Dreaming My Way Back
I still remember my first ever nightmare. I could have been any age between eight and twelve when I dreamt it.
I was walking along a marina in my hometown, near the water’s edge, wearing my grey skirt with a red pattern. Then all of a sudden I lost my balance and started falling into the sea. Or did I throw myself? Till this day I’m not sure which was it. If I did slip, I certainly — in my dream — didn’t panic. Instead, I just leaned into the space that opened up in front of me and let myself go. How beautiful, I think now, that image is. Yet at the time I woke up terrified.
The skirt was the key to unlocking the dream’s meaning. I used to strap it around my head and wear it as if it were my very own long hair. I’d walk around my bedroom, swaying my head from left to right loving the feeling of soft fabric brushing against my bare girl’s back.
Looking back on the dream now, I can easily see that it was an awakening dream — awakening of my sexuality, my feminine, my power. I’m sure I knew that at the time on a subconscious level. But it was the very knowing that scared me into waking up! In it was an offering of light I was to use to illuminate my journey through womanhood. But that light was too bright! Its scorching intensity a result of generations of denial — women not using it to decode their own version of Feminine — was too hot for my young hands to hold.
Consequently, the story of my becoming a woman has been a solitary and uncomfortable tale of endless battles between my inner “demons” fighting for Integration and my “virtues” repeatedly defeating them with incessant Rejections.
I wonder though what kind of woman I would have grown up to be if I knew how to shed the light on my girlhood dreams?
Fast forward, forty years later and you’ll find me dreamcatching my demony shadows unawares, bringing them out of the bizarre plotlines and strange landscapes and into my living day light.
Forty years too late? Can’t afford to think so. Fun? Sometimes. Mostly it’s actually quite hard work.
But the greatest promise this inner work holds for me is that it removes all mediators — coaches, counsellors and therapists of all kinds — and connects me directly to me. To my own wisdom. My own truth. The one I neglected the most.
It’s time to resurrect it.
PS In case dream & shadow work tickles you too, I highly recommend a book called Inner Work by Robert Johnson, a Jungian therapist. It’s an easy read with practical steps for interpreting dreams, plus a clear overview of Jung’s relevant work — on the shadow, the power of dreams and the wisdom of our unconscious.
