John: We’ve been exploring the threads revealed by your dream, which describes different aspects of the journey from the lower self to the higher self (for the full series, in order, see Into the Woods, Lighting the Way, and Help Along the Way). This is a journey of discovery we are all meant to take in our lives, and we have been exploring how our dreams help us unlock information we might not otherwise be able to access.
I think it’s important to understand this as a natural process that is fundamental to the human system. There may be many ways to connect, or reconnect, with the universe of which we are a part, but dreams offer each of us insights about this journey of awakening that are absolutely specific to where we find ourselves, as individuals, at any point in our lives.
And because, at deeper levels of understanding, our dreams operate according to fundamental processes of the universe, they can also give us great insight into the way the world around us flows first from the inner into the outer, from the unseen to the seen.
For instance, these recent dreams also have a relevance to how you (Jeane) and I go back and forth, as we tease the meaning out of a dream. It might be your feminine nature that doesn’t want to say too much; it’s more characteristic to want to hold onto the sense of what you’re feeling. It might seem a violation of the space you are holding.
However, when you do comment, it can cause an opening up, and a flow that you wouldn’t otherwise experience. To not have that expression can leave you feeling aggravated or pent up. If one gets out of sorts, there is a feeling of helplessness – like the world is too big. That’s when we see the imagery in your dream turn to seek the help of others, because it seems to0 much to go alone – the trail is too dark.
But, if you open up to it, it’s a bit like the little boy that comes in – in his innocence. If you don’t open up, then the little boy needs to hide himself behind the curtain. What happens next is an older boy arrives, and he is not as innocent – he’s more blunt, he’s not as cute, and he can create even more commotion.
However that commotion unfolds, it actually substantiates the initial reason for this thread. The imagery is portraying a type of breakdown that occurs when you hold yourself in check, and hold yourself in check, and hold yourself in check. When the energy finally comes out, it gushes in uncontrollable, unbalanced ways.
The same thing is true with me, in terms of me catching up with my feminine aspects. As I do, I usually want to express what is in me, but that’s not always appropriate. So I sit there not knowing how to do that, so the issue builds and it gets worse and worse. It’s like a catastrophe brewing.
So in your dream we see the older boy come on the scene, and then another woman, and if the little boy is discovered behind the curtain of the women’s bathroom, the whole thing could become a scene that’s too much to sort out. Just the innocent little boy would have been okay – it would have been cute. But now things have escalated far beyond the cute stage.
What is being shown to you is how you cycle this energy in a way that prevents you from catching up with something. If you caught up with that something, you would find your own way along the path, or the little boy scenario wouldn’t escalate to calamity. It’s like problems in our outer life – they’re usually avoidable if we see the signs early enough.
Here again we see how doing dream work can be very revealing of our inner processes. We may think we are working on things in our life, but our system itself is working on things too, on a much more fundamental level, and it works in a way that is designed to help us heal, or overcome through awareness, the psychologies that prevent us.
So even for us to discuss this in a way that sheds some light on these inner processes, helps those inner processes make progress. Just to remember and write down a dream such as this is incredible. Whatever I’m saying about it, whether it touches anything or not, triggers a deeper knowing within. The process of dreams, and dream work, is to make these inner processes known to us.
There’s no way that you could catch up with this information if you didn’t make this conscious effort to remember or discuss a dream. Ordinarily a dream might hit for a second or two and then vanish as we go on with our lives. Everything then, stays unconscious. You’d never catch up with the depth of yourself that’s possible.
Our higher self is trying to make itself known to us and, even though it’s doing so in minute ways, those minute ways could open us up to an unfolding on multiple levels. So it’s another interesting dream in terms of showing how the process works, and what it looks like in terms of the higher self and the lower self.
The higher self is shown as the meeting place where things come together and become known, and the house where you reside is shown as being a state that you might call a type of amnesia.
Then there’s the (dark) zone in between the amnesia state and the awakened state that you have to contend with and, if you do contend with it, you’ll eventually awaken to more and more levels of yourself, and know more about who you really are.
