When someone tells me a dream, they describe it but always add on a mental narrative on top of what the description of the dream is. I always wonder when they were in the experience of the dream, were they chatting away? Or does this just happen when they remember the dream?
So we always have to first chip away this habitual crust. The layers and layers, sometimes they seem endless. Help! I cannot get through, as the dream sits there patiently wondering: will this person see what the dream wants to share? We have to dismantle this habitual mind if we are going to access the intelligence that the dream wants to present. What if we stop deciding ahead what things are and just observe? We are explorers in unknown terrain; this is a treasure hunt. We know absolutely nothing about the dream until we become receptive.
Kat Taylor told me about this New York Times article about Morocco. I have always wanted to go there, having been obsessed with Paul Bowles and the Tuareg culture described in J.M.G. Le Clezio’s book Desert. So I immediately went to the article and looked at the pictures first as I often do and when I came to the picture above, a jolt ran through my whole body of “holy shit, I was just there in a dream.”
I had a dream about a big rock in a wide-open desert and I first thought, “oh, that was nothing,” but what I would have missed if I had not entered the dream. As the dream worker took me through the dream, slowly I came to move into the rock and experience its intelligence. As I moved through the hardness of its surface and started to view the desert from the rock’s viewpoint, the rock could see! Not only could the rock see but every facet on this rock viewed the desert from a different angle. I have no idea how many viewpoints this rock could see from but it was a world that I could have stayed in forever. The world of multiple perspectives is what embodiment develops in our beings, which we can carry forth into our daily lives.
Another dream that could have been discarded but wasn’t: I am standing on a cement block looking at the ocean wash its waves over this mass of rocks. As I felt my way into the rock through the dream worker’s guidance, the rock awareness took over me. The rock was in complete union with the waves. The record of all the waves landing on the rock was imprinted there. The rock and sea were in symbiosis.
WHAT IF THE DREAM IS NOT ABOUT YOU!
If we take away the running dialogue we lay on the dream, and just enter the dream in a state of I HAVE NO IDEA about anything, we can have experiences we would otherwise miss because our suitcases of ideas were obscuring the picture.