The Daddy of All Nightmares

 

I had a nightmare night before last that is still with me, and I realized I need to write about it, to share it. I will warn you in advance that parts of my nightmare are quite gory, so if that sort of thing bothers you, I recommend you stop reading now. I will also say that I will refrain from gratuitously grossing anyone out, but I am a Word Shaman and I tend to paint rather vivid pictures with my words.

Having said all that, this was the dream: A very large cat staggered around my bedroom, trying to climb up on my bed. All of his legs (in the dream I knew with absolute certainty it was male) had been stripped of flesh about halfway down, and clearly he was in terrible pain. I remember feeling shocked and sickened at the sight of naked bone with bits of bloody flesh clinging to it, and the existing flesh and fur had jagged red edges. The cat had two holes in his torso — one on each side — that looked as though two extra limbs had been lopped off or yanked out. I remember also feeling sad that the cat could not climb up on the bed, since he seemed to want to so desperately.

At some point the cat transformed into a man whos limbs were in the same grisly condition, except now the naked bones of his arms and legs were clean and dry, and he seemed in much less pain. He turned toward me and asked me for help. We had an extended conversation then, and all I can recall is his request for assistance.

When I woke up yesterday morning, what came first into my mind was, “Okay, what rejected, suppressed, denied, hidden, or cut off part of me does Catman represent?” (I almost want to call him “Zombie Catman,” except that he was clearly alive.) After all the shamanic work I’ve done, I have come to understand that my nightmares are suppressed parts of me being very loud in order to get my attention. One of my teachers likened this to what happens when you ignore a child’s repeated requests for attention. First, they tug gently on your sleeve. You ignore them, and they tug again, this time adding a plaintive, “Mom!” You continue to ignore them (after all, you have a lot of work to do and only so many hours in the day), and eventually the requests become louder, more strident, and finally end in a full-blown temper tantrum. If nightmares are the temper tantrums of my inner children, Catman was sure as heck throwing a hissy fit on Tuesday night!

This is the second time I’ve written about this, and I have a deepening sense that Catman represents my own needs, specifically those needs that go unmet when I ramp up into co-dependent overdrive. Raised to be a caretaker, I believe that’s my job — to emotionally take care of all my friends and loved ones. NOTE: I’ve never really understood that phrase, so I’m going to stop using it. I love my friends, after all, so aren’t my friends also my loved ones? Anyhow, I take care of other people, chiefly through managing (or attempting to manage) their emotional states. When I do this, my own needs get shoved aside. After a while, this translates into fatigue, irritability, wild mood swings, and illness, as well as the resurfacing of addictions, most notably to food — especially sweets.

Now I am uncertain what my next step will be, except that I clearly need to focus more closely on taking care of myself, and letting my friends take care of themselves. Therein lies the challenge, because I have accumulated quite a few friends who (big surprise) want someone to take care of them. Striking a balance between their needs and mine — actually, strike that! Focusing primarily on my own needs is what I must do, and that’s challenging. In a way, doing that feels like closing my heart. Perhaps instead I can think of it as opening my heart to myself. Wish me luck!

Thank you so much for reading. As always, comments are encouraged and appreciated. Take care, and may your life find a marvelous balance that often spills over into joy.

~Love and Blessings,
Selene~

Shamanically Dazed and Cosmically Confused

I feel as though I am waking from a very long sleep. I am reading Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Lifeby Marshall Rosenberg, and every 20 pages or so I put it down and cry. I feel deep pain in realizing how violently I have communicated most of my life, especially with myself. Even now, I struggle to put aside shame, to stop blaming myself for past words spoken in anger or in haste. Words are my reason to exist, and my sorrow at using them to ever hurt another, even if out of my own pain, is great.

I am also in the midst of a nine-month training course to become a Shamanic Soul Coach. Those of us in the course have one full day of training and one two-hour long teleseminar each month. This month, our training consisted of examining our relationship to money and success. I am still processing the emotions stirred up by the new information I now have about myself.

For one thing, I rediscovered that I move at a slower pace than most people. This has always been true, and I have denied it, pushing myself to spend enough time in the fast lane so I can appear to be “normal.” I often get feedback from other people to hurry up. My mother once told me that it drove her crazy to watch me butter a slice of bread. My memory is that I used the butter knife like a paint brush, pretending the bread was a blank canvas. I took my own sweet time spreading that soft, yummy yellow stuff into every corner, cranny, and nook of a piece of bread.

What I have realized is that this slower rhythm is the rhythm of my heart. Western culture in general — and American culture in particular — urges us to move at the faster rhythm of our heads, our thoughts. My path seems to be to feel my way through the world.

I’ve been looking for part-time contract work for the past five months, and lately I’ve had a lot of “false positives.” What I mean by that is I keep getting offered work and when I closely examine all aspects of it — fees, contractual obligations, circumstances under which I would be working — I find the only answer I can give is “No.” I’m realizing that what I’ve done is slowed the process down. In the past, finding work has always been faster, in part because I take the first thing that comes along. Now I’m choosing to be choosier, so I can take on work that feels right to me.

Where these two things tie together — nonviolent communication (NVC for short) and the slow pace at which I move — is that I have been chastising myself for failing to learn NVC more quickly. I need to jump off the judgment train, cut myself some slack. When the time is right, the right work will come and the money will follow. And when the time is right, I will begin to speakin the language of nonviolence, which will fall from my lips as though I learned it in utero.

After all that, you may be feeling just as dazed and confused as I have. Watch this space for further (and much more frequent) posts, which will explain everything. Once I figure it out, that is.

Thank you for your kind attention. Comments welcome, as always. I appreciate your regard.

~Love and Blessings,
Selene~

These are the Sacred Colors

It is rare that I get a song delivered to me in a dream, complete with melody. Well, to be more accurate, I’d say it’s a chant. In my dream I knelt in front of a low wooden table and held an orange and black hair tie (at least, that’s what it looked like to me). It consisted of a circle woven of black and orange cloth, topped with a beautiful orange cloth rose. I grasped the circle with flower, raised up my arms, and sang:

These are the sacred colors,
these are the colors sacred.
They decorate my altar
as each season changes.

This is a little less clear, but I think I was also wearing orange and black in the dream. I knew exactly why the colors were sacred, what they meant. They represented sunlight and its absence, earth and sky, life and death, enlightenment and the void of ignorance.

I woke up thinking of my love of colors, of wearing certain colors — especially during the holidays. I had the idea that the most sacred color for New Year’s Day would be white — the color of new beginnings, of clean slates, of innocence original and reclaimed.

Perhaps I will wear white tomorrow. Tonight, I have yet to decide what to wear. I had plans to go out, and I woke up not only with a mind filled with images from my dream, but also with a headache and a sore throat. Whether or not I go out tonight and tomorrow, I will honor the message of my dream. When I intuit between the lines, I think the deeper message is this:

The sacred is in every moment, in every mote of dust, in everything that ever was or will ever be. Live sacredly. Honor your life and all that it contains.

And I say, what better time to begin than on the Eve of the New Year? My spider sense tells me 2008 is going to be an amazing year.

As always, thanks for reading. Happy and Sacred New Year to you.

~Love and Blessings,
Selene~

Car Wrecks, Death, and Tollhouse Cookies

All three of the things in my title have been in my dreams of late. A few days ago I dreamed a car — looked like an old mustang — drove off the roof of a house and into an old-style Volkswagen bug, that happened to be painted robin’s egg blue. The mustang compacted like an accordian, and squished the two people inside. Three chunks of human flesh catapulted upward and broke through the window from which I was watching. One of the chunks landed on my arm and I screamed in horror and woke up.

Last night the tollhouse cookies entered, fresh-baked on a plate held by a woman who was supposed to be my sister, and who looked nothing like either of my actual related-to-me-by-blood sisters. An evil man dressed all in red (meant to be the devil, no doubt) entered the room and took her away. He told her he would murder her whole family (and while he said this, he transformed into a man in a Nazi SS uniform). Somehow I managed to hide behind a large sheet of white plastic, and the devil/Nazi man didn’t find me. I felt like a coward in the dream, and promised myself I would find her and rescue her. She came back later as a zombie, dressed in dirt-streaked rags and holding a plate of moldy tollhouse cookies, no doubt to reproach me for not rescuing her. I screamed in that dream, too — screamed and screamed and screamed until I thought my chest would explode. This time I didn’t wake up, though, and the rest of what happened is fuzzy, except I think the Nazi/devil man was standing outside behind my sister (I could see him through the hole she made when she crashed through the wall).

I believe I’m having these dreams because of unexpressed grief. I need to cry. I need to cry a lot, have one of those good, long, clearing-out-the-pipes cries. In order to have one, though, I need to battle many years of stoicism. I learned as a child to express all my emotions through only one — anger. Anger was the only “acceptable” emotion in my house. Everyone got royally pissed off on a regular basis, but I rarely saw anyone cry. When they did cry, it was quite painful to witness.

I vividly remember the first time I saw my father cry. Somehow I had formed the belief (at the age of about four) that grownups did not cry. I looked forward to growing up with joyful anticipation, because I sincerely believed that, once I attained grownuphood, my crying days would be over. Then I walked into the living room and saw my father looking at our couch. The same couch I had recently decorated with one of my mother’s bright lipsticks, that looked just like crayons to me. He stared at all the beautiful, swirly squiggles of vivid red, lay down on top of them and started to cry. His back was to me, but I knew the sounds, and I knew what that shaking back meant. Watching him cry was like witnessing a natural disaster, like seeing a mountain collapse. My dream of a grownup paradise free from pain and tears dissolved then and there.

Oddly enough, I had never connected that childhood belief before with my difficulty expressing grief. I’ve been waiting my whole life for my sadness to end, and it never will. Neither will my love, joy, anger, or any other emotion. Maybe, at age 48, it’s finally time for me to accept grief as a part of growing up. Wow! I typed that and the pipes suddenly started clearing out. Hallelujah and amen.

Thanks, as always, for your kind regard.

~Love and Blessings,
Selene~

Long Time, No Blog — Part I

I decided it was finally time to make a blog entry, after more than a month away from the blogiverse. Or blogosphere. Or whatever you want to call this fantastic other world we have all conspired to create.

Where have I been? To Shasta. To the Pinnacles. To the heights and depths of myself. I’ve spent a lot of time immersed in dreams, both in the process of dreaming and in the analysis of the dreams. One dream in the past month has been emblematic, so much so that I may paint the central image from it on the drum I bought (more on that later).

In this dream I am dressed in a long, golden-yellow gown and I am striding ahead of a large group of people, leading them away from a city under attack. I walk out onto a bridge, and then the world explodes around me. When the smoke clears, I stand on a blasted section of the bridge, alone. In front of me, darkness and jagged edges of concrete. Behind me, the same. I know I am relatively safe because I am standing in the center, with one of the bridge supports (the only one left) directly beneath me. On this concrete column are rusted metal rungs leading down into dark, roiling water — the only apparent way off the blasted piece of bridge. Above me dark clouds fill the sky. One of my kitties — the black one with two white patches (on her neck and lower belly) is with me on the bridge. I know this even though I do not see her.

Waking from this dream, I thought I understood the message, and I did — in part. I have since discovered there are many, many layers to this deceptively simple image, and each layer holds its own message. For me, the loudest message is: Everything has changed, and you must alter the way you have always walked. For most of my life, my path has been forward, onward, looking toward the future because (I was convinced) the future held the happiness I so desperately wanted. I believe the dream was meant to tell me “Happiness is here. Happiness is all around you, if you will only stop moving forward long enough to take it in.”

Being with myself, steadfastly in the present, is proving more difficult than I would have imagined. My forward movement for all those years kept me safe, provided a buffer from pain, from noxious things in my daily life with which I did not want to deal. If I try to list them all in this post, it will likely be the longest blog post ever made.

I promise I’ll be back soon with more. My life certainly is exciting — that I cannot deny. Thank you for reading, and for any comments you wish to leave. I appreciate your kind regard.

~Love and Blessings,
Selene~

The ‘Kill-Each-Other-with-Clay’ Game

It’s weird dream time again, folks. I woke up today from a dream in which I played a paint-ball-style game with a group of about 15 people. Just as the object of paintball is to ’shoot’ your opponents and win by ‘wounding’ or ‘killing’ them (as shown by the paint splatter on their clothing), the object of the game in my dream was to throw a large wad of moist clay at one’s opponent in hopes of ‘wounding’ or ‘killing’ them. The only way to actually ‘kill’ in this game was to hit your opponent smack in the face with the clay.

In the dream I could play the game the best, and I winnowed the playing field down to me and one or two other people. The whole time we played the game, all of us were laughing and greatly enjoying ourselves, and I remember we were mostly naked with much of our skin covered in dried clay.

At the end of the game — which, as it would turn out, was also the end of the dream — I had chased my last opponent into a large room in which all the players who had been ‘killed’ were waiting. Even though two large windows graced the far wall of the room, everyone sat in shadow, in darkness. From somewhere a light shone on myself and my final opponent — who I think was a young man — as we circled each other, hefting wads of clay and looking for the opportunity to strike.

We smiled hugely at one another, raised our clay lumps and simultaneously threw them — right into each other’s faces. And that was that. The only other impression I have from the dream is of the other game players — the ones who had been ‘killed’ — all sitting passively in the dark and watching us.

This dream makes my weird-o-meter go off the charts! I’ve got all kinds of associations and ideas frolicing around in my brain, such as: clay equalling the human body in poetry and literature, symbolizing our return to the soil after death. That’s the most obvious one to me. Also, I sort of get the symbolism of ‘playing the game’ of life, and that it doesn’t matter how good you are at it — if you equate staying alive with ‘winning’ the game, you’ll never win.

Perhaps this dream came into my headspace simply to make me think. About what, you ask? Well, about what would make me a winner, in other words, make my time on Earth — in this clay body – successful. Sure, I can have fun, and in the end I’m still getting that wad of clay in the face. So what do I want out of my life besides fun? Heavy question, eh?

I’ve got a lot to think about, it seems. Time for me to sign off and get started. Thanks for reading.

~Love and Blessings,
Selene~

Exploding Tennis Balls

I had a dream two nights ago featuring –  you guessed it! — exploding tennis balls. Some strange being whom I could not see kept throwing tennis balls into my house. They would explode and take out entire walls or blow pieces of furniture to tiny bits. I kept moving to another room to avoid them, but they kept coming.

At one point in the dream, my husband joined me. We were together in a room that had large blue plastic tubes running around the walls. Tennis balls began rolling through the tubes and landing in various locations in the room. This time, however, my husband and I picked them up and tossed them out a nearby window. Someone had told me that if I tossed the tennis balls into the ocean, I could lessen the impact of the explosions.

As it turned out, the ocean was too far away from the window. I tossed my tennis balls as far as I could, but they landed in the grass instead. My husband’s landed in the grass as well. When they exploded, the resulting fire began to eat the grass away, and I knew that the land would become barren and nothing would grow there ever again.

That’s about where the dream ended. There might have been more but it is fuzzy enough to be irretrievable at this point. One thing that seems obvious in the symbolism of the dream is the idea of self sabotage. No doubt the unseen entity tossing exploding tennis balls into the rooms of my house (which, for me, always represents my life) is my inner saboteur. I am very familiar with her. Over the years I have sabotaged friendships and job possibilities. I know that, for the most part, I am over this behavior. Apparently my subconscious is trying to show me that I still do it is some ways, and perhaps there are lessons to be gleaned from these incidents.

Water usually represents my subconscious mind in dreams, and I find it very interesting that we were trying to return the exploding tennis balls to, in effect, their place of origin. I need to sit with this one a while longer to discover if there are any further messages or symbolic meanings. I’m also sifting and searching through my life to see where I might still sabotage myself. I know that becoming conscious of such behavior is the first step to changing it, and I am happy at least to be on my way.

As always, thank you for reading. I appreciate your presence.

~Love and Blessings,
Selene~

Baby Dolls and Iowa Dreams

I woke up a short while ago from a four-hour nap during which I had vivid and somewhat disturbing dreams. The first was about a living baby doll, only it wasn’t life size. It was one of those tiny, hollow plastic ones I remember from my childhood, made of plastic so cheap that it was soft and translucent, with light showing through it in pinky peach tones. Someone told me in the dream that I needed to care for the doll as though it was a real baby (which, of course, it was). To do this I put it inside a clear plastic bag, then filled the bag with tiny replicas of baby things: a basinet, a blanket, a crib. I think there were a few toys in there, too — so small they were barely visible. My job was to keep an eye on the plastic bag and fluff it every so often so it wouldn’t settle over her tiny body and suffocate her. The feeling that stays with me most strongly from the dream is the deep love I felt for her. So fierce was my love that it pierced me like a javelin through the center of my body, and I found it painful and difficult to breathe. All my tiny baby doll did was sleep, and I knew in the dream that she always, always slept and it was my job to protect her while she dreamed her tiny baby dreams.

 The second dream is harder to pin down, but it seemed to be about living in a one-room apartment with my husband, my in laws and two children. In my waking life I’m married, with no in-laws in residence and two cats but no children. Somehow the six of us lived in a single room with style and grace, keeping out of each other’s way and getting along remarkably well. I felt the same deep, piercing love for all of them that I felt for the living baby doll in my first dream. Everything was sweet and lovely until one night when a large, scary man broke down our front door in the middle of the night. His intention was clearly to murder us all as we slept, but I escaped and ran to the apartment building next door to get help. It took me a long time to find someone who would open their door to help me, and while they were calling 9-1-1, the large man in my apartment took a shotgun and blew off the heads of my husband and his mother and father. What happened to my children, I don’t know. They simply seemed to disappear, to evaporate as though they had never really been. In the dream I felt my body rocked by each shotgun blast, and I wept long and silently for each of the people I had loved.

The strangest part of my dreams is that I woke up from them feeling lighter, as though something deep in me had been released and purged. Perhaps it has. And it’s only Tuesday! It will be interesting to see what I’m dreaming and feeling by the end of the week. Thanks for reading. As always, I am grateful you are there taking in my words.

~Love and Blessings,
Selene~

A Night of No Dreaming

I decided to do a post tonight before I leave for Iowa. I’ll be attending the Summer Writing Festival there, and I hope to return with some new and wonderful poems from the workshops I’m taking. Tonight, for me, will be a night of no dreaming because I will stay awake until I get on a plane bound for Cedar Rapids. Well, actually, it’s bound for Chicago first, then on from there to Iowa. Usually the only time I don’t have dreams is when I don’t sleep. I may have interesting dreams to blog about from napping on the plane, though.

I already have a new poem or six percolating in my consciousness. One is likely to be about my experience of telling fellow Californians that I am visiting Iowa. “Really?” asked more than one person. “On purpose?” Which uproarious statement was followed by gales of laughter. Well, perhaps not gales, but certainly snickers. Which reminds me, I’m hungry and I wish I had some chocolate. Ah me, I have readdicted myself to that velvetly, heavenly brown substance and am now rekicking the habit. Sigh. Perhaps someday I’ll be able to eat chocolate with impunity. And strawberries. Ah, that brings back such fond(ue) memories (okay, okay, I’ll stop)!

I may post a few blogs while in Iowa, since the friend I am going with assures me there is Internet access on the Iowa University campus. She posits there might even be wireless available now, given its pervasivness and popularity.

It is after two am in my part of the world and I can hear a train whistle blowing out in the distant dark. How different a train sounds in the middle of the night than in the bright light of day. I love the sound both ways.

Time for me to sign off. I need to cook food to bring on the plane with me. Or at least throw a salad together. Blog at you later.

~Love and Blessings,
Selene~

P.S. — In case I didn’t make it clear, I was surprised and appalled by people snickering at me for going to Iowa “on purpose.” Of course I’m going on purpose! How else can I expect to get anywhere?

Carving a Dog o’ Lantern

I had a very strange dream a few nights ago that I am still puzzling over. No matter how I try to view it for interpretation, I’m left stranded in a thick fog of confusion. Maybe I just need to accept that I’m really weird and sometimes I have nutty dreams! If you can offer assistance on this one, I’d be eternally grateful.

In my dream, a little dog — some sort of terrier with wiry, dark fur — was running around inside a large building, barking. The interior of the building looked kind of like a log cabin, and functioned as a bed and breakfast inn. I was one of the proprietors, and the dog was a stray I had adopted.

At one point the dog ran outside to bring something back for me; I knew in the dream that the item was important, but I didn’t actually know what it was. The dog was gone for a long time, and when he returned it was snowing outside. He ran in the front door of the cabin, barking and (somehow) carrying a large pumpkin. I was very happy to see the dog and even happier to see the pumpkin.

The dog jumped up on a table and I walked up to it with a large knife in my hand. As the dog sat passively in front of me, I lopped off its head and then its butt. There was no blood, because the dog was really a pumpkin, or had insides like one. I was appalled in the dream by the dog’s passiveness. He just offered himself up for slaughter without a struggle. I was also upset because I had cared about the dog, and didn’t understand why I would do such a terrible thing to him.

Well, that’s the dream. What do you folks out in blogland make of that one? I really am interested to know (and I thank you in advance).

~Love and Blessings,
Selene~