Where is the treasure?
Last night I had the dream, the recurring one I’ve been having for 6 years.
Actually, I don’t even know for sure if it is a dream.
The recurring part is what happens when I wake up.
I wake up in a rush of excitement. It’s a combination of panic, astonishment and thrilled delight.
Panic at having forgotten.
Astonishment because how could I have forgotten?
Thrilled delight because now I remember.
And what I have forgotten and now remember is this:
It’s a body of work.
Or really, another part of my body of work. A hugely important piece. And it’s already in physical form, that is to say: not just in my head.
Sometimes a stack of papers, tied up with a cord. Sometimes in a binder, a box, a flash drive. And it’s been somewhere close all this time. Under the bed, in the top of the closet, in the next room.
I feel relieved. I feel frustrated. I feel bewildered. I feel angry and excited.
This is the material I’m meant to be teaching. This is the super-advanced stuff that my Year of Biggification group can work with. These are the exercises and techniques that I want to be working with on a daily basis.
It’s the next level. It’s the next piece. The natural continuation of everything I teach that’s important.
How could I have forgotten this?! What have I been doing with my time?!?
But I remember now. And now the next piece can begin in earnest.
And then I realize. There isn’t a pile, a box, a notebook, or a flash drive.
It was a dream.
Except it wasn’t a dream because I’ve been awake for this whole process.
All the same, it’s not real. Or it’s not completely real. It’s not real in this moment. And I go back to sleep.
I’ve always understood this to be the next part of work that is growing inside of me.
But it’s the treasure. It’s the secret room. It’s Level 8 of Dance of Shiva. The unknown. The impossible.
Here are the pieces in the pattern.
The flashes of connection that I have to work with:
this secret/lost body of work … the secret room … Level 8 … developing the next piece … a bigger pattern that I’m a part of … the Playground … the city I’m building in Portland … the city I’m building in my body … the book … sovereignty … Upside Down days … isolation … rebuilding
Like a television detective, I’m examining the evidence while the clues are whirling around me. They’re on index cards, on the wall, on a whiteboard, in a notebook. They are rushing in my ears and coming up to meet me.
These are the pieces. But how do they fit together?
This is the treasure. But where is it?
This is the mission. But what is the next step?
I am surfacing. I am under again. I am awake again and them it’s gone again.
This isn’t the kind of treasure you find. It’s the kind of treasure you wait for.
Or at least, you wait for the clue that tells you to begin searching again.
In the meantime, you shake the snowglobe, you do the dance, you stir things up and let them settle to reveal whatever it is they need to reveal.
The next piece is something about oxygen. But I don’t have any more to go on than that. Breathing. Trees. Water. Something. I am so close.
Being close is hard. Being close is beautiful. Beautiful and hard.
Comment zen:
I know this probably makes no sense. It is sometimes very frustrating to be able to see the patterns and not articulate them.
And I am sure that sometimes you feel the same way. Double-especially if you’re a shivanaut.
So maybe for now we can just talk about dreams.
We all have our stuff. We’re all working on our stuff. It’s a process. We let everyone have their experience, and we don’t give unsolicited advice.
We make room for being surprised. And of course there’s tea. Or booze. Whichever.
Follow
Reading this certainly put me in mind of these moments AND of the music and lyrics from West Side Story: Something’s Coming: which I always associate with this feeling. So for musical inspiration as we ponder out dreams just out of reach the lyrics:
http://www.westsidestory.com/site/level2/lyrics/something.html
and the music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu7sRdRrm_w
Somehow, it makes perfect sense.
I’ve been dreaming about bridges. I am lazy about analyzing in the mornings but I think they are representing the connection between taking good things from the past into the future. Regardless, they are showing up a lot.
Come to think of it, your flashes remind me of notes after Dance of Shiva. The ones that I get and don’t know what to do with. This is a good reminder that some things need time.
Reading this, I got so excited. I think your words imparted a bit of that panic/rush/excitement upon waking, but within me.
It reminds me of when I was little and would read The Secret Garden. How I knew there was magic in plants and ivy, and under arbors.
It reminds me of how I felt when I first read The Phantom Tollbooth. And how I want to read it again, but I’m too afraid to. I’m afraid it won’t be magic, the way it was when I was little.
I know there’s magic out there. In the air, sometimes slinking into my consciousness. I need to invite it to me instead of running after it. I need to attract it like a magnet.
This is a lovely dream – so close to the culmination that you can taste it! I have to admit I’m really excited to see precisely what the treasure is like once you open the lid.
Due to my current state of flux I’ve not been remembering my dreams well, but I have hope that once my transition is over I can dive back into the richness of my dream world.
After my husband died, I could not see my future. All I could do was put one foot in front of the other, until the fog began to lift and thin and burn off, and I could see farther and farther ahead of me, in many directions.
A year ago I decided to start my own business. I didn’t realize until just recently that there were similarities – until I really embraced what I was doing and gave up some safety nets – and I began to be able to see my future, in many directions. Until then I didn’t really know I couldn’t see my future, only that I was putting one foot in front of the other and stubbing my toes a lot.
As I more and more actively wonder, and embrace it, and invite it, the things that I only glimpsed out of the corner of my eye are becoming more visible.
It does take time for things to hatch. It takes time for US to hatch.
Last night I dreamed I was at my friend Julie’s house, and when it was time to pack and go home I couldn’t find room in my luggage for everything I had brought. And I kept finding more. I ended up giving her a big box of gemstone chips because I didn’t want to take them home.
Then there are the dreams where I am at a gallery show and there are all these beautiful works. I used to wake up sad because they weren’t my work. Then I realized that because they were in my dream, they are my work. I wake up from those dreams a lot more inspired to be back in the studio now.
Thunder only happens when it’s raining….
Life is for me, too, sometimes about waiting for the pattern to crystallize out of the swirling muck of index cards, journals and dreams.
Interestingly, (that’s such a good word, isn’t it?,) there is one big black journal that contains a blueprint to my professional success and every time I go back to it I find the track again.
One idea, a practice, a habit, an I-dunno-yet, is to keep the blueprint closer to surface awareness somehow.
I want to BE that blueprint.
But maybe I can start with baby steps of keeping the book closer, going back to it more often—of DOING something to bring the insights home. Again.
Anyway,
I sure appreciate hearing someone else who looks at life creatively.
Thanks, Havi.
Wow, Havi,
I feel as though I am part of the cloud of possibilities for this dream. Thank you! And I’ll bet all of us, your readers, and clients, and lurkers and commenters, and helper mice, feel the same.
Also, it’s good to know I can have my own dream without knowing what it is yet. Thank you again!
Oooooh, I love dreams. Here, have a cup of tea, and I’ll share mine…
Recurring Dream No. 1: I am on an elevator. The elevator never works the right way. It starts going sideways or diagonal-ways and then it stops halfway between floors. I’m scared. I want the elevator to just take me up already. But it never does. It’s a … a…. meandervator.
Recurring Dream No. 2: I am in my house. (Sometimes it’s really my house, and sometimes it’s a dreamversion that is still my house. I’ve lived in it a long time.) All of a sudden, I open a door and there are extra rooms. One time it was a room where the floorboards all broke as I crossed, threatening to drop me into the basement. One time, it was a breezeway filled with garbage that I cleared out piece by piece. One time, it was a vast warehouse full of costumes. One time, it was an attic inhabited by ghosts who whispered to me.
Recurring Dream No. 3: I am flying through the air, thinking, “Finally! I’m really doing it. For real this time. Not just a dream!” And then I wake up.
This makes total beautiful perfect sense!
@Emily – I have your Recurring Dream No. 2 and No. 3 all the time. Never No. 1, though. A Meandervator is the best word ever.
YES! I love the word meandervator TOO!
I love this post also, so so much I dont have words to describe it (and this is unusual for me). My thing swirls around and teases me and stays tantilizingly just out of reach too, for now. You expressed this so beautifully x
@Pearl ! Showtunes!! I loooove show tunes!! Now I get to sing this all day! Hooray!!! With extremely excessive exclamation points!!!!
Will it be? Yes, it will.
Maybe just by holding still,
It’ll be there!
Oh, another allegory just dropped into my head: when you’re doing a puzzle and you’ve got the lighthouse pieces all together and the shoreline pieces all together and the big boat pieces all together and THEN all the plain blue sky and water pieces start to make sense and connect the other parts together into the final picture. That feeling! Yes.
Keep on dreaming everyone, we’re all part of the bigger pattern right?
xx
So I had a recurring dream breakthrough recently. Usually I dream that I am drowning. Specifically, I have dreamt for years that I had dived into a swimming pool (a real one from my childhood) in the deep end and was swimming for the surface and running out of breath and could not break the surface and I’d wake up doggy paddling in place and holding my breath and gasping for air.
Recently, I dreamed that I was with my sweetheart, and not at that swimming pool but a different one (with complicated backstory). But I dived in and…
I could breathe underwater as long as I inhaled slowly.
It.
Was.
Amazing.
I love this post and it makes sense in the part of my brain that does not deal in words.
thank you, Havi.
Oooh or a Sudoku puzzle when the numbers start to cascade towards the answer.
Or when you’re body surfing and finally caught that wave and being smoothly carried to the shore.
Oh metaphor fun!! (and exclamation points!!) Cx
Now I’m thinking about oxygen. Yes! I can feel something there, and I’m excited for you, and for all of us.
Often, in my own on-the-brink dreams, I’m reading something. And it’s beautiful, amazing, important. Then I wake, and it slips out of reach.
Still, I’ve been remembering my dreams in general in more detail recently, after several years of remebering very little. I’m very happy and hopeful about this. I wll keep dancing, and dreaming, and see what unfolds.
“The air is humming
And something great is coming…”
Ooh, dreams. I’ve had elaborate dreams that seem to span months. Met people, even had a part-time job working at a second hand clothing shop in 60’s England. Vivid colors, made good friends… kind of wake up wistful- should I be sad I missed those people?
Sometimes those recurring dreams feel like there is a message just on the tip of your tongue… can’t quite get it. My stance on dream interpretation is; when you hear or come across the correct meaning, it is an affirmation, an aha, a ‘yes, that’s it’
One of the clearest ‘meaning’ dreams I had was in college- in a 70’s beater car, (but mine) with my dad driving. We are crossing a bridge over a river (Jungian/Arthurian sword bridge? maybe) and my dad starts to turn left, off the bridge! I say, ‘no, Dad! Not that way, I know where we are going!” and he argues with me about who knows best where to go. That was pretty obviously a statement about choosing my own life direction to me.
One of my absolute FAVORITE anecdotes about dreams is about the inventor of the *sewing machine*. He was struggling with how to figure out how to pull the needle through the fabric- hand sewing, you pull the whole needle through, move your hand to the opposite side, grip it, pull it through to the opposite side, grip it, etc. How to switch grips with a machine?? He dreamt that wild men were chasing him through a forest, threatening him with spears! All the spears had holes in the pointy end, jabbing back and forth at him! And that is how he figured it out. I *love* how the mysterious human brain works!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dreams#The_sewing_machine
(Woah! Wikipedia has a LIST of dreams! I’m off to check out this tangent!)
xoxoxo!
Ingrid
Havi, reading your dream I felt like I was in it!
But I’ve never had that particular dream. My recurring theme is of wandering through a big old house (often wooden, falling down structure) full of rooms (sometimes it’s the same place, often it’s not) and opening up doors and looking through secret slots in doors and entering rooms that have not been looked in for centuries, and I’m looking for something, some treasure, that I know is there. Or sometimes I’m just exploring and the rooms are full of beautiful items and I just enjoy looking them and think about living in them.
What an interesting dream or post-dream-nearly-awake feeling. It seems quite familiar to me but I think that in my case it is the other way around. In my dreams I worry about solving a problem or completing something that is expected from me and I try real hard and I get very anxious and then I wake up and I get a relief because actually I have already done this. I have mastered it. It’s not a problem that I’m facing today – it’s something that I have already accomplished and I don’t need to worry about it.
Funny.
I totally have the dreams with the extra rooms and the strange ambulation and there is always more of everything is some way that does not make sense to waking life.
Lately I have been massively stuck on many fronts and I have been forced to sit quietly with myself and do nothing. In the middle of the not doing and the frustration, sometimes the answer calls out to me in a way that I would never have heard if I were not so stuck. I know what needs to happen. I have no idea how to get there but another piece slips into place that was not there before.
There *is* value to being stuck.
Had one of those myself this morning in fact.
After major epiphanies last night, was realizing a whole bunch of posts I can/would be wonderful & useful to write for the Cafe, which is good, since I have work there to do before my lovely guest columnist arrives next week.
And I was SO PROUD that I put the titles all safely into ‘Drafts’ in WordPress! That way, I didn’t fall prey to the ‘dagnabbit! I KNEW I should have written them down!’s, as I so often do.
I was immensely annoyed at breakfast today to realize that, while someone did indeed do that, it wasn’t me.
Best of Fortune to you on your Journey! 🙂
Immensely evocative.
Hugely. Immensely.
Havi, I’ve felt just like this.
Here’s the Rilke poem that expresses it for me.
Spaziergang
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Schon ist mein Blick am Hügel, dem besonnten,
dem Wege, den ich kaum begann, voran.
So fasst uns das, was wir nicht fassen konnten,
voller Erscheinung, aus der Ferne an—
und wandelt uns, auch wenn wirs nicht erreichen,
in jenes, das wir, kaum es ahnend, sind;
ein Zeichen weht, erwidernd unserm Zeichen . . .
Wir aber spüren nur den Gegenwind.
Rainer Maria Rilke
A Walk
My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-
and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
Translated by Robert Bly
My recurring dream is that I discover that my house has way more space in it than I thought. A whole new wing, just waiting to be explored and used, just for me. I’ve had that dream for years in different forms.
May you keep open to the wind in your face.
Ooh, I was so excited I posted before reading all the comments.
@Emily and @Havi, how neat that we all have the extra-rooms dream! A house has always represented my self in my dreams, I think, so I take it as a reminder of how much bigger I am than I think…
*How could I have forgotten this?! What have I been doing with my time?!? But I remember now. And now the next piece can begin in earnest.*
The feeling sounds to me like Recognition.
Re-cognition
Cognition = knowing
Recogition = re-knowing.
Re-knowing something that you always knew.
This is why we SPIRAL, right? To get back to the place that we started and know it for the first time, and all that?
I <3 poetry that fits!
So here's cheers to wind, and dreams, and poets and spirals and remembering all that we've forgotten but knew all along. And blog posts that stick in your head and percolate bubble bubble bubble
love and xxxxx
Ooh, Claire, reknowing something you always knew…
and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are;
there it is!
yes yes yes exactly! <3