The Shadowland of Dreams
I woke at 4.30am this morning, couldn’t get back to sleep. Suddenly aware of so many pieces of the puzzle of my life.
So I got up, made a cup of tea and sat in the dark in my dressing gown, looking at the trees outside my window. For an hour. Nothing more, nothing less.
It was the best thing I’ve done in weeks. Expansive, empty, uncoordinated SPACE. And then I thought of sharing this ‘nowhere place’ on Instagram, and with a sudden thunk I realised I had ruined my precious moment. Or had I?
Was I seeking an audience, or making an offering? A moment of solace placed out into the ether, landing somewhere, somehow, in someone else’s consciousness.
In that moment, I asked the tree. What do you think? And the tree said to me, ‘I am myself’. And I pictured all the other moments people have looked at this tree, walking past, or standing at their window, taking it in, a whole universe of tree and trunk and browning Autumn leaves just nonchalantly BEING. How could there be anything wrong with being ourselves?
And so I turned back to my conundrum. Is it some kind of virtue signalling to want to share my precious quiet hour, in the dark, looking at the tree. Or am I just being me? And can I really grasp the inherent value in me and in you, and in everyone, when we simply allow ourselves to be an expression of the season of life we find ourselves in? Trees grow, and twist, and seek the light and sometimes thrive and sometimes don’t, and they flower, and they hibernate, and they flourish again. Whole forests burn to the ground, and whole forests make a home for thousands of creatures and ultimately, us too. And beneath the roots of every tree lies a network of interdependence, of water and nutrient exchange through the mycelium super highway, and goodness knows what further intelligence. The tree thrives because it is in relationship, and because it is able to play its unique part.
Just as we walk past trees all the time, absorbing their presence, taking their shade, catching the sway of their branches in the wind, maybe social media is a way of stepping into the forest of interconnection that has always been here, just beyond our awareness. And what we ‘see’ and ‘experience’ in that forest is more a reflection of our own inner state, than it is an objective truth. Another medium, another mirror.
And so I do share my moment in the dark with the tree, right here. Because it’s a signpost to ‘being’. We spend so much of our lives worrying about what we’re doing, or what someone else is doing, but the real roots are the BEING. Are we being someone we think we should be, or are we free to be our own weird selves? It’s my humble guess that when we are ‘being’ - ie with our emotions, with our grief, our joy, our rage, our truth, our needs, our gifts - we are, at heart, peaceful creatures. It’s the suppression of being that evacuates pain onto another, and drives conflict, aggression, violence, retaliation, war. So this stuff really matters.
And if we’re stuck, how might we crack the habitual, conditioned being that gets in the way of our essential being? Whether that’s how we are at home, in our relationship, with our kids, or in the work we do, the medicine we practice, the art we make, or the whatever. It’s the being that creates the doing. So if we’re looking for a shift, we have to get to the being…but how?
Most of the ‘being’ we’re in is unconscious - powered by survival patterns, fixed beliefs, rejected feelings, essentially what we call the ‘shadow’1 - so we need a way to get behind the armour of the mind, a kind of psychic descent. One of the best ways I know to befriend this hidden, shadowy realm is to welcome your dreams. Not to analyse or decode them, or out them, but to let them in. Once that simple step is taken, a new path seems to unfold. And that path isn’t another thing to do, or another action to take, it’s a change in perspective, like a fresh path through the woods. You’re still on your walk through life, but everything appears differently. Possibility in the air.
I run a unique dreamwork container (online) called Dreamweaving every month, and it’s free to join this October. Elemental Chi Kung Class 8pm UK Time, followed by a Social Dreaming Matrix the next morning 10am.
For a great read about the shadow and all things Jungian I recommend Lisa Marchiano’s book ‘Motherhood, Facing and Finding Yourself’, and for a dive into the stories that take us there, anything by the mythologist Dr Martin Shaw.