A letter from home

Dreams are like a letter from home, from a deep place in the psyche that has a picture of yourself, of your life, of your psychic state of the moment that you may not be able to see just from your own ego-consciousness alone. And this way, dreams save people from blindness, from blundering into walls, from failing to sense or to see something important. The dream, in that sense, tells a story, a story that is not completely obvious in daylight, but becomes very clear to us when we’re asleep at night and it unravels itself all before us while we’re dreaming.

-Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, The Beginner’s Guide to Dream Interpretation

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Two Sundays ago, V and I decided to separate. The last two nights, I’ve had emotionally charged dreams about the breakup and V.

I’ve been waking up from the dreams feeling intense anger and grief. Last night, I cried myself back to sleep after the first of two dreams about him. In Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, Toko-pa Turner writes:

While learning to understand the language of dreams is an art form that takes years to master, there is one question that can almost always take you into the heart of a dream’s meaning: “What is the strongest feeling in my dreams?” While so many aspects of our dreams are dressed in symbol and metaphor, feelings are never disguised. They are honest representations of the feelings you are having or not having in waking life.”¹

These dreams have been a pressure point for moving the energy through me, “making compassionate encounter with [my] difficult feelings until they reveal their hidden intelligence.”² So, I surrender to the hot tears and wringing of my heart, asking, “What would you like me to know? What would you like to teach me?”

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The following is a retelling of the second of two dreams I had about V last night:

A large group of us are in an academic building, sitting and listening to something like a lecture. I left because I needed to wash up and head somewhere else. I went to my ex-partner’s, dorm room to use his shower. I hear him walk into the room so I gently call out with a tinge of sadness, to let him know I’m in the shower. He opens the shower door with this goofy grin on his face because he’s happy to see me. Standing in the tiled bathroom with nothing but a shirt on, I tell him they can see me, pointing the line of people in the hallway. He doesn’t regard them.

Now I’m in the dorm room and say I should go, but we’re just standing in the middle of the room looking into each others’ eyes. I notice a shiny, small silver-disc pendant hanging from his necklace. His body gets taller and his chest becomes broad and muscular. I’m aware that he is now a Samoan and he starts to hum a Hawaiian lullaby to me as I wrap my arms around his neck while continuing to look up at him. He’s looking down at me as I relish in the warm and gentle energy; I feel literally and emotionally held by him. An older female friend, P, who has a strong maternal energy gently nudges us towards the door and tells us to go be together. We both walk through the door into the hallway of people walking by.

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In The Beginner’s Guide to Dream Interpretation, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés acknowledges there are many ways to interpret dreams. Then shares her psychoanalytic method:

1. Record your dream. Make it precise and clear, as much as possible.

2. Make a list of all the nouns in the dreams - person, place, or thing.

3. For each noun, write down any personal association - images, ideas, feelings, thoughts.

4. Go back and read your dream aloud. Except this time, in place of the noun, read it with the association.

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Here is a list of all the nouns from the dream I recounted above, and my personal associations with each:

• academic building: institutional oppression of the power of the feminine

• me: young feminine energy, Maiden energy - a little girl, beginning phase of a woman’s life³

• V’s college dorm room: attachment to the patriarchal narrative that a ‘prince’ will save me

• shower: cleansing, removing unwanted energy

• V: young masculine energy

• silver-disc pendant necklace: devotion, remembrance

• Samoan: source of my relationship to the Salish Sea, an inland sea connected to the Pacific Ocean, who I visit regularly for cold plunges and offer her gifts of song and flowers; offspring of the Pacific Ocean, our Mother Water, a facet of The Great Mother; healthy and mature masculine energy

• P: mature feminine energy, Mother energy

• door: threshold, the end of one thing and the beginning of another

• hallway of people: life in motion

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This is a retelling of my dream, replacing the nouns with my associations, and perceiving each character as a facet of myself:

My social conditioning as a female from my Korean heritage and U.S. culture has me continue to rely only on the masculine for resources. However, something in me told me to go cleanse myself of the indoctrination I was mindlessly sitting through.

V is my inner-young masculine energy. My boyish enthusiasm is brought on by finding this wounded inner-feminine having to rely on my young inner-masculine in some way; this confirms the social conditioning of feminine oppression. Meanwhile, I am also lacking awareness of what my feminine needs may be in the moment, carelessly exposing my vulnerability, while my young inner-masculine remains ignorant to the impact of self-centered actions.

Some source of devotional remembrance brings on a transformation from an immature masculine energy into a healed and mature masculine energy, which is nourished by the presence of the Mother energy, grounded in The Great Mother. My Maiden energy is feeling nurtured and healed by this mature masculine energy.

My inner-Mother let’s me know that I am ready to bring into unity my maturing masculine energy with my maturing feminine energy. She gives me her blessing by guiding me away from what I was living in and towards teeming Life that is ready to receive me in my healing, healthier wholeness.

[Image: The Korean Great Mother, Grandmother Mago, created with Gemini]

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And this is why we follow our dreams, this is why we want to know what they mean. Because, they encourage us. They break open our narrowness of vision. They open our tightness of heart. Dreams make us as large as we really are. They give us the world on the terms of our wholeness, rather than on the terms of our woundedness or our smallness. So, we have a longing to listen, in order to be made whole. And when we follow our dreams, and this is most important, we can leave a better world behind, because we give others permission to also follow an interior prophet, an interior storyteller, an interior teacher, who can make others whole as well.

So may you have dreams that save you from yourself.
And I wish you dreams that take you far into mysteries.
And I wish you dreams that show you the things that you need to see to help you.
And I wish you dreams that will please your heart and comfort you.
And I wish you dreams, especially, that are direct, sweet, loving letters from home.⁴

1. Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home by Toko-pa Turner, pp 107-108

2. Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home by Toko-pa Turner, pp. 108-109

3. Maiden to Mother: Unlocking Our Archetypal Journey into the Mature Feminine by Sarah Durham Wilson, p. 6

4. The Beginner’s Guide to Dream Interpretation by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés