Dreams of Place: From the Landscape of the Dream to the Landscape of the Spirit

“Dreams transport us each and every night into that strange and radiant world inside ourselves wherein, for better or worse, we come face to face with powers greater than ourselves.”

 (James Hagan, “Diamonds of the Night: The Search for Spirit in Your Dreams”)

Welcome dreamers,

Dreamworker Robert Moss tells us “ A dream is a place; you don’t have a dream, you have an experience in a place”.

That fits with my sense of dream – that sense that we have really been traveling somewhere else for a few hours during the night while our bodies seem to lie in our beds.  When Dorothy awoke, she insisted on this.  Auntie Em tried to tell her that it was  “…Just a dream, dear”, but Dorothy declaimed “Oh no- it was real-and you were there, and you, and you, sometimes it was scary, but mostly it was very beautiful…”  Who among us doubts that Dorothy really was in Oz!  Remember how the movie suddenly switches from black and white to Technicolor when she steps out of her traveling house into Oz?  Even after seeing it over and over again for more than 50 years, I still get a thrill every time she opens that door and steps out (a dream? or alternate reality?) in vivid color.

The landscapes in our dream are important.  Sometimes we recognize the place- we’ve been there, lived there, seen it in a movie.  Sometimes it is nowhere that we recognize, but a curious or fantastic environment.  Sometimes the very stones speak to us, and the trees are dream characters in their own right.  The setting is where we are in the dream, and we have to start with where we are to be able to orient ourselves to where we are going.

We know that reoccurring dreams or dream themes at the very least are giving us a heads up that something is important.  They will frequently return in one form or another until we “get” the message they are trying to convey to us and do something about it.  Dreaming of the same place, or a similar landscape can have the same function- we are meant to pay attention; there is something to be learned here.  The dream landscape is a portal into a time and place that has meaning for us.

For example, if we have a dream set in our childhood home, you can bet that there is something about that time in our life that is relevant for us today.  When you lived in that blue house with the black shutters, how old were you?  And how old are you in the dream?  What about that time in your life is relevant in your life today?  Kevin kept dreaming about the town he grew up in when he was 6 years old.  In working back and forth between the dream and life, he realized that he had lived in that house during a time of great turmoil when his parents were divorcing and he didn’t know where he would be living next; and currently he was between jobs and experiencing many of the same feelings of being uprooted, out of control, and not knowing where he would be working next.  Once this dream-to-life landscape connection was identified, he could see the differences between changes over which he had no control at age six (parents divorcing, possible move), and one now (job search) that could make choices about.  Recognizing this let Kevin recapture some of the excitement and possibility that accompanied looking for more meaningful work.

A re-occurring dreamscape can also be a kind of code for “Hello-this is a dream”.  For close to 20 years many of my dreams begin “I am in Israel and…” then some story would unfold.  My dream circle helped me recognize this first layer of my “Israel dreams” as such a code. In my case, I had actually lived there for five years in my 20’s, big formative years for my adult self.  It seemed that my unconscious had decided to announce “Heads up – different reality here!” by setting my dreams in that other place that I had previously inhabited.  In one desert dream I am dancing in a line of robed and veiled Bedouin women towards a large tent where powerful drumming seems to be calling us in, in another I am standing on a sea of sand, seeing the shimmering heat waves  rise up.  in another I am promoted to a new job there.  I actually began my professional career in Israel, going to graduate school and working with teen girls in a development town.  The land itself was both foreground and background to all the rest.

Shamanic practice teaches that we can inadvertently leave a part of ourselves in a place, and if we do, then we have to go back and retrieve that part in order to be fully whole again.  These places may show themselves to us in our dream worlds, to let us know that we have to make the journey back, either literally or figuratively to complete some part of our personal mythic journey. Think about it- have you ever experienced a sense of yearning or longing, passion or curiosity, homesickness or a bittersweet tug associated with some place or setting or landscape in your life or dream?  It may be that a part of you has been left there, needing to be retrieved.

Once I discovered this aspect of reclamation of parts, the dreams began transforming as I tried to pay attention to their message in waking life.   Over the next several years, I found some friends to speak Hebrew with again, became an adult bat mitzvah, studied shamanism from a Kabbalistic perspective, and rejoiced at my daughter’ bat mitzvah.  These actions began to fill in a part I hadn’t realized had been missing since I left the actual place that later became the portal to my dreams.   Then I revisited Israel itself after a twenty-five year hiatus and reconnected with old friends and places. That seemed to be the final piece-I rarely start off my dreams in Israel now.

  I think that when we recognize the spirit of place in dreams, we get to renew our place of spirit.

Sweet dreams,

Linda Yael