John: Yesterday we heard your dream (see Into the Woods), and saw how it described a journey between two places – the house you are staying in and the meeting place with the teacher. In between these two places is a darkness that you are having trouble navigating on your own.
That’s where you’re friend comes in. She is a part of you, and she represents the means by which you can develop a certain sight, or understanding – at the depth of your being – that enables you to navigate in the darkness intuitively; by hearing or just knowing.
In other words, the unfolding of the spiritual part of one’s self – the higher self – occurs through a light that you can’t see. There is a gap that exists between these two points: you are whole and complete as a part of Creation, yet you’re in a state of amnesia, too, because of the darkness between the higher and lower parts of yourself. We are all, for the most part, strangers to higher selves.
Still, you have the feeling that something important is beckoning, is calling you, which is shown by the meeting house where the teacher is. The whole zone in-between is full of darkness. It’s full of trauma, it’s full of fear. It’s full of all the qualities that cause one to be veiled and lost to oneself.
And you mentioned that you have seen this meeting place before in your dreams, and needed help to find your way along the dark path. So you are being shown your lower self (the house you are staying in) and your higher self (the meeting place and teacher), and the darkness in between is the veil that has been created through fears, patterns, and the general disconnection we get from our cultural training.
But our systems are always trying to awaken us to ourselves. So the dream repeats, giving you the same hint, and offering you guidance. You are at a point that could be bliss, because the mystics spoke of this point where the in-breath turns into the out-breath as a point of bliss. (In the other direction, where the out-breath turns into the in-breath, it is described as a point of longing.)
But you are at a point where you can’t really hear the guidance of your higher self because it sits in an unconscious zone. So you find yourself telling the teacher that you can’t hear him. In other words, you’re not getting the memo. You’re not getting the connection. The teacher represents the higher self in your nature, but you’re not able to gain the awareness being offered.
Why not? Because you’re still depending on “things.” Among other things, you’re depending upon some quality of light or understanding from “your friend” in order to make your way back and forth to this place in Creation. In other words, you have your abstractions, and therefore you can’t properly listen.
You can’t properly gauge the two points. Ideally, if you gauge the two points, they’re one and the same. But you don’t know that because you have the higher self and the lower self and there’s all of that darkness in between that keeps you veiled.
This also is a good dream from the standpoint of the question “Why do dream work?” Well, this is why you do dream work: so that you can come to know these points, that they are accessible by all of us, and to bring awareness and light to the darkness that prevents us from knowing.
In that process, you can actually raise your energetic – you begin to work with higher energies. You raise your inner sense of power. You also speed up, because higher energies move faster, and that allows you to access even more from within.
In the dream work process, and in this particular example, you’re given an image that shows you the polarities, and because you are on a path, you understand you are being beckoned to something important, in terms of the higher self, even though you can’t quite hear the teacher. At least you know that the teacher is trying to get your attention and to communicate something you need to hear.
The dream also shows that you need to be able to go back and forth, between your higher and lower self. You need to light that pathway, and connection, until such time as they might merge into one.
