John: My dream starts off with me sitting in a church pew listening to a woman pastor. She is telling a story that is intended to portray an important inner vibrational point – it is like a note or something that she is trying to bring out. I am sitting back in the middle area of this congregation.
There is a center aisle, and up near the front on either side are two families. She is speaking about them, using them as an example and reference to make her point. The husbands of both families are police officers, and they are with their sons and daughters. Both wives are gone.
I feel jarred by the gravity of this, while the whole congregation is listening. The fact that the feminine (wives) is gone or missing has to do with an underlying note or point that the pastor is attempting to address. She is using the story of these two families to bring out a wound that exists, something that actually affects everyone in the congregation to some degree or another.
As the pastor is telling the story, she is interrupted by the police officer from the family seated on the left. He wants to make an important point about what happened. He is speaking in the interest of maintaining the accuracy of events, and he is holding up a court order. On the basis of the court order it is clear that certain facts must be made understood.
This interruption creates a feeling of abruptness. The pastor has gone way beyond the facts; she is interested in the greater overall motif of what occurred, trying to make a deeper point. The officer is more interested in the linear chain of events
Of course there are always factual issues. Patterns repeat throughout life, each repetition having different specific facts. Yet underneath that there are the secondary causes of things, which is really what we should be catching up with; you can’t do that if you dwell in the details.
I can see that the point the police officer is making is blocking him from seeing the bigger picture. It’s also subtly blocking anyone else, who takes his point too literally, from connecting to the deeper quality or revelation that the pastor is trying to bring across.
So the pastor continues with the story after this interruption, attempting to communicate the essence of what she felt needed to be revealed to the congregation.
The nature of my dream reveals the balance, or imbalance, of the masculine and feminine within. The pastor is a woman, trying to hold and reveal the deeper essence of something. The police officer, who’s wife is gone, is mired in the details of events, unable to see the overall.
This reflects an aspect of me that tries to solve problems by digging in to the details. When I do that, I cause more imbalances because I am always looking at things as separate aspects, so I create a kind of linear jumping around.
The feminine seeks to embrace and contain the whole picture – the overallness of things. She is receptive in that way and tries to bring everything together under one roof, so to speak. The masculine focus on the particularities tends to disrupt that wholeness. So my trying to deal with issues in a purely masculine way can introduce new confusions and problems.
So the dream depicts the linkage to the overallness as being held by the feminine nature (the pastor), while I (seen as the police officer) have lost my feminine connection (my wife is absent). We all have a balance of the masculine and feminine in us, and these different aspects need to work together for everything to run smoothly.
The masculine aspect tends to go around and around; it can bring many light-bulb moments through as a way of releasing possibilities, but it is the feminine aspect that is charged with storing and integrating it. When the masculine aspect gets too caught up in the specifics, it is apt to cause a deviation – a little here, and a little there – and will ultimately miss the overall point or connection.
In this way, details become just so much background noise. The overall is much deeper and more subtle, but it will get lost in the noise. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that, over and over again, the natural flow is affected by the stickiness of details. When that happens, the receptivity is lost. You could say that this imbalance is a wound that needs to be healed.
