September 2020

Dear Dreamers –
 It’s Emergency Preparedness Month, something that weirdly appeals to me. Maybe it comes from raising a pack of Boy Scouts.  Or from the prudent thrill of filling so many plastic tubs with supplies before the inevitable disaster of Y2K.  Or the charm of the tiny, detailed survival kits my boys used to pack into Altoid boxes.   Given the vividness and nightmarish quality of many Covid dreams, it occurs to me that we may need to check our Dream Emergency Kits.

This month I want to remind you of the Swiss Army Knife of dreamwork, the one tool you absolutely must have to engage with your dreams and to follow through on their purpose.  Often you will need this when things feel troubling or nightmarish in the dream.  But know this: when you feel an emergency in a dream, it comes in the service of emergence.*  The tool goes beyond “Mitigation Strategy” and into the realm of “Divine Compassionate Healing Miracle for Yourself and for the Ages.” 
 
Here’s your tool: it is the phrase I am that too.
 
Yes, you probably already have it in your pocket.
Yes, this is shadow work.
I just want to remind you how necessary it is, and offer a blade by blade review of how to use “I am that too” when you wake from a dream, particularly one that disturbs you.
 

1. Remember that all parts of your dream picture parts of you, the dreamer.
2. The upsetting element, perhaps a person or an animal or a place or a natural disaster, is most emphatically part of you.
3. And it is asking for attention, NOW.
4. Because to be whole, and to mitigate crisis or misfortune, and to be the person you are called to be in the world for yourself and others,  you need to integrate the essence of this dream image into your conscious living.  Now is the right time.
5. This will seem dangerous, mad, foolhardy, and wrong.
6. To bolster your conviction, recall who Jesus hung out with: the misfits, the marginalized, the ill, the poor, the overly emotional, the bothersome, the relationally challenged, the rulebreakers, and a few dullards.
7. That’s the sort of person you’re looking at when you encounter the “shadow” in your dream: a part of you that needs to be seen, wondered about, understood, gently heard, and accepted at the table.
8. “I am that too,” is a simple mantra or breath prayer that you can use to remind yourself that whatever you dream,  is part of you. Your main job is to acknowledge that you have that particular characteristic going on in yourself.
9. Stay with this challenging otherness.  Get to know it: learn to recognize when it starts to  make you angry, disgusted, or fearful.  Trust that there is some needed truth for you here; there is some sort of flip side to this energy. Give it time to arise.  Try a different kind of seeing. For instance, if you have a dream character who is controlling, you may find that they are manifesting the shadow side of your own untapped leadership.    A cruel monster may be the shadow side of your own unacknowledged anger and its power for transformation. **
10. Then see what happens.  Over time, you will find that you have more compassion for yourself, and you become more expansive in your understanding and merciful in your responses to others. 
11. Especially the ones who are most troubling to you. 
12. Clearly, the blades of this Swiss Army Knife are not for stabbing the enemy. They are for carefully cutting your attachment to your negative projection. This will free the person in front of you, whether in dreamlife or waking life, from your crippling judgment on them.   And it clears you to be your more whole and loving self, so that what comes through you is genuine and compassionate.​

I am offering this tool now because we are in a state of multiple emergencies, including the Covid crisis, wildfires and hurricanes, political turbulence, coming to terms with systemic racism, violence at peaceful protests, economic instability, and the general upheaval of life as we thought we knew it.

To many of us, it feels like a time of emergency.  It can also be a time of emergence.  Of new capacities in ourselves…of space for the Other…and of the wild surge of knowing that way way down in the psyche, in the imagination of God – there is a kind of unifying force field which holds us all.
 
Carl Jung talked about the necessity of doing this kind of soulstretching , claiming that the fate of humankind depended on every one of us doing our inner work.   
 
Shadow work is hard, it’s never finished, and it often feels nearly impossible. I’m still pretty bad at it. But dreams help us learn it.  They offer us an amazing chance to practice over and over this strange, richly powerful, deeply humbling work of saying…and meaning…and finally understanding… through the disturbing emergence in a dream …“I am that too.”
 
Heartfelt gratitude to each of you who is willing to stay with the otherness,
Laura


* I had a dream that showed me this: I saw a crash site, emergency vehicles everywhere, looked like a disaster, then I see a geyser of clear water gush up from the center of the intersection!  Somehow the emergency had become an emergence. Gives me hope.
​
** See David Richo, How to Be an Adult for a clear, simple guide to shadow transformation. 

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Autumn at
Fire by Night

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Individual Dreamwork –
Pandemic-friendly discounts
END
at midnight Wednesday Sept. 30.  Thanks to all who have taken me up on the offer!
Email me by the 30th to book your individual sessions at 
$75 each or four for $280. 
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 Something new:
Dream Emergence Survival Kit
for Group Dreamwork

Curious about group dreamwork?  Book a
one-time dream circle
for your small group or circle of trust.  You’ll learn the basics of group dreamwork, practice three ways of exploring your own dreams, and reach into your creative depths for some embodied dream-tending that helps you carry your dream’s wisdom into waking life.  You’ll be prepared to handle future dream emergences - alone or together. 
2 hour group meeting ($200)
4 hour workshop ($400)
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Groups:
All groups are set for now. If you’d like to be on the waiting list to join in January, please email me at laura@firebynight.net.