In this interesting image, Jeane finds herself, and everyone else, being made of thousands of small bricks. As the scenario unfolds, it calls to mind the denseness of earthly existence – bricks being made of earth. In her efforts to get the others to be more playful, it points to the idea of overcoming our own denseness through a childlike curiosity and innocence in the magic of life and the universe. (At the end of this post there are instructions and a link to download this recording to your computer.)
Jeane: In this dream, I seem to be a person who’s made out of bricks. I’m young and you feel like high school age or something, and when you move around sometimes your bricks fall off a bit, so you have to kind of learn how to stack them or unstack them or catch them now and then.
And I’ve gone over to this household and everybody there is made out of bricks, too, but the thing is that the kids in this household, and the son, I think, likes me, they’re super neat, like way more neat than kids should be, like their bricks are never going to drop on the floor because they’ll catch them, or stack them, or interact with each other in such a way that it’s almost like they’ve forgotten how to play a bit because the mother’s a bit rigid.
The kids in that household really haven’t learned a lot of play where you actually maybe get a little more casual with how your bricks move around. And you can tell that the dad and maybe even some grandparents want them to know how to play a little bit more, but the mother’s been somewhat overly rigid.
So it’s like I come in at night and so the son and I and then the brothers and sisters can play. It’s almost like I’m trying to teach them how to play a little bit.
I don’t want them to become so casual that their bricks are falling all over the place, because it’s kind of fascinating in some ways how they’ve learned how to work as a team so that doesn’t happen, but I want them to be able to play a bit, to loosen up, and actually come out at night when the parents aren’t there and move their bricks around.
And maybe you do set them down on the floor or you catch them before they drop, instead of just being super neat. And you can tell you have the support of the father and the grandparents in this. The mother I think would be supportive, but she’s still a little more frozen or rigid about it. That’s the initial dream.
John: So you’re discovering in your rigidity that you can move around?
So, there’s a way of letting go of your condition that enables you to somehow or another move around even though your basic nature is still a brick?
And so I guess from what you’re saying is that you’re able to move around, getting yourself out of the conditions of your surroundings, or at least finding a freedom to step away from those surroundings as represented by what, the adults?
Jeane: Well, a little overly rigid mother, and the kids were being too adult.
John: And so to do that even as a kid you had to be a kid. You couldn’t be too adultish in your approach. You’ve reached a level of trying to influence. Is that what you’re doing, you’re trying to influence?
So you’ve come to see the limitation of the grownup side of yourself?
And you’ve also moved on from some aspect of a delirium in terms of growing up, where you didn’t see where you were at because you’re just a brick, and now you get to be an adult and you are more at the cusp of things, at an in-betweenness of things. So you have a sense of how to move around.
But in order to expand or make that work for you, work in a capacity that serves life, you have to encourage or work with other kids. You have to teach them how to be receptive, how to let go. So they move around with a certain set mannerism, not venting everywhere, but still being a brick.
The dream seems to be one that’s challenging this idea of having a sense of direction, because any sense of direction presupposes that, somehow or another, you can figure out a way out of the maze of things upon which you are forced to contend. That being that you have an amnesia part of yourself that went along as a brick and not knowing how to have a childhood, and then you reconcile this somehow or another in relationship to how, as an adult, that is too stifling, and so you find yourself able to move around.
It seems you’re painting a scenario in which you’re being told that you’re just… that everything is a little brick, that you’re composed of little bricks. You’re composed of bits and pieces of things.
And so I guess that is kind of what a human being is, is these bits and pieces of everything that exists in the entire universe. As a consequence of that, he can come to know what he is because he is everything that there is, he’s made up of everything that there is, and you can’t do that if you look at yourself too intently as a brick.
That doesn’t look like you can find any position that you can take, as a brick, that you’re all in all the time, with everything that there is. And so if you pull anything out of that, you become childish, almost as if childish is the way to be – but it’s still childish.
Or playful. So you’re trying to take all the essence of everything that there is, of which you’re a composite of all of that, and put it into a play and make it playful. Put it into motion in a way that plays. You as a composite, you as something that represents everything that there is, now needs to know how to be able to gleefully exist, to be playful. Boy, how can you do this?
This is a conundrum yet. We haven’t even begun to figure this out. This is very deep.
Jeane: There’s the support of the grandparents and the father. The mother was the one who had been too rigid.
John: You have the support of something from beyond the beyond, yet somehow even knowing that you’re nothing more than a brick doesn’t seem to be that much of an answer. You just have to handle everything lightly.
It’s a tremendous image because I guess about all you could say about it is one keeps trying to figure out what to do, or how to be, in relationship to it – and maybe that’s the problem. Maybe there isn’t anyway that you can be. You’re just getting shown that this is what you are, so any attempt to try to untwine that, or unravel that, and maybe this is a way of just showing you that this is the condition you find yourself in too, is that you’re everything.
You’re a composite of everything in all of life and, as a composite, you’re the collective, represented maybe by the parents, or the influences of things upon you have gotten you to function in an awkward way. Yet you have the support of something that’s beyond all of that, and that what is missing is playfulness to cause things to let go to a flow.
In other words, it’s like you’re still in a world of a myriadness of composited bricks everywhere. You are that. You can’t really see yourself as a singular brick when it’s like that, and therein lies the problem to try to understand this, because you’re somehow or another trying to act like you can somehow be something other than the Whole.
You’re kind of trying to describe where you’re at in relationship to this humongous universal self. You’re realizing you can’t be like the parents, and that you are part of the overall Whole, but you’re still trying to find a way of being that has a mannerism that, for sake of reference, exists, exists in some capacity.
But the problem to doing that is it leaves you empty. It leaves you distraught. It keeps you from playing, because you’re trying to make something out of it, and how do you make something out of something in which you’re already everything? It’s a pretty unusual dream.
To download this file, Right Click (for PCs) or Control Click (for Macs) and Save: The Human Composite
