When it comes to working with dreams we can focus on a specific area of life where we’d like the wisdom and input of the Unconscious/ Dream Maker/ Self.
As I work as a coach, rather than as a therapist or analyst, I tend to attune to making positive changes around specific life shifts: as a Jungian Life Coach I attune to how those shifts are part of a lifelong individuation process. Dreams can help us with specific issues within that bigger picture of becoming whole.
You may be frustrated if the dreams you’re remembering are short fragments, so I’ll share how a tiny dream fragment has helped throw light on a central question in my own life.
I've been a visual artist, a painter, for many decades, in fact, most of my adult life.
But I reached a ‘Stop Sign’ over the last few years, not for the first time, and it was clear that the path I was on had run out of juice. I meet these signs every decade or so and usually go on a deep dive into other areas of exploration for a while, and then begin a new creative path, but something in me recognised that this ‘Stop Sign’ has felt different, and stronger, and this time I have been genuinely open to a deeper change.
I was, by then, studying with Jung Platform, and when the founder, Machiel Klerk, offered a workshop on Dream Incubation, to promote his book, Dream Guidance, I was enthusiastic! We spent the first session working on developing a good question and learning to develop a good ritual for asking the question of the unconscious. It’s a little bit like asking AI for help – get clear and get specific. So, I developed my question around my creativity, knowing that I would have help with relating to the answering dream in the next session of the workshop.
I was disappointed the next morning, when all I could remember dreaming was draining peas in a sieve – as in frozen peas that have been boiled for a couple of minutes.
I would never have guessed that I would be able to draw on wisdom from this dream fragment for more than two years. Exploring it began with helpful suggestions when I shared it within the workshop – one that I remember is that someone volunteered that ‘peas’ sounds like ‘peace.’ But over the next year I attuned to the felt sense of draining peas, every time I prepared them as part of a family meal. I noticed that when I’m too tired to prepare a vegetable that takes effort, there’s ease in the mindset of serving up peas heated from frozen, providing something that’s nutritious, tasty, and effortless. That was the mindset I needed for my creativity, as opposed to the effort of making a complicated meal that’s designed to impress guests.
After a while, my ego would be impatient to ask again, as I had still not adapted to this Stop Sign – and with Tarot and I Ching - I got Leave it Alone messages. Astrology had certainly reflected that it was a time for a major change in vocation. Then I would remember the dream and more insights would come. My friend, Emma, commented that green peas are beautiful and jewel like – at the same time as being so humble. Two and half years after the dream it also occurred to me that peas are something that you wouldn’t have every day, and that was how my relationship to visual art might be, rather than pushing to be the archetypal devoted full-time artist that I had identified as previously.
A co-coach commented that a frozen state, shifting to boiling, then to being drained of water and finally evaporating steam, or water vapour, sounded alchemical. And this resonated – something in me had been frozen, then the heat had turned up high, and now the water has drained. In fact, it reminded me that I’d worked on an alchemical image of evaporation with another co-coach a few months ago. With the evaporation, the heavy watery emotional feeling around it had lightened up.
With this curiosity and commitment to relating to a seemingly banal image, the image became a symbol. Once we have a living symbol, we open ourselves to connecting with what Jung called the Transcendent Function - a place in which we can reconcile the opposites within, through moving to a completely new perspective.
And in terms of answering my original question about my creativity – I’m now writing poetry, something that I’d done intermittently throughout my life. A change of art form. Not every day, but as a delicious and nutritious humble side dish, now and again, to have with the main course of the day. Life is flowing again.
I’ll share with you how poetry emerged from dream work too, in another post.
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