Best Waking Dream of the Week (3)
I am a big fan of working with dream material during the daytime, through meditation, art, writing, or acting in ways which are suggested by the events of the dream. What many people don’t realize is that this process is just as rewarding using other people’s dream material as it is with our own.
Case in point: my good friend Kathy Taylor, who is a wonderful dreamworker and artist. As wife of the renowned Jeremy Taylor, Kathy has developed her own unique processes for working with dream material over the decades. Recently, someone posted a dream about zombies on the email list of the Marin Institute for Projective Dreamwork, Jeremy’s professional training school. The person wondered (among other things) what to make of zombies in dreams.
Kathy responded by talking about how she sat with the dreamer’s question, and what personal associations came out of that process for her. It is not only a deeply insightful look at possible meanings for zombies in dreams, but a wonderful description of how to stay with an elusive dream figure, bring it into our waking awareness and let it challenge and change us. Here are Kathy’s words (quoted with permission):
When I read the dream, the word “zombie” leapt like Halley’s Comet straight into my unconscious/conscious interface. My first question was “why?” (no answer) and my second was “what would it be like to be a zombie in a dream?”
I kept this question “up” for those odd moments when my brain was not otherwise occupied, and was annoyed by my inability to imagine what the inside of a zombie head/body would feel like.
I couldn’t let it go. I’ve learned that if I persist at something even though frustrated and annoyed, then it’s definitely something my whole being has decided is important. I was rewarded at 5:30 this morning by a few seconds of “zombie mind.” Imagine my surprise when what I sensed/saw/felt was what I have come to call my “weeping child.”
This is my shorthand for an archetypal figure I’ve been in touch with (always briefly) for the last 35 years. She is the “ugly,” stubborn, ferocious, tenacious kid who was, in my childhood, keeper of my soul flame; she is the child self who hung on by her fingernails in the hurricanes, determined to keep my core self intact. She was holding it together in the powerless world of a child.
Now that I’m 65, she still comes out now and then, even though I am no longer powerless. That’s when she might appear symbolically to be lurching around, aggressively defending her right to be, barging in inappropriately, engaging in endless “walking” (for which read repetitive behavior) because to do otherwise feels to her like death and not life.
In that moment this morning my response to seeing my zombie—weeping—child was a huge outpouring of love. I set a place at the table and invited her in. I counted on love being as powerful as fire to transform. By this point I had moved into waking dream and in that waking dream she came in and I embraced her in her rotting, stinking, tattered, bloody embodiment of strength, will, and courage, and she turned into a cat in my arms, smooshing against my face, then leaping down, running up the long dinner table at which sat 100s of clear and unclear images of different “me-s” and she jumped into a basket by the fire, becoming a very different kind of guardian of the soul flame.
It was a fascinating exercise in active imagination….I hope [we] can find a way to love those shadowy beings and have compassion for all those parts [of ourselves] who feel lost, “homeless,” and (like Pinocchio) longing to be “real.”
When people bring this kind of thoughtful process to working with a dream, it enriches everyone’s dreamwork experience. I can’t remember having any zombie dreams myself, but if I ever do I will keep in mind their transformative potential, and stay with the dream until I too sense that magical shift back into life.
June 9th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
YES. Every divination is appropriate for the diviner as well as the divinee. Mindfulness, thoughtfulness, paying attention, bring healing to all the worlds.
Very exciting post.
My dreams this week? CRAZY. That means I’m crazy, and if I told you about them, you’d connect with your own craziness, too. I won’t do that to you, I won’t!
Grateful this week to know that you’re out there doing this potent good work. Thanks, Anne.
June 30th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
Aaah, the celebration of our many I’s, each of whom serve a purpose for us, and yet some of whom are seldom appreciated for the value they bring. The brightness of this blog post and the description of the ‘weeping child’ are wonderful to read.