Sue Vincent's Blog: Echoes of Life - Posts Tagged "dreams"
Door of Dreams
Would you walk the corridor of dreams,
Into the dark and unknown inner places,
Where silent voices whisper your desires
From unkissed lips upon amorphous faces?
Dare you cross the Temple chequerboard,
Where black and white in alternating tread
Reflect the hope and terror of the night,
To face imaginations deepest dread?
Could you face each inner world you find,
Knowing that they are a true reflection
That show the turmoil of the conscious mind
Destroying your illusion of perfection?
Can you face the demons hidden there,
Where every rock and tree and fragrant flower,
May hold the cryptic kernel of your fears
Reverberating with emotive power?
Look deep into the mirror of your dreams
To see reflected ancient joys and sorrow,
Begin to read the soul that journeys there
And face today and walk toward tomorrow.
http://scvincent.com/
Into the dark and unknown inner places,
Where silent voices whisper your desires
From unkissed lips upon amorphous faces?
Dare you cross the Temple chequerboard,
Where black and white in alternating tread
Reflect the hope and terror of the night,
To face imaginations deepest dread?
Could you face each inner world you find,
Knowing that they are a true reflection
That show the turmoil of the conscious mind
Destroying your illusion of perfection?
Can you face the demons hidden there,
Where every rock and tree and fragrant flower,
May hold the cryptic kernel of your fears
Reverberating with emotive power?
Look deep into the mirror of your dreams
To see reflected ancient joys and sorrow,
Begin to read the soul that journeys there
And face today and walk toward tomorrow.
http://scvincent.com/
Nightmares
I woke sobbing this morning after a fitful sleep filled with nightmares. Not the kind where the monster with dripping fangs chases you like a scared rabbit through the set of a Hammer horror movie. Those would be easily dealt with… wake, smile and turn over. Possibly a quick glance under the bed, just in case… No, these were the nightmares of ‘what ifs’, the hidden fears and worries that seethe deviously below the surface of the mind until they find an outlet in dream.
I seldom have bad dreams these days. There was a time, not so very long ago when the nightmare persisted in sleep and in the light of day, when reality itself was a nightmare with no waking to relieve it and the daily terror of opening my eyes brought worse fears than the night. It was a time followed by hope and worry, punctuated by flashbacks and questions to which each answer seemed more painful than the last. But those days have slipped into the realm of memory and the rich well of experienced life, exorcised by achievement and laughter.
I could say I have no idea what caused the nightmares last night but I would be lying to you and to myself. The trigger, of course, was pride in my son. That he could, physically, intellectually and emotionally write yesterday’s blog post, so coherently and with such depth is an astounding achievement in the face of the past three years and yet another predicted impossibility smashed into shards. Yet in spite of this and the wonderful response the post was given, it opened the door of memory and resurrected old fears long dismissed and disproven, but which left their scars on my heart and which, every so often, remind me of their presence.
Of course, once the nightmare is in full gallop the vulnerability creeps in and all the other doubts and worries surface. All those what ifs that everyday reality holds. From the most mundane financial niggles, through the emotional fragilities, to a meeting I have coming up today and a visit to see the surgeons tomorrow…. all the possibilities and unlikelihoods decided to play themselves out in a facsimile of reality on the cinema screen of dream.
It is the very plausibility of these nightmares that make them so heartrending and terrifying. In sleep we do not have the clarity of choice that we do when awake, nor do we have access to the strengths and experience that make us who we are. We are simply the victim of our own oft unspoken and unexamined fears and we wake in a fragile solitude, crying like a child in need of comfort.
So in the cold light of day and over the third coffee, I take out the nightmares and examine them. With my whole being awake and aware I can see the flaws and inconsistencies in the dreams. I can turn and face those fears which have a foundation in reality and deal with them, admitting their presence and validity, admitting my own vulnerability, yet choosing to face them straight on, looking them in the eye so to speak, armed with a lifetime of experience and an arsenal of learned strength.
After all, what use is being awake if we choose to let the terrors of sleep rule our lives? The freedom of clarity can shine into the darkest corner of our fears and show that the monster lurking there was merely a shadow in the moonlight.
I seldom have bad dreams these days. There was a time, not so very long ago when the nightmare persisted in sleep and in the light of day, when reality itself was a nightmare with no waking to relieve it and the daily terror of opening my eyes brought worse fears than the night. It was a time followed by hope and worry, punctuated by flashbacks and questions to which each answer seemed more painful than the last. But those days have slipped into the realm of memory and the rich well of experienced life, exorcised by achievement and laughter.
I could say I have no idea what caused the nightmares last night but I would be lying to you and to myself. The trigger, of course, was pride in my son. That he could, physically, intellectually and emotionally write yesterday’s blog post, so coherently and with such depth is an astounding achievement in the face of the past three years and yet another predicted impossibility smashed into shards. Yet in spite of this and the wonderful response the post was given, it opened the door of memory and resurrected old fears long dismissed and disproven, but which left their scars on my heart and which, every so often, remind me of their presence.
Of course, once the nightmare is in full gallop the vulnerability creeps in and all the other doubts and worries surface. All those what ifs that everyday reality holds. From the most mundane financial niggles, through the emotional fragilities, to a meeting I have coming up today and a visit to see the surgeons tomorrow…. all the possibilities and unlikelihoods decided to play themselves out in a facsimile of reality on the cinema screen of dream.
It is the very plausibility of these nightmares that make them so heartrending and terrifying. In sleep we do not have the clarity of choice that we do when awake, nor do we have access to the strengths and experience that make us who we are. We are simply the victim of our own oft unspoken and unexamined fears and we wake in a fragile solitude, crying like a child in need of comfort.
So in the cold light of day and over the third coffee, I take out the nightmares and examine them. With my whole being awake and aware I can see the flaws and inconsistencies in the dreams. I can turn and face those fears which have a foundation in reality and deal with them, admitting their presence and validity, admitting my own vulnerability, yet choosing to face them straight on, looking them in the eye so to speak, armed with a lifetime of experience and an arsenal of learned strength.
After all, what use is being awake if we choose to let the terrors of sleep rule our lives? The freedom of clarity can shine into the darkest corner of our fears and show that the monster lurking there was merely a shadow in the moonlight.
Fragments
I woke this morning after strange dreams with an odd yearning. It floated around the edges of my mind over coffee and as I tried to pin it down it kept melting into the background, almost as if it was shy. A fragile, fleeting impression, ephemeral, vague and unrealised.
Never one to balk at a mystery, especially one lurking around the periphery of my own consciousness, I sat down to contemplate it.
To begin with thoughts of the last thing I saw before I closed my eyes fluttered like a mischievous butterfly just beyond vision. As I do not like the substrata of conscious worry to intrude at these times, I thought the best thing to do was net it and have a look.
It was an innocuous image, just a small bottle of medicine. Of course, in itself, there was no problem with that. But as with most things, the association chain led a bit deeper to the hospital letter that lies beside it, the unpleasant nature of the impending procedures and the inevitable underlying wondering about what, if anything, they might find.
I can’t say I’m worried really. I am sure it is just a mechanical problem, if you like, and hopefully they can tweak the ageing machinery back to a decent level of performance. I don’t expect Formula 1 … not from a vintage model. Still, I’m not too happy about the prospect of other people rummaging around my innards. There’s not that much more they can stick in a specimen jar, to be fair, that I wouldn’t actually miss.
So okay. I accept all that. The up-side is that it is being dealt with, finally. *Files that thought…
So what was this vague lurker on the edges of awareness?
As I tried to get a better look at it, it was that phrase, ‘bits of me’, that was hovering around. As that was the only observable detail, I focussed on that.
Bits, facets, fragments…Now I was getting somewhere.
I thought how fragmented we are most of the time. Bits of our attention are given or called here and there, certain of our skills and talents required but seldom more than that. If I am asked to hang a picture, for example, it has no relevance that I can bake a fabulous chocolate cake or speak decent French, and (unless they have an urgent desire for cake with a little je ne sais quoi) the person who asks me will have no interest in those talents at that moment in time.
How seldom is it that we are asked to give ourselves whole to any task or area of our lives? Even rarer, perhaps, are the occasions when we choose to do so, simply because we can.
Of course, from there it was a natural progression to wonder if anyone is ever really known, except in a fragmentary way, through the facet of the self in action in a particular arena or relationship. Even our nearest and dearest have things they do not share with us… my sons, for example, though I know them very well… too well, they will tell you, sometimes… have areas of their lives that are not, as Nick puts it, ‘Mum-friendly’. And that is as it should be.
But that wasn’t the whole story. There was something else. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it somehow, but I could see the shadow it was casting on the moving thoughts. I was getting close. And my curiosity was piqued. So what was it?
We seldom, consciously, know and accept our entire self, of course. We readily admit our flaws to ourselves once we have become aware of them. Yet, while we may admit, nay boast, even, of the glories of our respective chocolate gateaux, few of us will admit to those personality traits which are seen as ‘good’. We may admit to the socially acceptable ones... the type we put on job application forms… flexible, adaptable, good with people… but the really good ones, we seldom recognise in ourselves. Possibly because those who voice that recognition of their own better qualities rarely seem to actually have them.‘I see myself as compassionate/empathetic/generous’ … the vast majority of the time these things are said by those who aren’t and we have all known those who voice them and yet wouldn’t know true humility or compassion if it hit them in the face with a wet fish.
But voicing it is different from feeling it. To speak of compassion and to feel it working through the layers of your being, reaching out, that is a different thing. And perhaps we need to take that scintilla of time to simply recognise the good within us as we feel it, in exactly the same way as we recognise the darker bits of ourselves in action… the ones that make us cringe and squirm occasionally. We all have those.
That, I think, was where the yearning came in. Because unless we are prepared to admit who we are to ourselves... the good equally with the less good, accepting our wholeness in all its balanced beauty, how can anyone else ever see that in us too?
Don’t we all yearn for that on some level, to be loved and accepted for who we are in our entirety? Yet we hide the good, even from ourselves, behind a socially acceptable modesty while brandishing our flaws and frailties as if they alone define who we are. They do not. We define who we are. As much by how we choose to see ourselves as by anything else. If we see ourselves whole, perhaps others may too. They cannot until we do, as we project outward only a fragment of who we are. The saying 'love thy neighbour as thyself' comes to mind. Maybe if we love our whole selves we can love others wholly too.
Astrophysics tells us that the very physical fabric of everything we know, including our own bodies, is made of the matter from which the stars were formed. Our physical forms exist because somewhere, aeons ago, a star died. If that is so, why shouldn’t we shine?
Never one to balk at a mystery, especially one lurking around the periphery of my own consciousness, I sat down to contemplate it.
To begin with thoughts of the last thing I saw before I closed my eyes fluttered like a mischievous butterfly just beyond vision. As I do not like the substrata of conscious worry to intrude at these times, I thought the best thing to do was net it and have a look.
It was an innocuous image, just a small bottle of medicine. Of course, in itself, there was no problem with that. But as with most things, the association chain led a bit deeper to the hospital letter that lies beside it, the unpleasant nature of the impending procedures and the inevitable underlying wondering about what, if anything, they might find.
I can’t say I’m worried really. I am sure it is just a mechanical problem, if you like, and hopefully they can tweak the ageing machinery back to a decent level of performance. I don’t expect Formula 1 … not from a vintage model. Still, I’m not too happy about the prospect of other people rummaging around my innards. There’s not that much more they can stick in a specimen jar, to be fair, that I wouldn’t actually miss.
So okay. I accept all that. The up-side is that it is being dealt with, finally. *Files that thought…
So what was this vague lurker on the edges of awareness?
As I tried to get a better look at it, it was that phrase, ‘bits of me’, that was hovering around. As that was the only observable detail, I focussed on that.
Bits, facets, fragments…Now I was getting somewhere.
I thought how fragmented we are most of the time. Bits of our attention are given or called here and there, certain of our skills and talents required but seldom more than that. If I am asked to hang a picture, for example, it has no relevance that I can bake a fabulous chocolate cake or speak decent French, and (unless they have an urgent desire for cake with a little je ne sais quoi) the person who asks me will have no interest in those talents at that moment in time.
How seldom is it that we are asked to give ourselves whole to any task or area of our lives? Even rarer, perhaps, are the occasions when we choose to do so, simply because we can.
Of course, from there it was a natural progression to wonder if anyone is ever really known, except in a fragmentary way, through the facet of the self in action in a particular arena or relationship. Even our nearest and dearest have things they do not share with us… my sons, for example, though I know them very well… too well, they will tell you, sometimes… have areas of their lives that are not, as Nick puts it, ‘Mum-friendly’. And that is as it should be.
But that wasn’t the whole story. There was something else. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it somehow, but I could see the shadow it was casting on the moving thoughts. I was getting close. And my curiosity was piqued. So what was it?
We seldom, consciously, know and accept our entire self, of course. We readily admit our flaws to ourselves once we have become aware of them. Yet, while we may admit, nay boast, even, of the glories of our respective chocolate gateaux, few of us will admit to those personality traits which are seen as ‘good’. We may admit to the socially acceptable ones... the type we put on job application forms… flexible, adaptable, good with people… but the really good ones, we seldom recognise in ourselves. Possibly because those who voice that recognition of their own better qualities rarely seem to actually have them.‘I see myself as compassionate/empathetic/generous’ … the vast majority of the time these things are said by those who aren’t and we have all known those who voice them and yet wouldn’t know true humility or compassion if it hit them in the face with a wet fish.
But voicing it is different from feeling it. To speak of compassion and to feel it working through the layers of your being, reaching out, that is a different thing. And perhaps we need to take that scintilla of time to simply recognise the good within us as we feel it, in exactly the same way as we recognise the darker bits of ourselves in action… the ones that make us cringe and squirm occasionally. We all have those.
That, I think, was where the yearning came in. Because unless we are prepared to admit who we are to ourselves... the good equally with the less good, accepting our wholeness in all its balanced beauty, how can anyone else ever see that in us too?
Don’t we all yearn for that on some level, to be loved and accepted for who we are in our entirety? Yet we hide the good, even from ourselves, behind a socially acceptable modesty while brandishing our flaws and frailties as if they alone define who we are. They do not. We define who we are. As much by how we choose to see ourselves as by anything else. If we see ourselves whole, perhaps others may too. They cannot until we do, as we project outward only a fragment of who we are. The saying 'love thy neighbour as thyself' comes to mind. Maybe if we love our whole selves we can love others wholly too.
Astrophysics tells us that the very physical fabric of everything we know, including our own bodies, is made of the matter from which the stars were formed. Our physical forms exist because somewhere, aeons ago, a star died. If that is so, why shouldn’t we shine?
