Blog o’ Gnosis

It happened again recently, that most rarefied of dreams: I am performing a beautiful new song spontaneously as I compose it. The dream wakes me up, and on waking I remember part of the haunting melody and lyrics, and am able to transcribe them.

There are many ways to tell what condition our psyches are in. Sleeping soundly and waking refreshed is a reliable indicator of all-around health and well-being. Of course the stress of our crazy schedules means that this doesn’t happen every night, but even if we achieve this only a few times a month we can probably assume that we’re doing okay.

If we want to do better than that, though, we have to spend some time tending to the soul’s needs. Thomas Moore has written beautifully about that in Care of the Soul and his other books. Our dreams point to this deep desire for soul nourishment in a number of ways. Sometimes we will dream of a favorite activity we’ve been neglecting in our daily life and the dream reminds us how much we love it and how good it makes us feel. If we are paying attention, it is always a good idea to take the hint and make time in our lives to do whatever that is.

I think of soul health in terms of what I call “indicator species.” In order for me to be healthy in mind and body, for instance, I have to write. If I let other work take over and neglect my writing, I will start to feel depressed. If I don’t catch on right away, I’ll soon have a dream in which I am either forced by circumstances to write, or am desperate to write and am being denied by some nefarious force. Either way, I wake up and know, “Uh-oh, I have been neglecting my writing. Time to get down to it.” Balancing my inner need to write with all the other demands on my time is just a fact of my life. I need to write like I need to breathe. You can probably think of something in your own life that functions in the same way.

Usually dream directives are not ultimatums. They don’t tell me, for instance, to write at the expense of everything else in my life. They want writing to be turned up in the mix of things I do, but they know I still need to spend time doing those other things. Dreams, and the soul, are not interested in us being perfect. But they want us to put out a reasonable effort, and to try and achieve what I think of as a “zone of success.”

Being in the “zone” for me looks like taking a deeper look at those moments of transition when I’ve completed one set of tasks, say packing up a bunch of music orders, and am ready to move on to another task. I could just look at the to-do lists scattered on my desk, close my eyes, and point (I have indeed used this method, with mixed results). But unless there is something on those lists that is an urgent priority, I can remember my dream and take a couple moments to consult the internal mix. Is there something I’ve been neglecting? Are all my indicator species relatively well-fed? If the answer is no, I can take an hour or even a half-hour and write, and come out of it feeling more centered and with far more energy than I had before.

This is not to say that satisfying those indicator species is always fun or easy. Writing is hard work, and I have devised several excellent strategies for being at my computer intending to write, yet cleverly managing to avoid it (reading other people’s blogs is high on my list). Sometimes I have to write about really hard stuff, and it is not at all pleasant. But dreams know the difference between mere intention and actual effort, and they reward us for the latter.

This is part of how I read my dream of a new song. Sometime this summer I realized I had come to the end of the stories in a series of predictive dreams from earlier in my life, and that I was at a very rare life turning point. It was time to show up, pay attention, and put some effort into starting the new stories right, so I did. My completely exhilarating dream of the beautiful new song feels like a “two-thumbs-up” sign from the dreamworld. Even if my new direction is still unclear to me and there are a lot of unknowns, I’m off to a good start.

Of course, there is also a bit of compass-pointing in the dream, too. Anyone who knows me probably knows that playing and writing music is my core indicator species. It’s one of those elusive beasts of the forest that only comes out when conditions are just right. This is true in my waking life, where making music is a luxury (and also a creative challenge I am skilled at avoiding). I can go without it for a while and think things are fine, but then I experience it again and think, “How could I have thought that breathing was enough?” Clearly breathing is not enough anymore, and even though things are going along just fine, this dream is poking me in the belly a bit, saying, “Here’s the beginnings of a new song. Now play it.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 14th, 2006 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Dreams, Music, Poetry, Spirit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.