Chapter 1 |
Chapter 2 (Excerpt):
What Does the Dream Want? Interpretations, Appreciations, & Enactments It is hard to know how to approach what the writer Jorge Luis Borges called "the incoherent and vertiginous matter dreams are made of." We want clarity, yet dreams often taunt us, obscuring their meaning with a sort of all-purpose murk. Why is it that our dreams are so often glimpsed through a glass darkly? Why not come out and just tell us what they want to say? Why not speak in blunt prose instead of allusive poetry? chisel their verities on granite, instead of writing letters in the sand? We often speak of a dream in terms of a mystery, something to be solved by sifting through clues and gathering evidence. And many dreams are artfully woven webs; puzzleboxes jam-packed with symbols and puns; tricky testimony, filled with parallel narrative twists, double-axle turns, and triple-gainer subplots. A certain amount of detective-work is required if we're to have success making sense of these marvelous constructions. But we also must remember that "success" and "making sense" are not always The word “mystery” comes from the Greek myein, "to shut the eyes." Here is pithy instruction for dreamwork. To shut the eyes is to withdraw from the outer world and open to the inner senses; to offer the hidden world a screen on which to project itself. "What you see with your eyes shut," said the Lakota sage Lame Deer, "is what counts." Myein also had the meaning of an initiation into the sacred rites. Just as Greek seekers of the Elusinian cult were required to symbolically drink of the river of Lethe (a word meaning both forgetfulness and sleep) before being admitted to the Mysteries, we may be asked to forget the logic of the day-world at the threshold of a dream. Sometimes we are not meant to solve the mystery---at least not right away. Rather it means to solve us. "Solve" comes from the Latin solvere, "to loosen, release, or free." It is the same root as "solution"---not in the sense of an answer, but a dissolving of individual ingredients into a surrounding medium. In dreams our narrow selfhood is loosened; the ego experiences itself, to its surprise, as only an element in something much larger. In dreamwork, too, we must first allow ourselves to dissolve back into the dream, allowing its images to work upon us. For we are being confronted with an ancient, urgent question: Not merely what does the dream mean, but what does the dream want? |
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paramount. Healing Dreams want us to stop making sense. They ask us not just to try to crack the case, but to enter the mystery.