John: I was feeling a little out of balance when I went to bed and my focus was off. It may have been because I watched a goofy movie on TV that deadened my energy somehow. I didn’t have normal buoyancy inside, and that feeling becomes the theme for the dream.
In my dream I am seeing myself having to relate in an imbalanced way. I seem to need to do things to get myself going again energetically.
I’m on a college campus, playing ping-pong. I don’t play with my usual skill. This gets me feeling a little down on myself; I notice that I lost. Next I watch an old friend play the game, and I’m amazed at how much he has improved. He has really pulled his game together. This leaves me feeling even more out of sync.
I wander away, then come back and notice my friend is now playing tennis doubles. They have to stretch the tennis court out longer than normal size to accommodate this fast pace because they are hitting the ball so hard. Feeling distorted like I do, I can’t even begin to try to play like that. In fact, I am so off that if a ball gets knocked in my direction I can’t seem to catch it. It goes by and I’m just standing there watching it, not even helping out.
The game ends and I leave with my friend. He’s an easy-going, jovial guy and I can sense that he is in fine balance. We walk across a field. I still have this block that interferes with my normal way of relating or being buoyant. I don’t understand what’s the matter with me.
As we walk across an open area we see three small ferrets playing in the weeds. My friend sees them first. At first we just see one of them kind of peeking out, then we see another, plus a younger one, so there are a total of three. As we pay attention to them they seem to want to relate or to be curious about us as well.
So as we make sudden movements toward them, with my friend doing it in a very interested way, they suddenly fall over on their sides. They only do it for a split second, and then they get up on their feet again. Each time they are shocked by our movements they do this again. It’s like they blank out for a moment and fall down.
As we get closer we can see that these small creatures want to relate. My friend is making friendly gestures and I’m following his lead. As he gets them fairly close I’m able to reach out and touch one of them. They are no longer fainting, but now they become overly excited. They are overwhelmed in their exuberance. Now we can’t get them to act calmly.
At first I’m able to touch them and everything is okay, but little by little in their increasing excitement and need to relate they start using their mouth to play and I suddenly get scratched by their sharp teeth. So I wonder about this.
About the time this happens, my friend says that these ferrets belong to a teacher and need to be returned for their own good. We have to take them across the field toward the office of the teacher.
What this dream is showing is that my ability to relate to things lacks coherency; it lacks fluidity. This is an imbalance in my lower-self nature. It’s as if I’m having trouble shifting to keep up with sudden changes. Like the ferrets, it’s like I short out and fall over. I quickly catch myself after each defensive reaction – to losing at ping-pong, or not being able to play tennis with skill – where I go momentarily blank and then develop a sensibility again.
Each jolt however seems to also bring me closer to what is happening. There’s a peculiar trance to overcome. When I do overcome it, I go to the other extreme and get overly excited.
It seems I shut down when I can’t handle a certain rhythm, all the while seeking to come out of such a state of imbalance. I peek around curiously, and then when I’m noticed I go into this off-again, on-again behavior. There is a desire to relate: the ferrets don’t run off. But when I’m able to make a shift I go to the other extreme and get overly excited. And such exuberance requires a teacher to bring this behavior back into balance.
So basically what this dream is doing is showing how one can go off on a psychological tangent and that change in energy can block or disturb the state of balance and the ability to relate to things.
We all can be thrown out of our balanced state – each of us in our own way. But this shows that in order to hold the state or to carry it the way it needs to be carried, it’s better to be excitable than to be blanking in and out (unconscious about it), and in order to be able to live it one has to get over the energetic patterns that we continually repeat (with awareness), and sometimes we require a teacher’s guidance to help us in our journey.
