Earth Floa Tk Cement Suede Walking
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“Especially in dreams, it is clear how powerful the imagination is-it is capable of shaping a totally real world, indistinguishable from the physical world.” -Robert Bosnak A Little Course in Dreams Sitting in a circle around the woodstove, swaddled in blankets, here in RB’s barn in a rural outlying town of Boston, we were learning to incubate dreams. As we practiced the exercises RB walked us through, we were to think of a problematic area in our lives, a relationship, a work-related challenge, or something strictly personal. We were to give rise to an effigy of a problem and hold it for assorted minutes before we went to sleep each night. Then we would ask the unconscious for a dream. It was for the duration of this Dream Intensive over the leaf-strewn weekend that I found the courage to write the poem with regards to my father. I am a dream guide and a poetical and I think I gravitated toward this work to heal the loss of my father for the duration of my adolescence. Currently I was instructing Dante’s Inferno. One morning a few weeks back I awoke unable to catch a snippet of my dream. But as I was dressing, it occurred to me that I could write my father’s story in the framework of a soul’s traveling from self-destruction to the afterlife. I wanted to show how the soul’s gradual realization of it is narrow faith systems on world influenced the afterlife transition. I knew from the Tibetan Book of The Dead as well as other reading regarding death and near-death experiences, that the prompt amount of time after death, the bardo state, was dreamlike, and allround the transition the soul experiences what it had felt or believed at the time of death. The ancients believed those who die abruptly often times do not even realize it and they recreate intimate worlds. In my poem, the soul would ultimately see it is error and journeying back to Oneness, awaiting another prospect to incarnate on earth. The reading I’d been doing along with Dante’s work gave me the idea for a sequence of poems. One night, I was battling insomnia; I was abruptly given the words to a poem. I turned on the light and started out to write. I had more of a sense of receiving the words than I normally did when I wrote. The whole thing came quickly as one piece. The protagonist of the narrative was only identified as “He,” but I knew the story had an omniscient narrator and focalized on my father. I saw the beginning of a poem with regards to depression and yearning for something missing from life. I think of it now as the spirit’s homesickness. A sense of incompletion, or that the meaning “of the world is not in the world,” as the poetical Rumi beautifully puts it. The mystic senses through the illusion of what we have devised with our egos, our beliefs in separation from an a priori union. All my life I have affiliated to that concept, even while it’s ineffability. When in college, I encountered Yeats’ “Among School Children,” O body swayed to music, O brightening glimpse /how do you recognise the dancer from the dance?”. I fell in love with the kind of poetry that reaches beyond the known world. * Friday night and Saturday were full of intense work in which I took a somewhat active part asking questions, as the group led the dreamer deeper to make connections amidst ideas and images, resistances and reactions, among surface emotions and suppressed undertones. Dreams leap and transform the way poems do. As in a free writing session in which I draft of a poem, I liked this intensity, the pressure and the reverberations that dreamwork provoked. Each night after the workshop I got into bed and visualized myself at my desk writing my opus, the poem in regards to my father. I had a great deal of scraps and snippings of dreams Friday and Saturday but it wasn’t until Sunday morning that my incubation hatched and I had the dream I wanted to share. I went over it myself assorted times to memorize it. I knew once we began, it would exaggerate and deepen. I hadn’t wanted to write my father’s story from the wounded daughter’s viewpoint. But I thought a broken man’s afterlife traveling might resonate with a heap of persons who believe they’re abandoned by God, thirsty for spirit, mentally suffering. Though my father often times joyously celebrated his life, I knew he had felt this black hole as well. Because I felt it when he felt it, years ago, before I was even conscious of what I felt. The rhythm of RB’s workshops always evolved in such a way that the person who felt pressed to offer a dream did so at the right time. Of course, we all learned more in regards to ourselves whether we were cooking our own dream or that of another. On Sunday the group gave me their attention. We sat in a circle and relaxed in our chairs, curled into our blankets and pillows and closed our eyes. I told my dream. * “I am in my Victorian apartment whose atmosphere resembles the townhouse where I lived with my husband years ago. I’m with two male friends looking up at a pipe leaking in a ceiling corner. One of the guys is Bruce, a terrifi poetical and ex-teacher of mine. The other is more vague. I don’t recognize him. Suddenly a big wave of water floods the room and we struggle to save ourselves. I hopelessly undertake to plug the leak. The scene changes and I’m walking into the little room where I write. I see that my printer is malfunctioning. It’s spitting out papers at a high velocity. There is a sense of delight as I watch this chaotic scene. Then I am outside with a young woman who reminds me of Cinderella in her rags. I perceive that she’s attempting out as some kind of astronaut. She disappears, I assume, into the rocket, and I am observing the launching… Countdown… Ignition, and the rocket lifts shooting fire. As it rises I see two feet dangling out the bottom. Strangely they are the feet of a chicken. “ * The group laughed at the last effigy though we all knew it was in all likelihood severe as well. RB started out the dreamwork by helping me to ground the atmosphere of the basi scene. The signification of the setting as my present home, relating to a former home, establishes the aroused surroundings as a regressive overlay. What I was sentiment in this share of the dream was a revisitation to a former aroused state. That Victorian home was a place in which I felt stifled emotionally. Particularly resonant was the fact that my ex-husband did not approve of a great deal of of my poetry. Whenever I felt relief in expressing dark sensations through poetry my ex not only did not want to listen me, but did not want me to confide in anybody else locally, even a counselor. In my depression I devised an irrational fear into a symptom, I couldn’t bear to drive over bridges. RB cited that I was in an “explosive” situation. I recalled this amount of time of my life when I was married and inadvertently came across that my father passed away of a Demerol overdose rather than a heart attack, which is what I’d been told at the time. I was 15 when he passed and I didn’t uncover this truth until I was 30. That fact coupled with my unhappiness with my husband’s limitations contributed to my depression. I remembered we had new ceilings installed as the old ones were cracked and stained. At one point, one ceiling had fallen, an explosion of plaster and dust. The water leaking in the dream related to overflowing emotions calling for expression. As the room floods, I am overwhelmed with attempting to stop it; it becomes life-threatening. Maybe the scene even related to “water underneath the bridge(s)” I dire crossing over, as if my past was threatening my present. RB and the other players in the workshop helped me feel the tension of the situation. Someone asked, “Where in your life right now do you feel stifled, in an emotional manner explosive?” It dawned on me quickly: my idea of a poetry sequence. My father’s death was a private portion of my life. Then there was the newly came upon notion that I perfectly necessitated to heal my father complex for my own well-being. I necessitated to shift the imprint of my father’s self-destruction within me, and release the talented, joyous father who had been lost, overshadowed by the negative images of his last years. I would never be whole or generative or confidant until I dispelled these fears and resurrected the terrifi man. I knew I had what Jungians call a “wounded animus.” My unconscious was providing me another way to heal through poetry. But I had even more fears of these dream pipes bursting. The fear of exposing my father’s personal story, of what my family would think or say. This was similar to the control that my ex-husband had over my capacity to express myself. The sense of suffocation was familiar. I remembered how one of the temptations that the Buddha had to protest was that of “social obligation.” I felt obligated to protect my family from my own discoveries, obligated to comply with my husband’s wishes, even altho speaking my truth was the only thing that could set me free. I had drafted three new poems but I was still debating whether I could go ahead. I explained my intent to the group and the fears surrounding it. RB pressed me to feel suffocation, tension of the two poles, release of the water and the requirement to plug it up. I realized metaphorically that the drowning itself would be like suffocation, a synchronistic irony: my father’s death was asphyxiation, the loss of breath. Again I admired the wisdom of the dream. The focus moved to the men who were with me; I identified Bruce as a very successful poet. But he was also a Vietnam vet and wrote strong, imploding poems when it comes to his experiences in the war. His poems were understated but the power they kept was exceptionally combustible. As a product or the Boomer era, Vietnam, and the a great deal of books I had read on the war, seemed to be percentage of my personal mythology too. After I had described him from the exterior as a strong but with regard to emotions vulnerable man, as well as a poetical in charge of his craft, the group moved me into Bruce’s knowingness in the dream scene. To my surprise, I felt his confidence, his capacity to manage the flood waters. I felt him move toward my own effigy in the dream, determined to aid the Deborah persona stop up the hole. As we took the dream onward into active imagination it seemed to me he could get the water beneath control. One of the women zeroed in on the hole in the pipe, which spontaneously morphed into a hole in the ceiling. “What is just above the hole?” she asked me.
As I pictured it in the living room of my former townhouse, I responded literally. “My bedroom is without delay above.” It was a bedroom where I lay awake night after night. Though it apparently kept great symbolism in my unconscious, I hadn’t thought of that bedroom and those unhappy months for a long time. “Is the hole beyond repair?” another woman asked. “Will you have to get an wholly new ceiling?” The hole felt like a wound connected up to my life through that bedroom where I had lain despondently in depression. So the hole not only went through my marriage but back to the father. “I don’t think I may patch the hole up but Bruce could.” “And do you think your father had that hole?” “Uh huh. He fell into it and drowned.” The words came right out of my mouth. “Do you want to explain that?” RB asked. I hesitated. “well… there was a self-destruction which still seems to live inside me. I can’t repair the hole in the dream. But Bruce, my poetic self, may repair it.” I felt the hole located in my solar plexus, where we carry our power. Then it was indispensable for me to feel Bruce’s competence. He served in this dream as a positive inner male figure, my own aspiration for success. Moreover, Bruce himself had turned his wounds into beautiful, if horrific, war poems. RB led me to feel Bruce’s power within. I moved imaginatively through his body to patch the ceiling. I raised my arms in my imagination. ” I feel the strength in my arms, the muscles seem taut… “ We moved in to detect the other man in the dream. This is where RB’s embodied dreamwork is particularly effective. In the actual dream the other man was vague. But in the dream space, which the group creates, i.e., behind closed eyes, new images come up. Now that shadowy man’s posture and shape begun to remind me of another friend, JP, one of the poets in my peer group workshop. When I told the group, they asked when it comes to JP’s poetry. I considered JP’s work starkly brilliant. And, I had to marvel at the imagination’s precision! I uttered, closely as an after thought, “He has but one subject, his father!” J.P.’s father was imprisoned in a German work camp in WW II. He was freed by the allies and moved to America. He became alcoholic and had physically mistreated my friend JP allround his childhood. Despite the beatings, JP loved him and wrote darkly amusive and heartbreaking poems with regards to him. Though none of this occurred to me when I saw the shadowy man take on JP’s shape, he was a perfective associate to the Bruce figure. Both men made music from their pain. After a long pause, we moved into the scene in my home office. Here the printer explodes. It’s a dissimilar explosion from the hole in the ceiling, but it is also the salient feature in the scene. In the dream I felt joy and curiosity upon discovering the printer gone crazy. I was not alarmed that it was malfunctioning. I merely concentered on watching it spit out sheets of paper. RB and the group had me play in the effigy for a while. I felt the excitement and imaginatively walked around amidst the papers as if they were snowflakes. In the active imagination that followed, I also came across poems written on the paper. The computer was symbolically embodying the procedure I would undergo. And it occurred to me that perchance the fact that I became a poetical in the basi place was the result of my father’s malfunctioning. Many come to poetry from a wounded childhood. But the effigy of the computer like some crazy scientist at work was both funny and heartening. There is no doubt there release when in the zone of the writing routine which is why we write in the introductory place, the sheer originative act itself; art for art’s sake. I’ve always felt the sarcasm of writing regarding a sad or sorry subject and then sentiment delighted and satisfied in the process. Finally we moved to the last scene of the dream. I felt I was not in the effigy but looking at it. I saw this waif-like young woman who was looking up at a rocket. I knew, in the way we just recognise in dreams, she was applying for astronaut status. The group tried to move me into her interiority. I felt there was something more pathetic with regards to her than plainly her ragged clothing. But the costume was a good trigger to get me into the sentiment of her body. “What kind of shoes is she wearing?” someone asked. Though I hadn’t looked at them in the dream per se, I noticed now her feet were bare and scruffy. “She’s barefoot and her feet are dirty calloused, as if she’s gone barefoot for years.” “How a great deal of years?” somebody whispered. “A lifetime” I said, beginning to discern with her, for I had had a lot of wounded foot dreams. (What Freud would call the sexual wound; after all, Oedipus had his foot scar from his father’s decision to chain him to a rock as an infant. And then there’s… the foot/phallus connection.) “And what is it like to go barefoot for a lifetime?” RB asked. “It’s ok in the summer, and I sense it is summer here. But she’s walking on cement rather than sand or grass.” “Is that how her feet got calloused?” “Yeah, I suppose. She’s been in training but she isn’t very confident. She feels ill-equipped. I mean you’d think they’d give her moon boots or something.” ” What’s it like to walk on cement?” somebody else asked. “In summer cement is hot and could burn. If it’s winter, it’s just cold, horrid in general, to be barefoot-” I faltered. “But it gives you contact with the ground, it’s like ground work,” I continued. We sat with that idea for a minute. Somehow I was laying the groundwork (for my poem?) but were my bare feet tough sufficient to take it? “What’s cement?” I was abruptly asked. “Uh, it’s… I don’t genuinely know…” I faltered again. “What’s it applied for?” RB piped in. I thought for a moment and laughed. “The primary thing that comes to mind is that the Mafia stands you in a bucket of cement when they’re going to deep six you. “So it binds you, holds you in place?” Someone asked. “It makes you heavy. So you’ll sink and drown.” “Drown?” someone echoed back. “So Cinderella’s afraid she’ll drown?” “Can you feel what it’s like to be afraid of drowning?” “Yeah, just like in the introductory part of the dream,” I said, returning there again. “She’s downhearted I think. I think there’s a cement-like inertia she feels stuck in.” I could relate to this easily; it was finelooking close to how I felt a lot of the time. “Is there a place in your present life where you may feel your feet in cement?” One of the women with a whispery voice posed the question. I without delay thought in regards to the prospect of writing in regards to my father. “Well,” I started in, “I have that writing project that I’m scared o.” I didn’t want to disclose the whole peculiar story. If I write it, I’ll feel better but it may trouble people. If I don’t write it, I may never heal.” “Why are you afraid?” The soft voice asked again. “It’s very personal. I’m frighted it will be outing my father’s disease and the family business is to keep it quiet. He was a good doctor and I’ll besmirch his reputation. But I’m also sentiment compelled to write it. I’ve already begun.” I cut myself off. I started out again. “I’m frighted I’ll fail. It won’t be good, it’s been done by poets better than me already.” Another long silence, after which RB steered us back to the image. “So Cinderella wants to be launched but she feels ill-equipped?” he asked. This made sense to me. Although the “Cinderella” notion was strange, I started attempting to make an analyzation of it when somebody asked rather plainly “Who is Cinderella?” “She’s an individual who wants her whole life to change, to go from unhappiness to happiness. She’s unfortunate but she gets help.” “The leap she wants to make is accomplished by a marriage to the Prince.” “Does this Cinderella want to be saved by a Prince?” “Not consciously,” was all I could say. Although, I had to think that writing my father’s story in order to redeem him was an try to heal my wounded inner male, I might project the hero outside myself, want to, suppose to-be saved in a literal sense by a man who would take care of me, i.e., love me. Still, that sentiment was unconscious. At the time I wasn’t even dating. But if I produced a father who is saved, by himself, by spiritual help, by faith, then in some way that close focus, the actual task of finding a way to make that occur in a poem- wouldn’t that have to make it conscious? Wouldn’t it re-parent me sufficient to modify the effigy of my inner prince, heal my complex, heal my kinship energy and the unconscious sense of being needy? No one had said anything for a few minutes while I was lost in analytical thought, and I knew I was meant to hold and listen the reverberation of my answer to the last question in regards to wanting to be saved. “Not consciously. Well, then unconsciously. Maybe…. Maybe, yes. Probably yes… Yes… Of course… Definitely yes.” I stuttered to undertake and express how I could see Cinderella’s complex was eternal and perpetuated. “Where do you feel that ‘Yes,’ that truth?” I was silent for a bit. “… That I’d like to be saved by the prince?” I at long last asked. “Yes, where in your body?” I thought for a moment RB was the Prince. Or was it my father? Or was it my second husband whom I hoped to meet someday? I attuned myself to the question, attempting to get out of my head. There was a free-floating sense of anxiety around my breath. “I feel it in my chest.” “In your heart?” I felt sad. “Yes,” I said. “And how does it feel?” It feels warm, it’s watery, it’s longing, the sentiment of longing.” We were quiet. But they let me sit there sentiment the longing that now I realized I alone could fill. I sniffled a little as my closed eyes welled with tears. Here comes my adolescent self, I thought. To my relief, we moved further to the very end of the dream. * “So, of a sudden Cinderella’s gone and you see the rocket launching?” “Yes, I’m sort of mesmerized, looking at it take off. It reminds me of The Challenger” I said suddenly. I had written a poem in regards to the 1986 Challenger crash, which had been triggered by another dream years ago. Like galore humans I had seen the spacecraft explode on television. It was an overpowering sight. Terrifying. The group explored with me the sensations of watching it explode before they brought it back to my present dream. “What’s it like waiting for the rocket to crash and burn, for Cinderella to fall?” somebody stated as gruesomely as possible. I could see the pieces of the aircraft, humans running down the Florida beach, horrified. “Unbearable,” I answered, “She was just a young teacher, whatshername?… Christa McAuliffe.” In saying her name something occurred to me. An aspect of Cinderella was Christa, was me, the teacher who wanted to bestow something new. And what with regards to her name? A effeminate Christ, Christa, “the anointed one,” the one chosen for the experience. Perhaps I was chosen to tell my father’s story. Another question interrupted my tangential amplification of this part of the dream. “So you’re afraid the rocket might blow up? And Christa’s on it?” “No, I don’t think at all, I just know, that she’s on it. It was share of her tryout, her application to become an astronaut, her anointing,” I answered. “Her initiation into something new?” someone else asked and then continued, “into a great deal of other space?” This last comment actually resonated with me. I was being asked by my inner self, my future self, my father, god, whomever-to work on a new level, to trust I could create my father’s afterlife, a world, of course, that I could only imagine and this routine would transform the way I held my memories of my father, the way I held my inner masculine. Lately I’d been reading books on near death experiences, books with regards to psychic awakening after a close call with death. And didn’t we go out of our bodies each night when we dreamt? RB taught that the dream was a place with it is own rules, an eco-system. But another question interrupted my reflection. “What does the rocket look like now?” Immediately I went into the effigy and saw it as beautiful. “Amazing” I said, “it’s lifting straight up and all this light, orange, yellow and red and blue flames are propelling it higher.” “I may feel that. How does it feel in your body?” RB asked. My body felt energized. “Is it dissimilar from the longing in your heart?” “Very Different.” I felt a jolt. A power surge rushed not only through my body but through my head. “It’s warm in my chest, in my heart and even in my head” I answered with enthusiasm. “Get into that feeling, the warmth, how is it a dissimilar warm from the longing?” “Not wet-warm, not teary or sad-warm. More like from the bottom-up-warm, stimulating like revving engines…” “Can you hold onto that sentiment for a moment? “He pushed me further. “Yeah, but it’s hard to contain.” “Like it’s going to explode?” someone else asked. “Explode, yes but in a good way, to take off, travel rapidly and without delay than light and sound, travel light years and space years…” A little giddy, I was babbling. “Now feel the sad-warm longing in the heart together with the revving heat. Can you hold them both?” I was quiet. My heart went without delay soft and the revving heat was in my head. I knew he wanted me to consciously feel both. “What’s happening?” RB asked. “The rocket’s turned horizontal, it’s like an arrow shooting through space. And that’s all in my head. It’s hard for my heart to keep it down. I feel like I’m being stretched…” Then I was gone into the active imagination, taking the dream to a dissimilar scene, one that wasn’t in the basi dream, one that clarified the potential of the rocketing Cinderella. That is, until somebody cut into my new fantasy with the question: “But when do you see the chicken feet?” “Oh my god, the chicken feet! I forgot when it comes to them!” In a moment I saw the feet vividly. Then I laughed. “Now I recognise why they’re chicken feet! “You mean they’re not Cinderella’s bare feet?” RB again. “They’ve transformed!” I exclaimed, “I mean yes, they’re Cinderella’s bare feet in that they’re chicken, they’re scared, they’re just cold feet, chicken feet. I was laughing now and a heap of of the group chuckled. A few laughed out loud. We had broken the tension but RB wasn’t finished. I had to describe the feet, yellow-feathered, gawky and awkward hanging there in the open air with the fiery flames, not burning or touching but awfully close to the flaring energies around them. “Okay,” he said, “How do those chicken feet feel dangling out there?” I giggled. The visual I had constructed was so silly. But then I hunkered down deep into the effigy and it didn’t seem so funny. I saw the flames licking the feet at the bottom of the rocket. The feet looked ugly, uncomfortable and endangered. What if she was sucked right out of the rocket? Don’t go there, I told myself. I tried to stick to the effigy that the dream had presented. “I guess they feel exposed to the fire.” “What would that be like to have the fire licking the soles of your feet?” “Well, it might spur you on,” I said optimistically. “But… it might put you in the hot seat, so-to- speak.” “Is that like the hot-seat you feel with your family, possibly by revealing your father’s story, exposing his depression, his death.” RB asked. I don’t recognise where the words came from but I of a sudden protested, “It’s my depression. I have a right to heal my own depression.” “Stay with that feeling.” RB said. I did and found I could endure the imagination of the feet licked by flame. “Now go back to where you kept the sentiment of the fear, the Challenger explosion, where you held the sentiment in your body. ” I concentrated to make all of the fear conscious. My breathing was shallow; I looked at the explosion again. “This time it feels different,” I said, not sure I understood why. “How is it different” RB asked. “It’s not as scary. It’s in slow motion. There’s Cinderella parachuting, or floating, she’s in one piece, she’s okay.” “Can you just float yourself through the project?” said the lady with the soft voice. Though our eyes were closed, I nodded my head. “Maybe, but it’ll be a challenge, I mean challenging….” “Maybe you’re The Challenger?” someone asked. “Well, of course! “I laughed at the other pun. We were silent for a moment. I’m challenging the family’s tacit agreement not to talk regarding the death, as well as challenging myself to write regarding it. “And what do you feel as you see Cinderella floating?” an individual asked. “I’m relieved.” I sighed deeply. “I’m very relieved. Relieved and released.” Relieved like you were when Bruce fixed the hole?” “Right. I don’t feel so scared of the flood any more. Bruce may handle it. The army trained him to work with explosives, He knows how the dark material may be mined, emotion controlled. Nothing in the dream seemed threatening any more. “Maybe the poem doesn’t have to be perfect, or even that good,” an individual said. Maybe just writing it, tinkering with it, taking it in, perchance that’s enough, perhaps that will be healing.” “Cinderella’s used to getting her feet dirty” I answered. The dreamwork felt like a launchpad. I opened my eyes and saw “the cross=hatched roof of the room. I’d tilted my head back as we were working. Others opened their eyes. We left the dreamscape and tardily came back to ourselves in the room. We knew the procedure had concluded. RB beamed at me in the fire-light. Though it was unnecessary, he closed the session with the therapist’s stock refrain: “This seems like a good place to stop.” “Or begin-” I whispered. A few humans smiled and nodded. ^j^ This essay original appeared in the literary diary Tiferet, Issue 13 |
