Creating inner landscapes
The Druid meditation of The Sacred Grove is, in part, about creating an inner landscape. Other visualisations exist within OBOD and the wider Druid community that also have that inner landscape aspect, and any pathworking will deliver it too. Inner landscapes can be important tools for reflection, exploration and spiritual experience. There are some who feel they connect us to other worlds, and they can be a useful barometer for how we’re feeling, as well. The limitation is that we construct them fairly consciously, and so they are as likely to reflect our desires as anything else.
Bears, I have noticed, tend not to shit in people’s inner woods so much.
In my late teens and early twenties, I had an incredibly strange and vivid inner landscape when dreaming. There were places I was able to visit repeatedly as well. During my twenties, I lost this, pared down to a tiny inner landscape that was a twisted version of the place I’d grown up. I did not dream widely, or wildly for a long time. If I’d allowed myself to take it seriously, I would have realised what a mess my life was in a good deal sooner.
Over the last few years, the less conscious bits of my mind have started constructing landscapes again. Big, wild landscapes full of detail and possibility. Some of which I am revisiting regularly. It feels like my mind starting to work properly again.
What are these inner landscapes? Some of it, for me, is about relationship with the land I live on. If that relationship is not good, if I am not rooted, then I won’t dream the place. When things are good, strange but familiar versions of the places I spend time will show up in my dreaming. Some of it is to do with my emotional inner landscapes. This is not unrelated to my relationship with the land. I can’t be at ease in a place where I feel no connection and no sense of belonging. How much inspiration I have and how well my imagination is being fed and is able to flourish also contributes to my making of inner landscapes.
Work that focuses on interpretation can encourage us to pull out a few key features and try to decide what they mean. What was that creature in the sacred grove, and what was it doing, and what does that kind of creature signify? As we have, on some level constructed our inner landscapes, be they dreamed or visualised, treating them as a code to crack may be reductive to say the least. If we take a more holistic view of them, they may make more sense. To go into an actual wood and ask ‘what is the meaning of my seeing a deer here?’ is to miss out the deer’s relationship with the wood, the seasons, the food supplies. To take the deer out of context in search of personal meaning can, in real life, allow you to miss what was actually happening. Deer have their own reasons.
To take a deer out of a dream landscape as a symbol, may be interesting, but there are no more guarantees that the symbolic potential was the important bit. Maybe it’s more important to note that your inner wood now has creatures in it. Inner landscapes offer us the potential for a bigger picture, and it pays not to pick them apart and lose our sense of the wood by staring too hard at the trees.
More thoughts on interpretation and dreams here.
