As we learn to recognized images and to allow them to teach us their ways of imagining, we will discover that each of our actions, feelings, perceptions and thoughts can be used to approach the imaginal… and that, indeed, our attentions to the imaginal movements of daily life can enrich and deepen our connection to that life. ~ Waking Dreams by Mary M. Watkins
The texts I am sitting with: Waking Dreams by Mary M. Watkins (whose work has guided my own so deeply although I have never met her. It would be a dream to meet her. Or at least thank her. I think I may finally allow that persistent fantasy to manifest as action.) I want to talk about collective dreaming and the way that our politics, the state of the world, the dreams of supremacy, of colonization, domination, and exploitation are co-constructed waking-dreams that began with night dreams and rise and fall from consciousness, and drive the hoards in one direction or another, and led us to co-create the reality we are now living in, exactly as it is. I believe we deserve to dream better, healing dreams that can help us live right-sized on the earth and with each other. And that the way ahead requires us to crowd-dream liberating sacred dreams and let them help show us the way. I’m not going to get all of that done in one essay. But I’m going to start From my dream journal yesterday: There is a part of me that only feels whole, that only feels well, when I have a fresh, pertinent image, lesson or a talisman from a dream to carry with me as I wander from one thing to the next. A brief glimpse of a dream. And then a hypnogogic image. and the action it initiated:
We dream while we sleep. Some of us recollect our dreams and some don’t. Of those that remember – some think they are nonsense, and some don’t. Of those that do consider their dream lives at all, some think they are boring and some don’t. Of those that find them interesting some think that they are an extension of our lived realities, an embodied sensory system as vital as scent or sight or hearing. And some think they have no impact or value to the material world at all. We also dream while we are awake. And like it or not, we regularly carry our dreams - waking or sleeping - into waking life, perhaps more so if we don’t remember them, refuse to pay attention or reject their influence and revelations. We don’t need to “interpret them” – we just need to sit with open curiosity and let them do their work. We day-dream, fantasize, and imagine our way through pleasant and unpleasant experiences every day. We pray, we meditate, we contemplate. We go mad, we fall into stories and mythologies, we find and lose our central spot. We publish books and make art. We practice religions, start businesses, lift up or tear down our idols and create power structures all first from an imaginal space. Dreams do many things, and one thing they do is serve as incubation ground for whatever bright idea we have next, and what we might make “real”, and whatever might then transform the world. They are the pre-public face of many of our eventual actions. The dream-piece, nearly forgotten, recalled at the last moment: I am someone else, an unknown woman putting the moon bracelet I got for my mother for Christmas one year, on someone else’s extended left wrist. A younger faceless woman I don’t know who she is. I don’t know who I am. “Do you want to wear the moon facing you? Or facing outward for protection?” say as I fasten it around her left wrist facing outward. I wonder if the moon was facing up her arm if it would grant her power – but those aren’t the words that were spoken. I must want her to have protection.
Johnny Appleseed must have dreamed sleeping and waking of a nation covered in apple orchards and swimming in hard cider before setting out to seed nurseries up and down the countryside. And he was living out a dream that was not his alone, a Swedenborgian dream of living a regenerated life of usefulness and love, aided by angels, tempted by evil spirits, holding the visions and memories of an entire spirit-society that traveled with him on his holy mission. Our dreams are personal, and collective. They are about how the world impacts us and how we might impact the world. The dreams we dream aloud together magnify and shape the dreams we experience in private and the reverse is true too. The dream quickly slides into a liminal state, where I am no longer dreaming I am partly awake, I hear the dogs shaking and scratching, their tags clinking but I am also planning my day, and I see myself finding my mother’s moon bracelet, and removing a sharp stone charm and it’s connecting links that probably prevented her from wearing it much, and stops me too. I repair the links and see that it now fits perfectly. Why am I mentally putting this task on my schedule for the day? Oh, that tiny bit of a dream…
Our dreaming mind operates autonomously, autonomically, which is perhaps why so many people who like to think of themselves as in control must devalue them so contemptuously. But even these will catch themselves in a quiet moment in the middle of an imaginal argument with someone they haven’t spoken to in months, the conversation starting before their attention even walked into the room. Our collective dreams unfold like the tides too, too, flowing like waves that rise and fall, like viral social media post. But most people I encounter don’t want to think about any of this. How we feel about autonomous imaginal process is, in Watkin’s view “all to some degree dependent on how the viewer feels about a ghost in the attic…” If one likes a clean house with one master the unconscious is a threat and a nuisance…
If we can’t drive it away then we might decide “to get to know” this spirit and come to some peaceful, if begrudging terms with it. The most desirable contact for us is the one where after some negotiation we read an agreement that can be kept for years, thereby placing the ghost in a part of the house where we can forget about it… One may feel that occasional trips upstairs are necessary, but by no means is he invited to dine at our table and sleep in our beds. The ghost is heard rumbling upstairs only occasionally. There is yet another way. It lies in getting to know that ghost. The ghost is invited to stay not simply because we feel we have no choice about it, but because there is something in him which we know is ours – not in the sense of possessing him, but of our being related to him in a way that is hard to explain
After I wake and feed the dogs and make my tea: I decide to find the bracelet in stashed in the bathroom drawer. I grab it and take it downstairs. I know just where the drawer is with the needle nose plyers that I will need to reopen, remove, and reclose the uncomfortable stone charm with its silver links. It takes time and is fiddly work. When I finish, I put it on my left wrist, and it fit perfectly, and no longer caught on things. I don’t usually wear bracelets on my left wrist because my watch is there, but when I tried it on my right wrist it felt wrong and unnecessarily rebellious, so I settled on my left wrist. Moon facing out. “For protection” the dream said. Protection from what? I wonder. But that thought quickly passes and the protective moon on my wrist will travel with me for a time. Until I need power.
Or until another dream conversation shows up when it is time for a new idea to travel with me like a charm, like a stone in my pocket, like a ghost that is somehow mine. Like the ghosts who live among and between us, like relatives. The ghosts that belong to us in a way that is hard to explain.
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