Tag: healing dreams

Dreaming Our Joy

September 7, 2023 / kirstenbackstrom

A joyous dream is like the precious seed of an heirloom vegetable: a potential-packed kernel of our essential, ancestral inheritance. We all come from dreamers, and we’ll all pass on our legacy to other dreamers. That legacy is not only conveyed through life lessons and practices, it is also fundamentally a transferal of inspiration, through joy. Dreams that bring joy will plant themselves in our hearts and flourish there, growing and flowering outward to bless others, providing sustainable nourishment with their colorful (though maybe oddly-shaped) fruits. Our sweet dreams can inspire us with the same joy that gave our ancestors hope in difficult times, making hard-won wisdom more palatable and easier to digest. So, even as we dig deep in our dreamwork, laboring to cultivate wisdom and skills that we can pass on to our own descendants, let us cherish and share the dream-seeds of joy.

Joyous dreams need very little working; they are immediately meaningful and only require our willingness to receive them. Each dreamer has a dream iconography for joy: images that signal the presence of hope, comfort, connection, sweetness or fun. For me, yellow birds (goldfinches, Wilson’s warblers, evening grosbeaks) come in dreams often when I’m grieving, to recall my own soul to me, bringing light in the dark. Flight and song are two qualities that make birds likely harbingers of joy in dreams. Do you dream of birds? Do you fly with them? Sing with them? Can you feel their brightness?

Music features in many of our joyous dreams, too. Sometimes, I dream of singing or playing an instrument in a public place where others join in spontaneously, so we become a “flash mob” of sheer exuberant playfulness. I sing “Oh What A Beautiful Morning!” or “Let’s Go Fly A Kite!” and the music makes me emerge from sleep “with a song in my heart.” These dreams remind me of a dream-like waking experience I had in my teens… I was riding a Boston subway at rush hour in August after a long workday, standing pressed against sweaty strangers, when I started contrarily singing “Jingle Bells” under my breath. Other passengers caught the mood and soon a dozen of us were singing Christmas carols (some could actually carry a tune). We started with the jaunty melodies, releasing our inhibitions and forgetting our weary misery with unseasonable mirth. Then something shifted; we began to harmonize, our voices softened. Eventually I stepped off that baking hot subway car on that sunny afternoon as the cool, gentle glory of “Silent Night” rose behind me. Joyous dreams can make memorable music like that, too, transcending our expectations with a paradoxical blend of merriment and holiness.

When I was younger, I felt the giddy bliss of my joyous dreams mostly in my throat, as if I had literally swallowed a song and couldn’t contain it. Such dreams were fresh winds lifting me; I woke up weightless. But these days I feel my joyous dreams deep in my chest or belly, and I dream of swimming, diving downward. I wake up trusting, supported by the liquid density of the dark, safe waters that surround me.

Swimming in the Stone Cellar: A friend takes me to a famous healing spring in the off-hours, at night, when no other swimmers are present. The spring is located in the stone-walled cellar of a ruined stone building. Perfectly clear cool water fills the cellar to the top of the steep stairs. We descend the steps, and swim down to where we can pass from room to room underwater, exploring. It is beautiful and spacious and deep—the water so pure that it is essentially invisible, like swimming in clear air.

Later, we return during the daytime, for a last swim before we will have to leave (we’re traveling together, visiting sacred sites like this one). Now there’s a line of people waiting for access, and groups of 10 or 12 at a time are admitted to swim together in the healing spring. It won’t be quite as awesome as swimming in the privacy of the night, but I’m still looking forward to the water, and to sharing this wonder with others.

I needed this dream, and I still feel the joy of it like the tingly glow of warming skin after a plunge in cold water. Health setbacks over the past year repeatedly broke my spirit, leaving me, sometimes, without strength, courage or hope. Worldwide crises—COVID, plus environmental, political, economic and social disasters—have been dreadful in ways shared by by virtually every living being, and yet perhaps the most terrible aspect of these crises is how they have cut us off from each other. Joyous dreams are holy healing springs, miraculously bubbling up in the stone ruins of our lives, and their restorative waters invite us to dive deep. As in my dream, we will find joyous restoration in the peaceful privacy of the night with those closest to us, but it is also vital that we “return later, in the daytime” to share joy with others. Overcoming our “social distancing” to recover our trust in one another, our trust in potential healing—this is the challenge we face now, and as we heal, individually and collectively, we will rely on our joyous dreams to remind us that happiness is still possible. We can help each other to remember this by sharing the joy whenever possible.

As I was working on this article, I received a couple of dreams from dreamers sharing their joy. Both dreams describe meaningful transformation. They are not just expressions of joy itself, but also convey change: an emergence into joy from something perhaps less easy to share. In one dream, there’s a movement from heavy greyness or meaninglessness into sacred space, and in the other a movement from night into morning. In both cases, the brightness of joy seems more fully felt because of the darkness that precedes it. This visceral contrast invites those with whom the dream is shared to resonate with joy: we recognize darkness or heaviness in ourselves, and then respond with relief to the bright opening that the dream represents. I’m grateful to these two dreamers for their sharing, and delighted to be passing their joy on to you. I’m also grateful to my own dreams—particularly those that have followed a similar pattern of emergence from difficulty or crisis into an unexpected joy—so I offer you one of these as well. It felt fitting to render these dream-gifts and my responses as a kind of conversation. May you en-joy all three, and dream on from there.

First Dreamer:

“I am a novice in a convent in a city that has a Mediterranean feel. I am looking at an arched stone window just before dawn. Another novice and I climb out the window and onto the red tile roof, looking across the city. As the sky lightens, the bells all over the city begin to ring, making loud booming noises I can hear through the soles of my feet, making a beautiful harmony. I begin to chant, ‘Bells, bells, bells!’ When I awake, I am still saying/singing to myself, ‘bells, bells, bells,’ and there is a feeling of euphoria at the dawn and the sounds.”

My Response:

I love the embodiment that this dream expresses, as the bells are not only heard but actually felt “through the soles of my feet” and echoed in the chant of “Bells, bells, bells!” The ringing joy is a heady, euphoric experience shared with another “novice,” and also a grounding experience that reverberates through the body; the sound is in the air and in the earth itself. Climbing out through the window and seeing the city from the rooftop suggests actively coming out of a private world and into a collective one, going out to meet the day and the “bells, bells, bells” that might be an inside-out version of the words “bless, bless, bless.” This dream carries a promise of blessing and a dawning of hope. May it be so.

Second dreamer:

“…in the middle of this grey and uncomfortable landscape I had a lovely vision of a protected space, like a bower, with a nuthatch in it. It was a beautiful and sacred place graced with this lovely bird. The image stayed with me and I painted it. By the time I was done, I was very happy! I started to see nuthatches at my feeder shortly afterwards. They had not visited me before.”

My Response:

This dream charmed me because nuthatches have brought me joy since I was a child. These birds have an ungainly shape, but a crazy kind of grace as they zig-zag around the trunks of trees: up, down and sideways. They sound off with a nasal “beep, beep, beep” (a comic version of the “bells, bells, bells” in the previous dream) which can be hilarious when fledglings chorus together, practicing their calls like kids talking over one other, all trying to tell some big news first. Dreaming of this bird in a sacred context, and then being visited by nuthatches in waking life invites simple delight as much as awe. The nuthatch overturns expectations, representing a humble yet powerful beauty and dignity. If we prepare sacred, protected places within ourselves and in our world to welcome these messengers of joy, they will indeed visit.

Third Dreamer (me):

I’m on a crowded bus. As we come to a narrow, winding mountain road, I see that the driver has abandoned his seat. Horrified, I take the seat and try to keep the bus in its lane, but steering is difficult and visibility is poor; I can’t control this huge vehicle so I keep swinging into the oncoming lane, narrowly avoiding accidents. I can’t keep this up for long.

Then we’re going backward. There’s a driver’s seat at the other end of the bus, so I rush back there, and find a small girl driving this big rig! I can’t imagine how she’s doing it, but she’s managing. We’re coming into the city now, approaching the terminal. We need to slow down. I tell her to put her whole weight on the brake; her legs are too short so she has to release the steering wheel and slide off the seat to get both feet onto the brake pedal, slowing us just enough. As we hit the rear wall of the garage, I throw myself over her to shield her from the impact. The windshield cracks but doesn’t shatter, and there’s only a bump.

We’re safe and everyone is cheering. I hug the girl, telling her how incredibly brave and capable she is. I’m filled with love and joy.

My Response:

Joy is intergenerational: we pass it on to our children along with the burdens and responsibilities we also hand over to them. This dream has many personal associations for me, but the collective story seems more interesting: the feeling here isn’t just relief at averting catastrophe, it’s an individual triumph extended to and for everyone on the journey. The passengers all cheer as they feel what I’m feeling, what the Buddhist tradition calls sympathetic joy—delight in the happiness or success of others (which benefits us all). There’s a profound shift from the front of the bus where the adult (“I”) struggled for control, to the back of the bus where a child has assumed the driver’s seat. My joy, as the adult, comes from seeing the child succeed where I could not. My role is to encourage and protect rather than to drive, and I can throw my whole body into that role just as the child throws her whole weight onto the brake pedal to slow us down.

Sympathetic joy, shared joy, is essential to us as a species. Our survival depends on our delight in one another as we recognize that everyone on this bus is essential: some of us drive, some of us witness, all of us cheer each other on. Thank you for being essential, and thank you for your joy—wherever you find it.

[This article was originally published in two parts, in the Fall, 2021 and Winter, 2022 issues of DreamTime Magazine. If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing to DreamTime by joining the International Association for the Study of Dreams ]

Natural Light: Dreaming Into Death, Dreaming Into Life

June 7, 2023 / kirstenbackstrom

[This article was written during troubled times: the early days of the pandemic, when, like many others, I was suffering the impacts of collective and personal traumatic events. In such times (which can be anytime), dreams provide perspective—inviting us to see things as they are, in the shadowy half-light where nothing is absolutely certain. In dreams, death and life receive equal space, darkness gives way to light when light gives way to darkness. Dreams don’t accept the good/bad duality we impose on our experiences, they invite us into paradox. Here, I explore such riddles, and accept the dreams’ invitation to walk in the dark.]

When animals (including human beings) are seriously ill or badly injured, they can experience a pull toward death that may become as powerful as the drive to live. Perhaps this is nature’s way of easing suffering. When survival seems unlikely, dying becomes easier.

I saw this when our feral cat friend Harold was living out his last days. It was winter, and we’d set up a space heater and a bed for him on our doorstep out of the wind. For a while, he kept warm, but finally insisted on leaving this comfortable shelter to wait for his death in the open, in the cold sleet. We tucked a towel around him, and he accepted it, but clearly preferred to let himself be chilled, to hasten the implacable process of dying. It was painful for us to watch, but perhaps not so painful for him. Mostly, he lay with his eyes closed, purring at the sound of our voices, otherwise patiently still.

In 2019 I went through a major spinal fusion surgery and spent weeks in the hospital struggling with heart problems, intense pain, choking episodes and total physical helplessness—and this condition helped me understand Harold better. While one part of me progressed toward healing, another part of me prepared for potential death. For months after surgery, my physical craving for rest, which would give my body the opportunity to recover strength for new life, was also allowing for the possibility of leaving life behind. Profoundly, instinctively, I needed to withdraw. Eating and drinking required tremendous effort. I hovered in a dreamy, half-sleeping state all the time. I had no inclination toward the future, and felt no real connection to the past. This was strangely peaceful. It would have been easy to die. From the perspective of my physical body, the damage caused by years of degenerative illness and a brutal surgery might be irreparable. Even as I was getting better, my body also contemplated letting go.

Turning away from dying was difficult. Supporting the healing process meant hovering in limbo, in that animal place where the instincts take over. I had to let lethargy consume me, let myself rest at the deepest level, yet hold myself back from death. My dreams reflected the ambivalent nature of this recovery period:

Wanting to Sleep: Restless, I get out of bed and go into the living room where there are lots of people. I realize that this must be a dream because it’s the middle of the night and there shouldn’t be people here, but even though I know I’m sleeping, I still feel exhausted. I try some lucid explorations like asking questions of the dream figures, knowing I can do anything I want. But I don’t really want to do anything, don’t want to be lucid. All I want to do is go back to bed and let myself sink into deeper sleep.

Plunging Into the Graveyard: There’s a little patch of graveyard nearby. A skeleton is just sitting there on a stump or gravestone. How can this be? Is it real? A boy wearing bulky plastic bones attached to his body like armor dives off the rail fence and plunges headfirst into the loose, loamy dirt of the graveyard. He disappears into the ground as if it were a pool of water. We’re all shocked, waiting anxiously to see if he will resurface. He doesn’t.

My dream journal was filled with dreams like these, but also with dreams that suggested a definite movement through the “dying” process, rather than the finality of a “dead end.”

Walking In The Dark: I’m in my late teens, responsible for a group of 12 to 14 year olds. It’s night. I lead them through a city, through unfamiliar urban neighborhoods. Now, we’re facing a downhill sloping sidewalk that plunges into total darkness. I tell them to put away their flashlights; our eyes will adjust. We begin to descend. The kids are whispering to each other nervously. At first, we can’t see anything, but then we get used to it, and the darkness begins to seem safe. There’s enough natural light to go on.

Now, over a year later, I am still feeling my way forward in darkness or semi-darkness, trying to sense the “natural light” that will show me where I am going. My “eye” (I) is still adjusting. The dream reflects the vulnerability, but also the potential, of a coming-of-age process as the part of me that is leading is barely older than the parts that are being led. Yet the confidence of the dream ego to “put flashlights away” and guide the whole self safely downward and inward, into the dark, suggests that a decision has been made. Unlike in the earlier dreams, there is no doubt that progress is possible, no question that we will keep going.

The world as a whole is going through some dark times right now, and it’s natural that many of us are experiencing a tendency to withdraw in exhaustion or dive into the grave of our own fear, anger, and despair. Sometimes, we dream of giving up. The earth herself seems unsure which direction to take, since ultimately death is as natural as life. Yet even as death and dissolution are possibilities manifesting around us and within us, healing is also happening. We stand up, we walk together, we learn. The natural world and the human world are the same world, even when we are divided and pulling in different directions. Outside my door, where Harold went to meet his death, squirrels and birds are eating birdseed together in the cold rain, keeping themselves warm and fed and alive. Personally, I waver every day, but even in uncertainty I recognize my own strength, and yours.

May our hearts sustain the courage, collective imagination and energy we need to explore an unknown future. May we be willing to go inward and downward into the dark, without the probing light that insists on knowing the outcome of our efforts. May we let our “eyes” (our I-dentities) adjust. May we choose life, and find our way.

[This article was originally published in the Winter, 2021 issue of DreamTime Magazine. If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing to DreamTime by joining the International Association for the Study of Dreams ]

Walk Softly On The Earth: Tenderfoot Dreams

January 15, 2019 / kirstenbackstrom

When someone shares a dream about feet in one of my regular dream groups, there’s often a humorous tone to the discussion. The dreamer usually presents the dream in a light-hearted way, and the group members may respond with laughter. Feet seem to be inherently a bit comical, or maybe it’s just the way we dream of them. In our dreams, we walk on tiptoes, hop, skip or trip over our own feet; we find ourselves wearing bunny slippers or someone else’s old loafers; our shoes are missing or mismatched; our socks have holes; we have luminous toenails or too many toes… Feet appear fairly commonly in dreams, and the preponderance of foot-related silliness can make these dreams seem trivial. But feet can be significant. In fact, awake or asleep, we need our feet. There’s a reason that feet are sometimes called “dogs.” Like our canine friends, our feet can be trusted. They are faithful, sometimes funny, often brave. They serve us with love, and their service is both practical and spiritual.

For much of my life, I didn’t really understand my feet. They seemed somehow embarrassing. I broke my ankle when I was three (racing down a slippery hallway in my socks) and was prone to sprains, so I always thought of my feet as a weak point. My arches were too high, my toes too long… I avoided going barefoot because my feet just seemed so naked.But when I really needed them, those feet stepped up. When I was training to walk the Camino de Santiago in 2016, I worried that they would fail me, but they just got stronger. The further I walked, the stronger they got. During that 500 mile trudge across northern Spain, I began to realize that my feet are sacred, and very dear. I learned to care for them, as they care for me. Though they sometimes ache with all their hard work, they carry me easily, and they’ve become muscular and beautiful in their own awkward, knobby, intrepid and steadfast way.

Metaphorically, a foot can be a stand-in (pun intended) for the body as a whole. The ancient healing art of reflexology is based on the fact that pressure points on the feet correspond to the organs and systems of the body. What could be more representative of our physicality than our feet? Our feet literally bear the weight of our mortal lives. They connect us to the earth, and we balance ourselves upon them. With each step, one foot rises into emptiness, transcending gravity and carrying us forward, while the other accepts the entire burden of the body’s weight, bearing down, holding steady—then, as the first foot comes down to the ground, the second foot eases up, tipping us forward, rising to swing into motion. The feet are indeed taking turns, engaging in a perfect dance of give-and-take that creates the essential momentum for our progress through the world.

Unlike our other paired parts (hands, eyes, etc.), the feet cannot perform their functions separately—one hand can still work, one eye can still see, one ear can still hear, one lung can still breathe, but one foot can only fidget on its own. We have to stand on our own two feet, and it takes two to tango. In a sense, our feet remind us that our separateness is an illusion, our lives are carefully balanced with the world around us, and if we are not acting in harmony with ourselves and in coordination with others, we can go nowhere.

So, when feet appear in our dreams, they may be telling us something profound about the nature of our bodies and our souls (soles), our independence and our interdependence, our connection to the earth and to one another. There’s something tender, even poignant, about our feet. They manifest our strength and our vulnerability at the same time.

In the Christian story, feet play a significant role. With great tenderness and reverence, Mary (the sister of Martha) pours precious ointment over the feet of Jesus and wipes them with her hair. This is a way of offering blessing and gratitude to the most fundamentally human aspect of the divine—and when Jesus acknowledges this by saying “you will not always have me with you” he is emphasizing his own mortality, his temporal nature. In Buddhist terms, he is acknowledging his rare and precious “human birth,” his fragile humanity. The hardworking feet embody this humanity, with humility. When Jesus stoops to wash the apostles’ feet, he again draws attention to the humble and temporary nature of all of our lives—the ordinary holiness we must treasure in each other.

Although I’m not a traditional Christian, such images have always moved me. I remember sitting in my uncle’s church as a child, horrified by the presence of a larger-than-life-size crucifix above the altar, yet fascinated by the poignant vulnerability of the feet of Christ, pierced together by a single nail. Even in death, when the feet have been mortified along with the rest of the body, those bleeding feet remind us powerfully that they belong to a flesh-and-blood human being, a unique person, who somehow transcends the final brokenness of the physical self.

When my mother died, I was sitting at her bedside and watched the life go out of her face. Unlike most of the other people whose deaths I’ve witnessed, no trace of her individuality lingered in her features after death; her body seemed instantly emptied of all that she had been. My sister (Jill) was unsure she could handle seeing Mom like this, yet she feared that if she did not look, she would regret it later. So, my other sister (Didi) and I suggested looking at Mom’s feet instead of her face. Even though the rest of the body was just a corpse, swollen with edema and slackened by death, those feet were still Mom’s feet. The three of us, her three daughters, gathered close. Uncovering Mom’s feet was like receiving her blessing, and giving her ours. We touched her feet gently, crying, recognizing them, remembering them. They were so familiar and so ordinary, so uniquely Mom’s.

I’ve been more aware of my own feet recently. While much of my body is changing rapidly due to illness (losing muscle, and becoming more frail), my feet, like Mom’s, are still reassuringly familiar. Whether I’m barefoot or wearing shoes, I look down at my feet a lot because the structural changes in my upper body make it difficult to hold my head up. When I’m taking long walks, I have to rest my neck by hanging my head much of the time, and when my head is down, I notice my feet, as well as the ground under them.

The ground is beautiful; the earth is beautiful. I notice the the scrambled tweed pattern of douglas-fir needles on the path, the maple leaves etched in frost, the footprints of humans and dogs in the mud, and my own feet in their well-worn boots finding the earth with every step. When I’m hanging my head, I can’t see where I’m going, but I can see where I am. Right here, pressing my feet against the sustaining ground of my life.

Dreams about feet might be amusing because it is wise and right to acknowledge our human vulnerability and courage with a sense of humor. Look at us! We are awkward, knobby, intrepid and steadfast creatures. We are beautiful, from our heavy heads to our stumbling feet. And the earth we walk upon is holy ground.

Dreaming and Dukkha: Unsatisfactoriness

September 1, 2015 / kirstenbackstrom

I’m exploring dreamwork through the lens of Buddhism [see “Buddhist Philosophy in Dreamwork”], taking each of the “Three Marks of Existence” (unsatisfactoriness, impermanence, and non-self) in turn. These may sound like gloomy ways to mark existence… and I’m going to start with the gloomiest of all: dukkha. But let’s see what dreams can do with this stuff that defines unhappiness in our lives:

Learning from a Child: I am imprisoned with a group of people I don’t particularly like, afflicted by a deep, visceral depression—despair, frustration, anxiety, paralysis. I know I must go off by myself and experience this depression fully. When I’m aware of my body, the depression is a sensation in my chest, a dull vibration or slowly pulsing electrical current, as if a heavy metal object has been struck by a hammer. I’m exploring this sensation when a little girl appears and begins to talk—partly to me and partly to herself. I don’t feel under any obligation to listen, still experiencing the physical sense of the depression, but then find myself absorbed in what she is saying and doing. She has drawn a cut-out human figure on paper, and she tears it down the center lengthwise, explaining that this will make it larger, because now it has space in the middle. This inspires me to act compassionately to protect another member of the group from being bullied…

I’ve had dreams about depression periodically for most of my adult life. In each dream the context is different, but the mood is the same—as intense as any waking depression. Over the years, I’ve “worked with” these dreams in various ways. Because they were so unpleasant, I used to try to forget them as quickly as possible, but I noticed that this distraction method usually just pushed the depressed feelings below the surface, where they subtly influenced my thoughts and behavior for the rest of the day.

So, my first dreamwork practice was simply to give the dreams my attention when they arose. I wrote them down, noting how the circumstances and sensations varied from dream to dream, and seeing the patterns that emerged over time. I noticed that when I gave the unpleasant dreams my waking attention their unpleasant influence on my waking state would naturally dissipate. With a dream-sharing group, I reenacted the dreams, and found grief in them, which needed to be shared.

Since the dreams continued, I kept exploring, and found layers of psychological insights into how the dreams fit my personal history. This was useful, also, in my work as a spiritual director and chaplain, where I often accompanied others who were experiencing depression. I gradually discovered a compassionate core at the center of depression, a tender place where I recognized I was not alone. No one is alone in the experience of suffering.

I found that I could work with the depression within the dream, as well. In some dreams, I’d remember that I didn’t want to let my mood affect the way I behaved toward others. In one lucid dream, I actually reached into my own head and removed a tumor-like object that was causing the depression. All this attention brought to bear on depression dreams “helped” in a sense, but my efforts were still directed toward making the unpleasant experience of such dreams stop. My awareness was tinged with judgment (“these are bad dreams”) and the need for control (“I will get rid of them”).

Unsatisfactoriness, dukkha, is the first of the “Four Noble Truths” of Buddhism, and also one of the “Three Marks of Existence.” We find experiences to be pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, and we tend to cling to what is pleasant, try to get rid of what is unpleasant, and ignore what is neutral. But we never succeed in these efforts: pleasant things necessarily pass away; neutral things either persist in being neutral or become unpleasant when ignored; and unpleasant things arise inevitably in the form of sickness, old age, death, and a myriad of other causes and conditions. Our efforts to choose and control our experiences invariably lead to “unsatisfactoriness”—and, ultimately, to suffering. Continue reading

Tag: healing dreams

Dreaming Our Joy

Walk Softly On The Earth: Tenderfoot Dreams

Dreaming and Dukkha: Unsatisfactoriness

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