For some people dreams are very important. I guess I am one of those people. Perhaps it is because I remember my dreams from my younger days; I am saying around 4 or 5. They were mostly nightmares and with hindsight I realized that they were often ‘Lucid’ dreams. By that I knew that I was dreaming…though at that young age I did not know that I could control them. The first time I found out that I could control them was when I was 14 years of age. I did not then, nor do I now, especially look for them. Sometimes when dreaming, I will consider if I am in fact ‘lucid dreaming’, and the only way I can find out is to jump up in the air; if I float I am dreaming. Even then, once I tried jumping up and came right back down to the ground, so I told myself I was awake….shortly after I woke up and laughed at myself. One time, the people in the dream talked me out of my lucidity, which was also funny. In a lucid dream I found out that if I am starting to fade back into dream mode, all I need do is spin very fast and I will change the scene and be in another dreamscape, however it is hard work, so I don’t bother too much with it anymore.
The most important dreams for me are the ones I feel are ‘given’ to me. Not sure what I mean by that, but I would like to share a dream that I had in 1975, when I was 26 years of age. I was up at our Motherhouse, the Abbey of Gethsemane, for a symposium on St. Aelred who wrote a good deal on friendship. Mother Miriam, the abbess of Redwoods Abbey in California, and Dom Eudes, the then abbot of Genesee Abbey in New York State where the two main speakers, playing off of each other, leading us into discussions. Dom Eudes was Freudian and Mother Miriam Jungian. Both talked about friendship in our order using these two different approaches.
I was taken with Mother Miriam and asked if I could talk to her. We meet that evening after Vespers. I shared with her some emotional struggles that I was going through. It was like I had some sort of black tar in my chest areal, emotionally painful and I did not know how to deal with it….or for that manner what it was. So she talked to me about using symbols to help me to deal with my inner condition. She told me that when I used the term ‘black tar’, I was using a symbol to describe the pain. Also that it was a powerful image but one that needed another powerful image to counterpoint it. So she presented to me the symbol of a chalice for me to consider using. That I could sit and think of a chalice, any kind that I wanted to and pour my suffering into it and offer it up to the Lord. After she told me this, I became very fatigue and thanked her and left.
I went up to my room and sat down on my bed, and literally fell back unconscious. It seemed that as soon as I fell into this deep sleep, a very bright, golden chalice appeared before me, surrounded by light. On it were beautiful stones, large ones, they circled the rim of the chalice. They were blue, red and deep green. There where also stones on the base of the chalice of the same color. I was profoundly taken with the green stones.
As I observed the chalice, a pair of hands, lifted the chalice and then passed it to another pair of hands, they spiraled upward, looking actually like DNA in their configuration. This went on and on, but I was taken by the beauty of the hands (there seemed to be thousands of them), and the chalice and its gentle slow rising upward. Then at last a last pair of hands grasped the chalice, a different sort of hands, and raised the chalice into the Light….a very bright light, so bright that it woke me. It was 6:30 in the morning.
I don’t obsess about dreams. Most are just confused images, and then there are others that are clear. From time to time I get a dream like this and it seems to propel me through some sort of wall onto the other side. I think this dream helped me to deal with something that I could not understand, my pain, and gave me a vehicle to deal with it….the symbols where of course Catholic and Eucharistic, at least I believe so. I am amazed that after 41 years, I still remember this dream so profoundly, as if it happened yesterday. I have more than a few like that, and when I talk with others, they sometimes share some of their powerful dreams with me. I am not sure that it is always important to figure them out, but to simply allow them to do there work, or perhaps let us know what is happening, or has already happened, but has not reached everyday consciousness. I believe there is an ‘over-view’ and an ‘under-view’ of our lives that we are not aware of, but work on us all the time. I also believe that this process is personal, loving and seeking to bring us to inner healing and oneness. This process is a form of waking up, as well as dying to an imprisoned self created often out of confusion and pain and fear. It is a long process, this slow march towards freedom. Perhaps that is why I actually love aging, because of this inner thawing of my heart and soul that is slowly happen. It makes all the aging ‘stuff’ worth it. It is also part of the process.
I would like to add, that if there are those who don’t remember their dreams, that is ok as well of course, we are each different. Perhaps it is because I am so fragmented that I need dreams to give me some sort of idea, even if often cloudy, of what is going on. Stronger people probably don’t need dreams.-Br.MD
