A lesson in time — the eternal youth and the wise crone
Sometimes the goal is to drop the “I” from all your sentences. To identify less and less with your self or your sex or your station in life. And sometimes there is a need to do the polar opposite of that — to hold on to our form in a closed fist, to re-tell our personal myth over and over again, drop roots into the earth so our spirits don’t float away. I try to let go and hold at the same time. I am a woman with aspects of all different ages and genders within me. In my visions, I ring the church bell of my cathedral and I call them all home.
Night dream, October 22, 2022
The small boy within me dives into a cenote, but is unable to climb back out. He waits patiently for me to save him.
I’m scared, I say, I don’t know how to swim. But I jump in anyway.
This is the entrance to my underworld.
There is no way out, except for a spiraling tower that belongs to the wise crone within me. It’s locked. She has the passcode, but she can’t remember it in her old age.
The small boy and I know we will eventually become this older woman as time passes, bringing along the memory of the code.
All we can do is patiently wait.
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.
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.