I call this way of mindfully being with a dream 'Pilgrimage and Presence.' When dreams come, they are pilgrims in our land. When we return the visit, we are pilgrims in theirs. Pilgrims are not tourists. Tourists go to see the sights. Pilgrims go to experience the place. Tourists go and document their presence. Pilgrims go to Be Present. And since a dream is also a present ... its very essence is Presence. As Marshall Rosenberg writes, "Empathy is giving the gift of our Presence." To be present to a dream, then, is to be in empathic engagement with it, to be willing to experience it from its point of view. To be a pilgrim with a dream is to be willing to walk side by side with it, with no expectations. Letting go of these expectations is challenging. It is difficult not to impose a structure on a dream, not to demand that it use our guidebook. We don't want to feel lost.
As dream pilgrims, we may go deep into the unknown, or only as far as the corner. We may have to wait for hours to get a flight, or we may be rushed onto the first bus that comes along even if it isn't the one we wanted to take. On dream pilgrimages, we miss connections as often as we make them; we take unusual modes of transportation; we wander around in circles as often as we find our way; we meet kind strangers and frightful ones; we struggle to make ourselves understood or are surprised to discover that we know the language. Guides appear out of nowhere, and disappear just as quickly. Sometimes they pick-pocket all our money; sometimes they leave us with even more. We eat unusual foods, make new friends and run into old ones in places we would never expect. Nothing is ever quite what it seems, and rarely what we expect.
Tourists and business travelers find such unpredictability annoying, at best, and want to manage it. The managing of it gives rise to entitlement as the ego makes demands. Pilgrims learn to treasure the unpredictability and to be present to it with wonder.
How to become a Dream Pilgrim yourself, then? There are a variety of dream theories and theorists, schools and methods. There are programs. There are individual guides. And there are now literally hundreds of books and thousands of articles on dreams and the symbolic world. Familiarizing yourself with the general lay of the land and reading about other people's approaches and experiences can be enlightening, entertaining, and helpful. But with all the information available, it's easy to get overloaded. It's even easier to become an armchair traveler. Some of the guidebooks are richly imaginative and inviting; some are solidly practical and well grounded; a few gems are both. Your personality and needs will help you determine which are best for you. However, caution is in order because, as Jill Mellick so eloquently puts it, not all books are "rooted in experience and wisdom." Neither are all guides. Many have one, but lack the other. Further, dream theory and research is fraught with contradiction. Many theorists, scholars and authors are very well educated, and very persuasive; they argue their points of view well, and it is easy to become enthralled by a person or an approach and forget that no one can interpret our dreams for us, tell us what they mean, or tell us they mean nothing.
Like many Westerners, my initial training was based primarily on the work of the physician-psychologist C.G. Jung, and I am indebted to Jung for the depth and richness of his work. Most of all, I appreciate the lively curiosity he brought to his research and particularly to dreams. I also appreciate his willingness to be wrong. Even he wasn't wedded to his own ideas. He expanded and refined his thinking about the unconscious many times during his life, and he believed that we should be ready at any moment to construct an entirely new theory of dreams. He also believed that the exploration of the Self was not for the "frivolous-minded and immature," nor for "intellectualists and rationalists." He was writing of the use of the I Ching but I believe his warning is appropriate to anyone undertaking a pilgrimage of the soul, of which dreamwork may play a part. I do not believe he was suggesting we must undertake the endeavor with lugubrious solemnity, nor alternatively give up the hard-won discrimination which brings us to wisdom and maturity. Rather, I believe he was speaking to the fact that the exploration itself requires a willingness to be available to the Divine Presence in the same way that the Divine Presence is available to us.
I have learned much and I continue to learn much from him and others who have followed and expanded on his many insights. But I also try to remember that Jung did not invent dreamwork. Neither did Freud. Neither did the prophet Daniel, or the Australian aborigines, or the First People, or the Senoi, or any other human being or human culture. Dreams invented dreamwork. And every culture, in every age, has in one way or another attended to their world. Each method, each school, each theory and approach has something to offer. Getting stuck in one point of view can not only be short-sighted, it can deprive us of a dream's Presence. And the dream, in turn, is then deprived of our Presence.
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