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Radical Dreaming Excerpt:
Depressed?
Your Dreams Can Help!
© 2006 by John D.
Goldhammer
Condensed from Radical Dreaming
I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after,
and changed my ideas. They’ve gone through and through me,
like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.
Dreams are gifts of the Spirit meant to alter us.
-Emily Bronte
A lot of our chronic
“depression,” which has reached epidemic proportions in the U.S., may well be
one of the symptoms of “non-being,” of an unlived life. This also means
that depression can be one of our most valuable signposts, a red flag, a
spiritual distress signal, a deep inner protest about something we are doing to
ourselves. It also makes sense that “depressing” or burying our natural talents,
our passions, and our dreams would logically create feelings of depression.
After twenty-plus years of
researching dreaming and techniques of dream interpretation, working with over
twenty thousand individual dreams, I discovered that the majority of our dreams
have a profound intent and purpose; they stand as guardians at the gates of the
human spirit, defending us from all manner of nefarious influences. Dreams
focus, with laser-like precision, on freeing us from anything that is
self-negating and self-defeating. Dreams are like a master sculptor removing
everything from the block of marble that is not “elephant.” This natural
process slowly but surely brings one’s Authentic Self and particular
genius into clear definition. Like a fog lifting as the sunlight emerges, we
begin to understand what it is that we must do with our life. And one of the
remarkable side effects of this process is the healing of unrelenting
depression. Here’s an example:
I first met Laura in a
weekly dream group. A professional accountant in her late fifties, she described
her life as “having plenty of material things,” but feeling a persistent
depression and a “baffling” angst about what to do with her life. On one, hot
July night, she brought a dream that changed everything:
I’m at a big attraction, like a Sea World. The crowds are huge. A large
porpoise is the main attraction; it’s swimming in a deep concrete canal.
Everything around is lush and rich. Then I’m in a very cluttered gift shop and I
see this exquisite mandolin for sale. I offer to buy it if it’s less than $1,000
but the clerk says it’s $2,222. I ask why it’s so much but there’s no answer. I
notice the back of it is slightly crumpled.
For Laura, the “big
attraction” was a place “designed to make money by amusing and entertaining
people.” As part of the crowd, she is one of many “observers”—in contrast to a
participant—who has come to see a wild animal, to see it up close,
to perhaps feel a particle of what it would be like to be such a creature. But
the concrete canal imprisons this porpoise, separating it from its natural
environment. Laura described the porpoise as “playful, but confined—a big fish
in a small pool.” When she imagined being the porpoise, she said, “I have
all this capacity but I’m not using it; I’m in the wrong place,” her voice
breaking with sudden emotion. “It’s my work,” she said. “I’m in the wrong
place.” For Laura, the “concrete” represented all the “practical” reasons she
“should not” and “could not invest” in creative pursuits, the walls that keep
her true nature contained.
Feelings of deep regret and
heartache surrounded the mandolin. Laura explained that in her twenties she had
loved music and that she had especially loved the mandolin and had learned to
play it. “I’m handmade, unique. I feel rejected and damaged, unappreciated, left
on the shelf to collect dust. Where is my home? People don’t see me but I can
help make music,” Laura said, letting the mandolin in her dream speak to her.
Hesitating, tears welling up, she added, “It’s the musical, creative part of
myself.”
Laura will buy it if
it’s less than $1,000 but her dream presents her with a dilemma: the mandolin
will cost her $2,222 —a curious series of “twos.” She realized that her dream
was telling her that a rejected, damaged, musical part of herself has a price
tag beyond what she is willing to pay. She must make a profound choice: to once
again reject a valuable part of herself or resolve to pay $2,222 for the
mandolin. This dream also reminded Laura that she had been feeling rejected and
because of her age was also feeling old, ready to be “put away on the shelf.”
When something in a dream
has a price tag, our willingness or unwillingness to pay the price often means
we are choosing whether or not to put our energy into something. Laura’s dream
ends with her decision left hanging, unresolved. She would like to get the
mandolin at a far lower price—meaning with much less effort. Her desire to
reconnect with her inner musician—a straightforward reference to a valuable
aspect of her Authentic Self—might not happen; it’s her choice. She might
refuse the adventure, turn back, put a valuable part of her genuine nature
“back on the shelf,” spend her remaining years with another unsettling spiritual
abortion gnawing away at the fabric of her life.
Her dream says that she must
make a $2,222 effort. All these “twos” reminded her of the words from an old
Sonny and Cher song: “It takes two babe.” And in her dream it would indeed take
“two” to create music: the mandolin and the musician. One, $1,000
or less, will not do it. Perhaps her dream requires a relationship
between the mandolin and the musician creating a third element: music.
Without such a relationship, this connection to the mandolin, the musical
composition of her creative life will never be heard.
Laura’s dream does not
necessarily mean she needs to start playing the mandolin; that would be a
literal interpretation. But she could play the mandolin as a way to ritualize
her dream’s meaning, to serve as a reminder of the dream’s transformative
message for her life. Indeed, it is in the nature and character of such dreams
to stir things up, as Laura’s dream illustrated, to produce a healthy,
necessary, creative tension between a depressing status quo and her own
creative potential.
Her dream inspired her to
think seriously about leaving a job she said was exhausting her. She began to
explore ways to reconnect with her creativity and her love of music—to create
time and space for these valuable aspects of her essential nature. And Laura
knew she would have to overcome that part of herself who was resisting putting
the necessary energy into her efforts. I was not surprised when Laura reported
feeling much better as she began opening herself to the idea of exploring new
creative possibilities in her life.
Ironically, attempts to
“fix” depression with drugs often end up perpetuating the wrong life. That’s
what had happened to Peter. When I first met Peter, a nerdy computer programmer
in his early forties, he told me, “I’m sick of being labeled with one of those
personality disorders from that horrible big book and then having some therapist
try to fix me.” Peter explained that he “hated” his job and the company he
worked for, but had stayed for nearly twenty years for “the security and the
money.” He had just begun taking a new prescription drug for his depression when
he told me about a scary dream that he called a bad nightmare:
It was just getting dark and I was standing outside and realized that
there had been a nuclear war. Everywhere I looked I saw blackened remains, a
burned-out landscape. It was horrible! Then three, white Atlas rockets
landed like space ships, the kind that carry nuclear warheads. As I watched,
three alien beings came out of the rockets’ doors. A strange, green glow
came from the doorways. I woke up really frightened wondering how aliens
can be in U.S. ICBMs?
After allowing Peter’s dream
images to speak to him, he understood the true impact of his devastating
bout with depression, how it had effectively wiped out his world¾the
“burned-out landscape” that he described as being “dead, there’s nothing growing
anywhere.” And when I asked him to imagine being one of the ICBMs and to
tell me his “job description,” he
realized, with a look of real shock, that the three, white ICBMs in his dream
represented the outside world’s remedy he had chosen as well as the
actual, three white pills he took each day¾a
powerful, synchronistic allusion to the gravity of the pharmaceutical
establishment’s attack on his “depression”¾a
quite real “alien” invasion of his psyche.
From this dream he began to
rethink his approach to his depression. Instead of chemically altering his
brain chemistry so that he would not feel depressed and could continue working
at a job he loathed, Peter began to consider other alternatives including
exploring what his depression wanted, using his depression as a catalyst to
change his life and his career, to stop depressing his hopes and dreams
and his unlived life. Peter’s dream helped him redirect his life by
illuminating foreign influences that paradoxically were preventing him from
getting to the heart of what his depression really intended: to free him from
living someone else’s life!
Our dreams carry the awesome
potential to help us to see clearly who we really are—our natural, inborn
potential and unique character without anything “landing” in our world that does
not belong there. When understood, they become our passport into a life that has
meaning, passion, and purpose. Our dreams want our lives to make a difference.
We need only remove all the isms and complex psychological systems
that would like to tell us what our dreams mean and instead learn how to give
our dreams the respect and the freedom to speak for themselves. A single
choice can change the world. A creative, fulfilled life requires us to, as James
Joyce suggested, turn our minds “to an unknown art.”
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