Things that do not belong to me
For the past month, I’ve been dreaming a lot about things that don’t belong to me — things like houses, lovers, jewelry. I covet them. I steal them. I fall in love with them. But in the end I wake up with none of it.
When I was a child, I would sometimes burst into tears upon waking, because the really cool thing I found in a dream did not exist. I still remember how badly I wanted those x-ray glasses, or the treasure chest filled with gold, or that fallen star gleaming in my hand.
I don’t cry about that anymore. As an adult I learned the hard way that not every beautiful thing belongs to me. “Sometimes the grown-up thing to do is ooh & ahh & walk away.”
But there are dream gifts that you can pull into real life. They come in the form of words, or images or in the spatial dimensions of an emotion.
I pay closest attention to Full Moon dreams, New Moon dreams, dreams while traveling or menstruating, birthday dreams, and even dreams on holidays can carry gifts.
Last night’s Full Moon dream had edges.
I found myself at an open house. As I walked through, each room was more beautiful and extravagant than the last. Exalted ceilings, ornate wood, gilded mouldings, stained glass. There were murals and mosaics and unearthed marble tile that had been restored. All the colors were rich and lustrous, and my heart ached to be bathed in their light.
I knew I could never own this house. It wasn’t for sale. They were only looking for a subletter, anyway. Someone who would live in the smallest room, without a view, and remain fairly unknown. There would be no lease or binding contract. No proof that I ever belonged there.
At the end of the dream, I stood there in the largest room — a Turkish-style bath — staring at the fairy-tale like murals. So much history that I was not a part of, so much future that I would never know. And I cried. Not like a child. Not because I couldn’t have something beautiful. I cried because I loved it anyway. I cried because it existed, and I appreciated it, and I would never forget it. And it didn’t matter who would live in this house or own it, I was here now, grounded in the moment, surrounded by walls that I loved — walls that I would let keep me forever.
Even after I awoke, I was still within those walls. That is the gift I brought back with me. My heart had a new shape — as if the dream had tugged on its edges and stretched it out further into the world. A new appreciation for all the beautiful things that will never belong to me, but that I get to see and love anyway.
Updated: Dreaming as a technology
Dream imagery: Mental Clouds
Dreaming is a technology. Every night I become more adept at translating the language (symbols) of dreams.
On March 8, I dreamed someone who loved me hired a skywriter to write my name in the night sky in neon light, but there was so much cloud coverage that I could barely see it.
When I woke up, I had a knowing that the clouds were my thoughts getting in the way. My mental body was building a wall between love and me. Suddenly, so many other dreams from before made sense!
From Symbolic and the Real by Ira Progoff:
If the dream goes unheeded, or if it is not understood, and if its subject matter remains important, the dream will usually be repeated, either with the same or with equivalent symbols. It seems that if an important part of the process taking place in the depths of the psyche is not recognized on the conscious level so that the person cannot cooperate with it and draw it forward in the acts of his life, the process of growth is stymied. The individual then remains in a condition of self-stalemate until he learns to recognize the tendency of his inner life and manages to bring his outer life into accord with it.
I thought about the other coded symbols I had unlocked (specific to me or universal):
Water/Waves/Ocean — subconscious, different levels of consciousness or what is repressed.
Landscapes/Cities — usually depicts the state/shape/territory of my heart.
Movement/Transportation/Airplanes/Buses — journeys, mental/subconscious/emotional or otherwise.
Spaces/Rooms/Furniture — usually calls for rearranging of mental structures. perspective shifting. mental baggage.
Clouds — my thoughts, a system of intelligence that differs from my intuition or emotional body.
Dream imagery does what self-help books cannot do.
How dream imagery works for me: First it is the image, then the understanding or knowing of what the image represents, followed by the emotion that’s anchored to the dream which makes it so meaningful and has the power to transform something inside of me.
UPDATE:
El Candado (the Spanish word for padlock) is a provoker-symbol in dreams. It show me doors I’ve neglected to lock or unlock. Sometimes there is an intruder, other times I’ve locked someone out when they needed to be let in.
Dream language will never be entirely translatable — but the energy from dreams is what we need to carry with us in our waking lives.
When I dream of El Candado and wake up, I ask myself throughout the day: who I am locking out or what I am letting in?
Every dream has a request, and when I dream of El Candado, it is asking me to pay attention to my emotional boundaries and physical space. So I do exactly that.
Landscapes and movements as symbols
Last night around 1AM, I woke up from a dream about Oakland. The cities and towns you live in have energies and histories and destinies, just like we do. I found myself there when I was at the lowest point in my consciousness. Oakland cradled me when no one else cared.
My apartments were shit holes. I was chased, cussed at or threatened everyday. I listened to a man get stabbed and bleed out right underneath my window. I heard my neighbor — a young mother and sex worker — get bargained down to a ten dollar blow job. My best friend’s car riddled with gun shots. My building raided by the FBI. West Oakland was a ring of Dante’s Inferno, but it was my lovely hell.
The ley lines of cities map your heart. I was poor. I was broken. I was depressed. There were no pretenses. I was sad and so was everyone else around me, and I found solace in that.
In last night’s dream, I parked my car at the top of the highest hill in Oakland, got out and set off on foot to search for my love. The town became the edge of a cliff. There was no railing, just a single-track trail. I almost slipped twice, and I was scared, but I kept going. Eventually, I hit a chain-link fence and remembered how I tore my wrist open climbing one just like it when I was 8, so I chickened-out and turn back toward my car. At that moment, I woke up.
A love note I wrote in 2010, while living in Oakland.
Some dream symbolism is so blatantly obvious it slaps you in the face. I still have chain-link fences posted up in my heart. It keeps me from loving the way I want to love. I need to tear those fuckers down.
Our personal journeys to evolve/ascend/bloom-then-wither-gracefully unfold like archetypes and legends and myths. The key to discovering what story you might be living, and obstacles you are to overcome, is to learn your symbols and patterns and rhythms. There has been movement since the beginning.
The ways we protect our hearts
The ways we protect our hearts. “He took certain liberties to protect his heart.” Only in costumes, only comedies, only short plays. But then he said we could wear whatever we wanted to wear on stage, and write our own lines, and as he told us his new plan for our show, his whole face lit up and I thought I saw God in the room.
Answer all your self questions or else they float there like your lost bodies
The younger version of me could not be pulled through the dimension. Her skeletal frame was frozen and split and hanging from a branch. Her consciousness could not translate. I was sad but I accepted it. What else could I do? Answer the question, they say. Answer all your self questions or else they float there like your lost bodies. The girl drops from the tree as an egg 🥚. I bend in between the worlds to pick myself up. The egg is glowing. Obviously I’m fertile. A man is speaking on a PA system. I only hear the words … “Come be …. Your future is bright.”
A still-frame from a dream
I’m out in the backyard of a strange home that is my home. The sky is dim, like a French noir film. There is a little girl bathing in a kiddie pool. She is not mine, but she is an aspect of me — the young, feminine psyche baptizing herself in the shallow end of her subconscious. I look up and see an inflatable pool toy in the shape of a butterfly floating across the sky. It is colorful and striking against the grey light. The butterfly is both the spirit and the psyche and it belongs to me. It has broken free and glides across the forefront of my mind and thoughts. I reach for my phone to take a picture. I knew it would make a beautiful picture.
Claudia, The Growler
Three nights ago (02-08-2022), I felt embarrassed in a dream. The polar opposite of this dream experience:
Another version of me resurfaced from The Wild. She was on the news, and word had gotten around that she was me, and she was called Claudia, The Growler.
A Growler is someone who one day leaves behind their life and recedes into the wild to go crazy in peace. My mother had wanted to be a Growler too. (This is what I knew to be true in the dream).
Apparently, she had been in exile. I was embarrassed because now everyone knew that this Claudia existed, without ethos or etiquette. And that whoever I had become in the past 37 years would be replaced by this wild woman. Then I woke up.
I immediately thought of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the mother figure to all wild women. I went back into the book “Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype” and searched for solace and clarity. What I found was a manifesto and a newfound responsibility for my life and self:
The things that have been lost to women for centuries can be found again by following the shadows they cast. And make a candle to Guadalupe, for these lost and stolen treasures still cast shadows across our nightdreams and in our imaginal daydreams and in old, old stories, in poetry, and in any inspired moment. Women across the world—your mother, my mother, you and I, your sister, your friend, our daughters, all the tribes of women not yet met—we all dream what is lost, what next must rise from the unconscious. We all dream the same dreams worldwide. We are never without the map. We are never without each other. We unite through our dreams.
Dreams are compensatory, they provide a mirror into the deep unconscious most often reflecting what is lost, and, what is yet needed for correction and balance. Through dreams, the unconscious constantly produces teaching images. So, like a fabled lost continent, the wild dreamland rises out of our sleeping bodies, rises steaming and streaming to create a sheltering motherland over all of us. This is the continent of our knowing. It is the land of our Self.
And this is what we dream: We dream the archetype of Wild Woman, we dream of reunion. And we are born and reborn from this dream every day and create from its energy all during the daytime. We are born and reborn night after night from this same wild dream, and we return to daylight grasping a coarse hair, the soles of our feet black with damp earth, our hair smelling like ocean, or forest or cook fire.
It is from that land that we step into our day clothes, our day lives. We travel from that wildish place in order to sit before the computer, in front of the cook pot, before the window, in front of the teacher, the book, the customer. We breathe the wild into our corporate work, our business creations, our decisions, our art, the work of our hands and hearts, our politics, spirituality, plans, homelife, education, industry, foreign affairs, freedoms, rights, and duties. The wild feminine is not only sustainable in all worlds; it sustains all worlds.
Let us admit it. We women are building a motherland; each with her own plot of soil eked from a night of dreams, a day of work. We are spreading this soil in larger and larger circles, slowly, slowly. One day it will be a continuous land, a resurrected land come back from the dead. Munda de la Madre, psychic motherworld, coexisting and coequal with all other worlds. This world is being made from our lives, our cries, our laughter, our bones. It is a world worth making, a world worth living in, a world in which there is a prevailing and decent wild sanity.
The imagery of spreading the soil of my psyche in larger and larger circles until it becomes a continuous land, resurrected from the dead, is the same imagery as last week’s resurfaced audio. The Universe confirms your journey over and over and over again until you pay it attention.
I can’t be embarrassed or ignore Claudia, The Growler. I know the answer is to not feel embarrassed, and to instead wear her like my soul. She’s returned from exile. She wants to live beside me. I breathe her wild and it infuses everything I do.
The Mandrake Man Dance
I held on to that space between wake and sleep and these mandrake-like creatures slid out of the trees and a did a dance for me. They introduced themselves as “tree men” and that’s why I call it the Mandrake Man Dance.
The Legacy House
n. a property that has maintained its historical and/or cultural significance over multiple generations.
My “legacy house” was run-down and boarded up. I walked a long way in the dream realm just to stand guard in front of the house and protect it.
Squatters had broken in and ruined all the plumbing and stolen all the copper. Nothing worked inside and it was unlivable. But still, I stood guard.
I knew my family had forgotten this house. They no longer stopped by for their shifts.
I wanted to gut the place, pay for someone to come and haul all the trash away. But then I was told, “It’s not your responsibility to clean up your family’s mess. They can help too.”
This was never just my house. It has gone to shit, but I am not responsible for protecting or preserving it.
Then I woke up.
The Catfish Museum and All Points of Possibility
Catfish: Points of Possibilities created by AI Art Machine
I am given a tour of an underground water museum. The tour guide takes me to the catfish exhibit. I see a catfish swimming toward me and I see it’s skeleton and how it forms and grows.
I can see sound waves and the potential of energy before it is “activated” in the water. The potentials appear as dots or points. I see the catfish navigate all the possibilities at once.
A propeller appears in the exhibit and it is churning my subconscious, like the deep waters.
At the end of the tour the guide gives me a jack-in-box toy made out of paper, but instead of a jester it is a catfish that pops out. I ask a lot of questions and the guide pawns me off to the exhibit programmer who is disinterested in telling me more. He mumbles something and turns his back toward his computer.
I take my folder of informational pamphlets and my paper catfish-in-the-box and I say I am ready to leave. This dream is an invitation to see the potentials of my life and desires.
All roads lead back to yourself
In dreaming life I pulled a tarot card. I saw myself in a sacred circle surrounded by other versions of myself pointing what felt like staves/wands/arrows. At first I felt cornered — was this something to ward off?
No, my subconscious interpreter said.
This card means that you are never worried about a missed chance. These are all versions of you existing after each road taken. Opportunity after opportunity will continue to arise. All roads lead back to yourself. You are never lost.
10 of Arrows
All roads lead back to yourself
“For all the supernatural lust in your eyes: BELIEVE”
Dream Journal, August 2, 2011
Disclaimer: I was 27 when I had this dream. I feel like anything written or experienced in your twenties should have a disclaimer.
I was walking the streets of San Francisco, sometimes it was Oakland. Irrelevant though, because it was acting more like an old lover. Acting as if it had forgotten me, never loved me, moved on to better things. Still, I stepped onto every curb and turned every corner trying to remember what drew me to fall in love in the first place. There was a boy, like there always is, and at every crosswalk we met. I tried walking in front of him, tried leaving him behind like so many had done to me before, but somehow we kept crossing paths. My destination/destiny became a broken-down bookstore where Spacewaves was performing. Suddenly, I knew his name was Camus and that he was their new drummer. I said, “Fine. You can have me.” Then, I dragged him into the bathroom and made out with him, like I was drunk, but I wasn’t. Not even on love, I don’t think. I left him there and as I walking out, a stranger with an Indian accent, stopped me and said, “Don't be afraid of Camus. Rule him the perversion in your life. For all the supernatural lust in your eyes: BELIEVE.”
Note: When the Indian stranger said “perversion” he also said “purpose,” like at the same time.