Am I dreaming?

Recently, on Shrink Rap Radio, I heard an interview with a guy called Ed Tick who helps people heal through dreaming.

This was very timely as in recent weeks I have been remembering dreams again – something that I have seldom done in recent years. The remembering seems to align with a spell of better sleep. My insomnia – which leads to me being rudely awakened from deep sleep by an alarm – appears to inhibit the process.

Even so, I only recall fragments. That may be a good thing as there is little more tedium-inducing that someone recounting their dreams. Unless it is their careers.

One fragment is, on the surface, self-explanatory.

In real life, my father is in hospital having had a stroke that has paralyzed his left arm and leg. Recently, in one of our nightly conversations, he told me that he had stood up twice, helped only by the nurses that day. The following morning I recalled a dream in which my father and I were standing outside a hotel or convention centre, waiting for a bus or taxi, and he said to me, “Did you notice that I walked here?” And I was exultant, delighted. That seems like a straight-forward wish-fulfilment dream.

The conversation on Shrink Rap Radio, though, led me to wonder if maybe there is more to it. Perhaps related to my not noticing? In the dream, I was more concerned with catching the bus than on how he came out of the hotel or convention centre… or, now I think of it, the hospital… the doors in my dream were the doors of his hospital. Perhaps it is a reminder to be present with every moment of his progress, rather than always looking ahead, trying to get to somewhere else.

On the other hand, it may simply be a reminder that he can’t get out of the hospital until he can walk.

The other fragment is more intriguing in that it seems more symbolic.

In this dream I was walking down a track that I know well in real life. It is an old by-way, something that I think is called a “holloway”. This is a sunken lane, a lane much lower than the surrounding land. The track has been worn down by centuries of passage by carts and cattle. This track, near the home where I grew up but where I no longer live yet long to live, which is a public right of way, becomes a river in wet weather and is now largely overgrown. It is though, and always has been, rather magical. I think all holloways are rather magical.

The very word has the sense of a lacuna, that space not where there is nothing but where nothing is. It’s a neat distinction – in which the presence of nothing is, in a way, redolent with an ineffable meaning, an unknowable consciousness. But, I digress.

So, I was walking down this track, a track I had been thinking about recently as I had been wondering if the woodland surrounding it has the botanical markers of Ancient Woodland, and in the dream I was hampered by my baggage and by time constraints. I wanted to get to the bottom, where there is a permanent river, and I didn’t think I had the time or the energy. I thought I had to traverse a whole long section of the holloway to reach it. But then, suddenly, I was there, at the river. And the river had the “aura” of “the source”. It felt, in the dream, as though I had reached, so much more easily than I could have expected, precisely the place where I wanted and needed to be.

Is this dream telling me that I really am not so far from my goal? That I can make it despite my baggage and the limited time? And that the unknowing I feel all to conscious of is a necessary part of the process?

Once again, the message could be that I am so concerned about the stages of my journey that I fail to realise that I already am – or am near - where I am meant to be.

This would be profoundly reassuring if only I weren’t so fixated on my narrative of always needing to struggle!

Perhaps tonight’s dream can help me start to resolve that.