How do you learn from dreams?
On guides, reading, and shadows
Early dawn, when the bird calls began, I was in a lucid dream. Standing on the top of our earth, observing the approach of a glorious planet. Turquoise and snowcapped and vital. Unserious pink clouds. This planet was marvelous.
She had cut curves through the vast, sparkling cosmos to join us in the Milky Way. She brought along a moon, too, for the comfort of tides, fertility, and poets. I was in awe.
“What is the meaning of this?” I asked. In my dream, I was also scared. What an abrupt event! No one had predicted this! Why was I the one observing?
I turned for help and, in the way of dreams, there was a wise friend. Someone I hadn’t seen in years. She was gravely ill and illuminated by the otherworldly knowing that is special to the dying. The veil between this world and the spirit world was thinning for her.
“To be a guide,” she said, smiling with her mouth closed.
Apologies, I don’t usually write for an audience about my dreams—they’re both so personal and nonsensical. Plus, I’m a rube about Jung.
But this dream reminded me of themes in my conscious life. That we’re celestial bodies undergoing changes. And hunger for guidance and meaning.
I missed the solar eclipse this year. Most of us did, in the Pacific Northwest. I comforted myself by remembering partial solar eclipses. Last fall, August of 2017. And by rereading Annie Dillard’s tremendous essay on the total solar eclipse in 1982 in Yakima, Washington. (My god, this essay).
I tend to regard writing like Dillard’s as a kind of guide. I return to her essay to learn allegory and pace. I ask her text questions, like how to make sense of strange, unexplainable phenomena? And reading gives me techniques that I can pilot.
What I’ve liked about the conversations around this most recent eclipse is the acknowledgment of our celestial position and the palpable question of our zeitgeist, what does it all mean?
I asked that last week to a friend, an admirable scholar, who has also been a mentor/guide at times. “What does it all mean?” I asked, rhetorically, because I’d noticed a connection that I hadn’t grasped before.
“Acknowledge it!” she replied. Ah, yes. Let me acknowledge this, in addition to reading for guidance, I’ve been lucky to have brilliant and kind mentors as guides. Some were formally so—my advisors, professors, former bosses, supervisors—and some informally so, neighbors, relatives, friends, kin who live with care, whose wisdom I seek. The contact can be temporary or sustained. And sometimes, I actively reestablish connections, which I’ve done recently in part due to a new role/job at the university.
I’m not sure if this happens to you, but when I’ve reconnected with a person, or a place, after a long pause, I instinctually, psychically, return to our last encounter. I’ve written about this before. It still confounds me, this impulse. How is it that all the months, years, changes, that have happened between that event and the present, can possibly gather into a kind of cluster and freeze? How does all that mothering and laughter and waiting and working and cleaning and writing and learning and reading and this and that become as invisible as hidden sheets in Excel? How do I tesseract?
I don’t know until there’s a snag. Until a memory, a realization, a lesson, a recommendation, rubs something in me and I see the accordion.
Yesterday, it happened after a reconvening with a wonderful mentor from my undergraduate years. During our coffee, whatever of my life had momentarily sunk into my subconscious, disbanded into forgotten corners of my memory house, emerged afterward only as I considered a question raised in the conversation.
What happens when something is created without a theory of why it’s there? How do you make sense of it? Asking questions shapes what happens next. And as I walked up the street, across the lawn, I saw that it’s through the shadows that the form—the theory—of something becomes manifest. Planetary bodies we are.
Thank you for reading The Gift.
Until next time,
Monika
The Gift
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This resonated with me. When I have a coffee with someone, I often drift back to my last interaction with that person (or the last coffee, specifically). It’s like we’re still in one long continuous conversation.
You mentioned the eclipse and we were lucky enough to experience it in totality in Dallas. The whole city seemed to shut down in fear and awe for those few minutes. I kept thinking how rare it is these days to have a monoculture experience that brings us together.