Ready or Not
Over the years a strange kind of lucidity has crept into my sleep and dreams, as I extract the meaning of a dream as I am dreaming it. Sometimes my dreams are merely explanatory elucidations of the previous dream.
A dream will often come and tell me what my dream meant.
Sometimes, when I wake up, I only remember what my dream told me that the dream meant, and the dream itself falls away into the darkness of forgetting like a husk with the seeds removed.
The message that I wake with lately is something like this:
I am being prepared or preparing myself. I am getting ready or getting trained.
How and for what I don’t know or can’t recall. But most nights I am put through my paces, practicing, readying, preparing, honing my skills, reviewing my training like a performer before opening night or a solider heading into battle.
Or in this week, a bride before a wedding:
I dream I am a bride, although I am already married, and the groom is unknown to me. I am wearing a fancy wedding dress laced with delicate gold threads. I have rented some shabby rooms in a boarding house to get ready. There are many children in the wedding party, a pile of giggly girls, and I am responsible for them all.
While I am getting myself ready, the little girls have squeezed all the toothpaste out of several large tubes, creating a small mountain of toothpaste on the side of the sink. I am already dressed, and I can’t really deal with this mess, so I will have to take care of it later.
I realize I haven’t allocated the time properly and we will have to vacate these rooms several hours before the event. I must take all the children to a park to “kill time” and I won’t be able to stay tidy and composed. I will arrive at the ritual sweaty, messy, frantic, and scattered.
New commitments that I don’t feel ready for or can’t quite prepare for.
Sometimes these dreams have some inflation or grandiosity attached to them, as if I am being prepared for some significant task I must perform for the sake of all humanity, some important chain of events I am supposed to initiate or influence or contribute to. Some prophetic message I am supposed to convey.
Sometimes I wake imagining it is about some “big break” heading my way (although I have no need or desire for one). Sometimes I wake thinking that my dreams are initiating me into a new role – as an elder, teacher, writer, or leader – and that I feel insufficiently prepared for such responsibilities.
Other days I consciously reject the felt sensation entirely. How ridiculous. I am an ambition-less almost sixty-year-old woman, in a peaceful détente with a bizarre cancer, in a pandemic, in a nation facing fascistic collapse on a planet in the throes of climate destabilization. There is no glorious or important task ahead, other than the work I have right in front of me: Parenting the now young adults that live in my home, caring for those who find their way onto my caseload or into my groups.
On more vulnerable days I suspect that the “big event” I am getting ready for is death itself, however far or near it may be. I remember that any day, at any moment, I could learn that my body has jump started its dying process once more. Maybe I am just spending my nights getting ready for the Big Goodbye, and whatever follows (or doesn’t follow) on the heels of that.
The next night’s dream is a dream about the bride dream:
I dream of words spoken in the dark into my mind’s ear, as I sleep.
“You won’t be ready, but no one ever is. No one ever feels ready. You are in the company an enormous crowd of souls who didn’t feel ready for their assignment either. But it comes, and it all unfolds, and you will rise to it like all the others before you.
You will rise to the challenge before you and perform the tasks required of you joyfully and with your whole heart. It doesn’t matter if you are a mess.
The bride is never ready for the bridegroom”
And the truth is this, consciously, in the day light, I am not preparing for, or seeking out any “big event” at all. I just do my own little weird thing and wait and see what comes, and what goes. Some seeds fall by the wayside, some are eaten by birds, and some take root and bear fruit. Occasionally an opportunity arrives at my door that appeals to me because it isn’t particularly disruptive. Other days opportunities knock that make me feel exhausted or demand too much of me for incentives that don’t motivate me.
And I suspect the real event that I am never quite ready for is the chance to live life in the present – attentive, aware, grateful, exactly as it is, mess and all, without having to “get ready” in any way for all that is already here and now.
