Thursday, January 8, 2009

Big Dreams

2 weeks before I turned 38 I had the following dream. I am talking to a unknown person on a football oval. Its Deanmore oval just down the road from Scarborough primary school.Perth where I grew up. In the background behind the man I am facing, a light pole falls over and leaves a red dent in the ground. Out of this dent arises a sort of shit volcano. Its shaped like a volcano but its made of shit. It keeps growing until it begins to envelop the man I am talking too. To be precise the shit comes up to his mouth.
Its well known that big changes happen to many men at 38: the midlife crisis and I was no exception. 8 years later and lots of monumental changes that are still working there way out I can get some perspective on it. On the one hand it was my dream and it was connected to my"shit" so to speak, and at the same time I think it is concerned with much wider issues. In tribal cultures it would be called a "big dream" that's meant for the whole tribe. I have had many thoughts and reflections about it over the years here is some of them. Its a "light" pole that falls over:Our source of literal light and metaphorically our source of spiritual light perhaps, the light of reason maybe? And electricity is something we just take for granted now and is so fundamental to our way of life we are only just beginning to think twice about where it comes from and the enormous cost to the earth to have it at our fingertips! My surname is Power and my dad was an electrician. I did an apprenticeship as an electrician but didn't continue. Its like fate has conspired to make me be aware of electricity! Uranus is conjunct Sun in my astrological chart and Uranus is connected to electricy( what a coincidence...not!)
And again metaphorically its a light that is up high(in my head maybe) that falls over and dents the ground. Like lightning earthing, it draws up the shit which must of been under the surface all along. What is the shit of the earth that I/we have discarded/buried? Partly it was to do with my mind-body split, something we all suffer from in various ways. My depression, despair that I had run away from since childhood and also the awareness that I/we live in vast interconnected ecology of life-forms that are tired of being ignored. There is a lot more that I will return too (in a future entry...I promise)as it was and still is a big dream.
What struck me recently was when I shared this dream that two men(no coincidence here!) wanted to argue with me about what it might mean. Not that either had any special expertise in dreams but hat never stops men from having opinions does it . One who is an indigenous artist of some repute told me that dreams are just the rehashing of events of the day. A sort of simplified Freudian approach. Neither could grasp that the dream might be bigger then me or that after 8 years I might have some insight into it!! Sadly this is to be expected from most educated people. White supremacy is not dead and it doesnt just belong to white people...but thats another blog. Our education even in the Arts more often then not reduces the world and robs it of mystery, awe and anything remotely spiritual . And worse still it reinforces our rampant individualism and narcissism.
Coincidentally my indigenous mate had experienced a number of meaningful coincidences(synchronicity) recently that he didn't want to accept as meaningful. He was turning 38 in a week!! Sadly I think his education had cut him off from his roots in the culture of collective dreaming. Its ironic that a Swiss Psychiatrist(Jung) can propound theories that open the door beyond Western rationalism and are very compatible with traditional indigenous religion yet he wont be taught to indigenous students who will suffer through fashionable French Postmodernism. No wonder the earth is erupting with shit!! We mine her, concrete and pave over her and worse of all ignore her, pretend that we are autonomous units and that she can't communicate to us meaningfully. That's what my good friends are implying, that the earth , the cosmos is just there. It doesn't care about us or what we do to it, its just there and we are here and what ever goes on in my head is about whats going on in my head. If the last 8 years have taught me anything its that its all alive!! Everything is alive and meaningfully connected and communicating. If we are not hearing its because we don't have ears to hear!! Our theories scientific, postmodern, cultural have conspired to block all meaningful communication and we are surprised to be facing a "epidemic of depression" as the psychologists tell us. A tidal wave of depression as some say!!
Wake up folks! That shit volcano is not just mine its ours. "We are all in this together" says the Coke ad. Clever marketing as usual. Its targeting what we are dreaming. At some level we know this and we are hoping to live more fully like this . After all its human to be connected. Selfishness sucks, get with the revolution. Share your dreams with friends and listen to there's and imagine that they are you and you are them and lets hope that shit volcano doesn't erupt! Take care.

2 comments:

  1. As we enter a year very much dominated by earth energy it will be the collective dream of us all that will purge the earth of the damage that has been done, allowing the light energy to grow stronger, healing all in its path, what we start in our own thought process will grow and spread, so dream and heal and spread love and peace to all.
    You are a great visionary Jeff

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  2. Hi Jeff,

    If it was my dream I'd also be pondering the 'ground-breaking' that occurred because of the light pole descending, and the 'power' inherent also in the 'shit' i.e. such a wonderful fertiliser for the Earth. Elements of release here for sure, but also growth.



    Dreams are so incredibly multilayered aren't they. Great dream, indeed. And obviously it keeps on unfolding over time for you. Maybe you could call this type of dream a Power Dream - de-light-full, oh yes. I agree wholeheartedly, everything is inter-connected.



    I LOVE the philosopher Arthur Schopenhaur's take on this:



    'Life is a vast dream, dreamed by a single being; but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too. Hence, everything interlocks and harmonises with everything else.'



    For me this throws light poles on the magic of synchronicity. I have shared the foregoing with many people, but I haven't yet found anyone yet who gets as excited about it as I do. I can only deduce that they have not yet experienced what Schopenhaur is talking about it. But I am sure that all dedicated dreamworkers will resonate immediately.



    Hopefully, Beth

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