Jeane: In this next dream I’m in high school or early college and I have a girl band. We’re supposed to perform on a college campus.
I’m home with my mother and I need to get dressed for the show. My mother has on a black-and-white polka dot dress, in a flapper style from the 1920’s. That’s what I want to wear, but she tells me it’s a size smaller than what I normally wear. Still, I have the idea that I can wear it and, sure enough, when I try it on it fits. I even jazz it up a bit because we’re performing.
Then the girls and I have to get to the concert. They’re all in a car, but I see a very long bus that’s taking a lot of people. I have a sense that I should take the bus with them, so I run and jump through a door or window into the back of the bus.
When I get on the bus it’s filled mostly with young guys hanging out together and giving the girls a hard time. I see that in front there are four or five empty seats so I decide to take those seats, even if the boys hassle me, because I like the larger space they represent.
Next thing you know we’re at the concert. It’s a large outdoor arena and the stage is very elevated. It’s actually a huge, smoothed-out rock surface. When I get on stage I’m looking way, way down and there’s no railing or anything.
At first I find the height paralyzing and dizzying. The other girls won’t even come up for fear of falling off. I have to sit down on the edge of the stage for a minute to get my bearings – it’s only a few steps from the front edge to the back edge.
Then I shift from feeling paralyzed with fear to where I actually leap from the rock and land almost crouching, like an animal, on the ground below. Next I’m back on the rock and going off the back edge, backwards. I’m falling but there’s a bungee-type cord that pulls me right back up.
After I’ve done that, the other girls overcome their fear and join me on stage to sing.
John: It’s interesting how differently we approach things, even in our dreams. I usually struggle with every little transition or change, while you quickly come to recognize that you can adopt, or absorb into yourself, certain aspects of your environment.
For instance, when you decide that you can wear your mother’s old dress – even though it seems the wrong size – you are recognizing that you can make something that already exists your own.
Normally there are barriers that can prevent adopting aspects from a different time (the 1920s dress), but you instinctively know you don’t have to take on the attributes of that time, but can adopt it for your own use in this time. In other words, you don’t need to take on every association – just what’s useful to you.
The fact that you realize that changes the note, which enables you to function or flow freely: you can easily jump on the bus and find your own space within that (the empty seats). If you had been left to your ordinary devices – without this change – you might have been consumed by the collective conditioning of the bus environment, i.e., you would have been stuck with the boys.
Then, when you arrive at the concert, this new element that you’ve absorbed (the updated, older energy) has brought an octave change in your nature, or your way of relating. But there you are challenged to look at an even bigger aspect of it. Just as you had to adopt the old energetic of the dress to the present purpose, you now find yourself continuing that note forward.
The challenge comes in the form of the strange stage, but we can see that, after getting your initial bearings, you’re not as limited by fear as is everyone else. You can be at the epicenter of what’s happening; you’re not smothered by the situation as it unfolds. You’re able to project yourself up on stage and go this way and that, amazed that everything is safe and sound and secure.
What you’re dream is basically telling you, or showing you, by the process of these encounters, is that when you’re able to adopt a quality as your own, it creates a greater depth in you in terms of how you’re able to relate, appreciate, enjoy, and handle the things around you. You’re not as limited anymore.
And you’re doing this in a natural, subjective way and finding greater wonder through this. This whole new way has just opened up for you, causing the experience to be different than it might have been if you’d insisted that you just do it your limited way. Instead you make it possible – the show can go on.
