3 dreams

In the first, Keith and i, aware of an impending tidal wave, sought out a room in the top floor of the highest building. There with others, we sat in false calm. i saw out the window, towering above the building, the white crest of the imminent flood contrasting against the dark night sky. A gasp escaped my throat, alerting the others, for which I felt guilty. I held a young boy in my lap and used all my will to convey a sense of calm as I pet his hair and kissed his forehead. With a loud roar and a blinding flash of fear, I braced myself for the hit.

In the second, our community of friends fell into some conflict and Keith and I seemed to draw out the unabashed contempt of others.

In the third, I saw a skunk approaching me. I was lying on my back and instinctively tried to curl into a ball to make myself unknown. As it came closer, I tried to block it from me with my feet. The skunk attempted to break through and come closer so I tried gently nudging it away with my toes. The simple gesture incited a violent reaction, and the skunk began to bight and claw at my feet.

DreamMoods.com/DreamDictionary

Tidal Wave
To see a tidal wave in your dream represents an overwhelming emotional issue that demands your attention. You may have been keeping your feelings and negative emotions bottled up inside for too long. On a positive note, the tidal wave symbolizes the clearing away of old habits. If you are carried away by the tidal wave, then it means that you are ready to make a brand new start in a new place.

Children

To save a child in your dream signifies your attempts to save a part of yourself from being destroyed.

Skunk
To see a skunk in your dream suggests that you are driving people away or turning them off. Alternatively, the dream indicates that your suppressed anger is on the verge of exploding. You are not expressing your true feelings even though you do not agree with a decision.

Cain and Chloe

It is November, and I am still unemployed. It is November, and there are 7 billion people on this planet. It is November, and snow already covers the ground. There is a ‘perfect storm’ of factors playing into our generation’s revival of small, intentional communities, and I feel the strong draw.

In our own community, we talk about Chris Martenson's Crash Course. It has become a frightening premonition for many of us, I think, and I myself had my first Crash Course-inspired nightmare the other night.

Martenson defines debt as a claim on future work. So, in my dream, China was collecting on its debt with human labor. The citizens of the United States were occupied in rotational work camps that, like seasonal immigration cycles, followed the country's weather patterns in agricultural and factorial work. Keith and I were separated from our dream children, who I remember very distinctly to have the names Cain and Chloe.

Because I have never considered those names for children, and because I love the idea of a collective consciousness accessible through dreams, I looked into these two names.

Chloe is Greek for "young green shoot", and Cain means "reed" in many traditions, or the hollow stem of a tall grass.

In Greek mythology, Chloe is raised by people that are not her parents and carried off by raiders from other nations. Fitting for a dream set in an occupied country. Separately, Chloe is another name for the Greek Goddess Demeter. To dream of Demeter, according to DreamMoods.com, is said to represent your maternal instinct and desire to provide for your dependents. You see, Demeter is the Goddess of the harvest, the fertility of the earth, and the seasons. She presides over the sanctity of marriage, the sacred law, and the cycle of life and death. I imagine it represents the part of me that is awakening to the limitations of the Earth and a growing anxiety of what awaits future generations.

In my mind, the name Cain immediately takes me to the story in Genesis. As Daniel Quinn tells the story, ancient Semitic herders would have heard the story of Cain killing Able to symbolize an old way of living being killed off to make way for the cultivation of the land. It is interesting that my growing awareness of environmental degradation as the crux of economic and political unworkability birthed a dream child named Cain.

I find it interesting that in my dream I had one child that was a green shoot, and another that was a hollow reed. I find it interesting that both have to do with a cultivation of the land. One embodies the fertility of the earth and the seasons, and upholds the sacred law of life and death. The other breaks that law and commits the first recorded murder, and it is more than the murder of a man; it marks the destruction of humanity's relationship with the natural order.

Dreaming of Dolphins

I have awoken frustrated the past few mornings. I sorely crave direction in my life, and hoped to find some guidance through my dreams. I awake, certain I have had a complex dream, with foggy memories of very symbolic figures, but am unable to piece them together.

Last night, I had a simple dream. I was swimming back and forth between two shores. I was trying to split my time between the very contrasting banks. I was nervous, because I hate the feeling of powerlessness in the ocean's waves.

Then, I noticed I was swimming with dolphins. Sometimes I rode them, sometimes they swam alongside me, as I shuttled back and forth between the beaches. I was comforted and invigorated.

According to my trusty DreamMoods.Com:

Dolphins

To see a dolphin in your dream, symbolizes spiritual guidance, intellect, mental attributes and emotional trust. The dream is usually an inspirational one, encouraging you to utilize your mind to its capacity and move upward in life. Alternatively, it suggests that a line of communication has been established between the conscious and unconscious aspects of yourself. Dolphins represent your willingness and ability to explore and navigate through your emotions.

To dream that you are riding a dolphin, represents your optimism and social altruism.

If only, DreamMoods.com, if only!

Two loves

I had another revealing dream.

I dreamt I was lying in bed, walking my eyes over the curves of the sheets.

Then I realized...this was not my bed, but my hometown.

And I knew it intimately.

I knew it completely. Every rise and fall, every veer and surge in the land.

I loved it, because it comforted me, sustained me, and possessed me,

and I it.

As I came to see the details,

the molehills of humanity in the hollows of this hallowed ground,

I began walking the streets of my city

as though they were the halls of my high school. I knew

everyone I passed.

I felt great warmth for each of them. And I worried, with them,

over their concerns. Health, financial, familial, what have you.

But despite our daily worries, there was security in our amity

and goodwill.

We were connected, and stronger for it.

Then an idea turned everything grey,

stuck somewhere between black and white.

I put my hands in my pockets and continued to walk the streets,

a little more bent, biting my lip as I chewed over the idea

The full potential of my two loves could not be reached together.

Inter-Is

Last night I had a series of complex dreams in the style of Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible.

There was a family that lived in the hollow of a mountain. Water flowed through the hollow but pooled in front of their home. The home was simple at times, otherwise decrepit. It smelt like dust and burnt wood. There were four children. An angry oldest child (13) who was sometimes a 'bully' and sometimes a 'trouble-maker', two younger boys (10 and 8) and a girl (6). There was a thin mother in a worn cotton dress that came down to her mid-calf. And then there was the father, an abusive man who I mostly only saw from afar. He was normally working or drinking.

In this dream, my conscious took turns inhabiting different bodies. In most dreams I observe scenes like a puppeteer. Hovering. Meddling. In this dream, I literally saw through the eyes of the different people I embodied. For example, when I was the six year old girl, I was walking behind my mom on a hill and noticed the bruises on her legs as the dress lifted with each step. My imagination met my eye level. I remember thinking how pretty the shapes of the bruises were, but how I didn't like something about them. Maybe the color. My imagination met my age level.

Most of the dream were scenes with overly simplistic plot, but deep emotion. I remember being the "thirteen year old bully", and sitting on the porch with the dad while it was raining. I remember these mixed emotions of fear and joy. I was anxious to be that close to the man, but exuberantly happy that he allowed me that close. In that mix of emotions, I became overly anxious about the rain flooding the house, the splash back from the porch dampening my clothes, and the noises of my siblings inside and how each overheard word made my father shift in his seat. I wanted to run in and 'pound some sense' into my siblings. I remember so much detail. The smell of the rain. The fog over the water. The sound of the man's weight on the chair as he rocked back and forth on the rotting floor boards. How his uneven whiskers moved as he smoked his pipe.

In a more dramatic scene, I remember being the ten year old boy and hearing my six year old sister scream, so I ran to the water and saw that my older brother was motionless at the bottom, caught in some seaweed or trash or something. So I dove in to try and pull him up, but I was too scared, and began frantically swimming towards the top. I saw my mom running towards the water, and I felt shame at not having my brother with me. She came splashing into the water, and became hysterical. I was afraid she would drown, and so I tried to pull her to shore, but I was so small compared to her, and she was treading water, holding me tightly. Later I dreamt the same scene, except I was the mother, horrified that I had lost my son. I swam out and saw that there was a rope around his neck, and realized that my husband had done this. I transitioned from this fear that I had lost my son, to this even deeper fear that immobilized me, and I clung to my ten-year-old. The dream was so strange, because when I was the ten year old, I saw something around my brothers neck, but assumed it was accidental. Any guilt or blame was on me. When I was the mother, I put things together differently.

What really struck me about this dream was that, every now and then, I was myself as a social worker, 'assessing' the family. After being several of the children, and after being the mother, suddenly I was coming to realizations like, "Mother is borderline MR...". Also, when I was the children, I felt scared, hungry, angry, cold, anxious, but never embarrassed. But suddenly when a child welfare worker was there, I remember being conscious that I was covered in dirt or poorly dressed. I remember feeling stupid, and worse, that my mom was stupid. And sometimes, depending on the child, I began to hate my mom.

I was the social worker, but not any more than I was the mom or the six year old. And yet, as the social worker, after having 'lived' as the mother and her children, I thought about how best to break up the sibling group in foster care placement. I was the social worker, not any more than I was the mom or the six year old, but as the social worker I detached and used the power inherent in my role, but without understanding those involved as I obviously had the ability to do. I was the social worker, not any more than I was the mom, but I didn't share my power. I had my own idea of what was best for the family, forgetting that I was the mom.

The stuff that dreams are made of

I have taken an interest in dreams. People spend eight hours a day sleeping (at least as I approach 30, that seems more reasonable), and I have to believe more comes from that time than rest and drool. I take it to be my most genuine processing time, free from pretense or deceit. By paying attention to my dreams, I awake to a part of myself too often clouded by daily drama, preoccupation, or pride.

I remember two dreams from the other night. In the first, I was plastering a cob house wall in a business suit. As explored in my last entry, I feel torn between upcoming career and life choices. Both the cob walls and fancy pants are a means to and end. I want to reform foster care and, by golly, business suits just might do the trick. I want to live intimately with friends, and as we all know, 'if you build it, they will come'. And yet, these two things seem at odds. I was getting plaster all over my outfit, and in an attempt to avoid dirtying my suit, I was doing a horrible job plastering the wall! Each precluded the other.

Dream #2: I had a bloody nose. That's about it. I looked it up on a website I'm a little embarassed to admit I frequent. This dream dictionary suggested that a bloody nose warns the dreamer of becoming overly involved in other's fights. The application of this wise counsel is astoundingly broad. I have been picking fights for my past self and my future self. I have been mediating arguments, unprompted, on behalf of my husband, my sisters, and my parents. Not to mention my recent meddling in the love-lives of others. Sometimes I am attempting to fill my long-standing role as peace keeper. Other times I am trying to explore new conflict styles. In either case, I feel 'beat up', leaving no relationship better than before.