“Channels are blocked in the mind, from the day.  Lie down in blackness of night, forgotten remnants rush to the mind, or creeping slowly appear in the dreams.” ~ Nathaniel LeTonnerre

“A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read.” ~The Talmud

I had a terrible dream this morning…

It was a weird, restless night – in part, I think, because I didn’t take my Vitamin D3 before I went to bed, and because there’s a lot of shift happening within me.  Things that have been the foundation of my life are changing, twisting, disintegrating in order to reform themselves into what I trust will be some new, more spacious order from which to continue my growing and experiencing.

So, after waking at 4 AM and alternatively floating in that strange asleep/ not asleep space and wandering to the kitchen to eat oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, I finally fell back into a very deep sleep.

I dreamt that I was in the bathtub.  Not the bathtub in my current apartment, but the bathtub in the summer cottage where my family used to vacation every summer.  I sat in the water with my computer, working – on I don’t know what… and somewhere along the line, I started to nod off.  So in the midst of my dream, there’s a blank space, from which, still dreaming, I suddenly catapult… because in falling asleep in the tub, I have dunked my laptop.  I think that I’ve only wet the casing, but when I lean back out of the tub with the computer, water is pouring from it, dirty brown water streaming out of disk drives and usb ports…. I squeeze and the water continues gushing out all over the floor.  And yet, the screen is still up… I am able to save whatever I’m working on before it fritzes out.  And I find myself weeping and mourning over my mac… sobbing and apologizing, and stroking it like it was a loyal kitten that I had let drown through my own negligence.

And then I woke up… heavy, cumbersome, as if I was waterlogged myself.

And I had tears on my face.

Clearly something is going on.

Dream Analysis expert, author, and teacher, Jeremy Taylor believes that, “Dreams come in the service of health and wholeness.” And they don’t come to tell us things we already know in the waking world.

So this isn’t simply a lesson in computer maintenance.

Within the world of dream analysis, there is a school of thought which conjectures that the scariest of our dreams actually herald the coming of new consciousness.

For instance, the classic nightmare in which someone or someones are chasing us down in order to kill us can be interpreted as the dawning of our new stage of consciousness.  Our Ego, which fights to maintain the status quo and feels most comfortable in situations and circumstances that it already knows – even if they are unhealthy – runs terrified from new ideas and understanding which, if owned, would force it/us out of our complacency and into a strange new world where – horror of horrors – we might be happier.

In this case, the nightmarish part is really perspective – Ego doesn’t want to die to what it knows, and so it sees new opportunities for growth as murderers.

Which is often the case in life as well.

We lose jobs, relationships, friends, things shift, change, disintegrate, go in directions we never suspected.  And it feels awful.  It feels like life is over.

And it is – at least the old life that brought us to this place of loss is.

But what if, just like the dream, this death signals the breaking of a new day – if losing that job is the kick in the pants we need to go back to school in order to have the job we’ve always dreamed of?  Or the ending of that relationship encourages us to set better boundaries, and change our patterns of behavior so that when the right person comes along we’re ready for them?

The belief within the dream world is that if we could just stop running from our murderers, turn around, embrace them, and allow ourselves to be killed, that we will be automatically transformed.  New consciousness will descend upon us like a soft comfy robe, and we will be off on our new adventures, quickly and painlessly.

I actually know someone who allowed himself to be stabbed in a dream, and within weeks his entire work life, which had been stuck and frustrating for several years, untangled itself as if by magic.

Coincidence?

Maybe.

“Coincidence is the word we use when we can’t see the levers and pulleys.” ~ Emma Bull