Your fear," he answered.
"Of what?"
"Of life. Of love."
Now that he'd told me who he was, his death in the machine, which I couldn't avoid in the dream, seemed necessary and important. And, as an older man, it was clear to me that this fear has been with me a long while. So my subconscious mind was letting me know that I need to let my fear die in order to save myself, because there was a woman in this dream, this man's young partner, who didn't want to see him die. She, in fact, was close to letting herself go as well due to the malfunction that had caused him to be trapped in the machine. Whatever chemical put them to sleep spilled at her feet after she was out of her own machine, and she wondered if it would be best to give in to it, to stay asleep. In Active Imagination, I asked what would keep her asleep, what would keep her from saving herself; the answer came: animosity. Since she was also me, it was clear that my own animosity toward certain things in my life could keep me asleep, could keep me from saving myself, from letting go of fear.
In the dream, the woman fought unconsciousness and, though she'd lost the use of her legs and feet (they, in fact, were scattered on the floor around her), she gathered them up in her arms and dragged herself to a couch in the center of the room. When she was able to fling herself over it, the floor on the other side was clean and soft, the air pristine. She could breathe again.
After understanding this dream through Active Imagination, I found clarity and a new sense of lightness and ease I didn't feel before. I'm not always sure of the processes for letting go of fear and animosity, but let them go I must. I know they are within me and, if I don't release them, my best self will suffer. This has reminded me of a Mary Oliver poem in which she writes of a woman saving "the only life she could save," her own. It seems that "saving" our own lives, our highest selves, the selves most connected to the divine, is our life's work, and I'm grateful for each message that reminds me of this.
No comments:
Post a Comment