1. Everyone dreams: Do you remember your dreams? How often?
Whenever I wake up out of a dream full of symbolism I usually try to be quiet for a few minutes and assess what it might have been about, though it's been several years since I tried writing down and pondering the meaning of whatever I'd recently dreamt. 2. Did you or do you have a recurring dream? Share it, if you'd like.
As an adult I haven't, but as a little kid I had a visually interesting dream that featured what looked like a board game full of textured black squares I had to move through from start to finish. It always was easy, with almost no roadblocks, but it always took a while to get to the end.
3. Have you ever had recurring themes or images in dreams? Examples?
One basic type of recurring dream features players currently on the periphery or who have been on the outskirts of my life for a short time in roles and situations where now former friends and acquaintances used to be; I'd call those thematic images and they're always people rather than objects.
4. Do you day dream? About what?
As part of living as if and practicing resurrection, I try to daydream often, imagining a here and now, a place, space, and a people that welcome me, do not consider me a threat or a curiosity and are willing to help resurrect me from this death. I envision a scenario where I've found a geographically local, a "parish" church where I can design some posters and bulletin covers, teach on a regular basis, preach now and then, help plan worship, be the regular supply musician or possibly the musician for one of the worship events.
5. What are your dreams/hopes/goals for the future?
Please refer to (4), and to emphasize, I dream of a place where I have a future, where my many years of education, my gifts, skills, and abilities will be exploited and celebrated. Internet options can enhance and enrich life tremendously, but like sacraments, real life is local. Like sacraments, real life is sensory: you can touch and feel, taste and smell, see, hear and celebrate it. The sad reality of someone with my level of education, skills, and experience running around town and around the internet, sending emails, making phone calls and cold calls trying to explain my background and begging folks to let me do something, (sometimes to go to lunch with me!) is plain pathetic. Walter Brueggemann says "bright, skilled, educated people are valued and sought-after"; he also speaks of people being nullified.
What is life? Community, friends, family if you have one, participation and parties, good food, good drink, opportunities for "meaningful" service; for me it needs to include a setting safe enough that I can recover the reasonably full emotional responses that are essential to being human. Real life evolves organically, and isn't something you can manufacture as I've been trying to do. That's my hope for me as an individual, but more broadly, I dream of that kind of setting for everyone. In short, a total environment that helps transform the world and especially the neighborhood (remember, life is local!) into something closer to the Reign of Heaven on Earth. Community, friends, hopes, dreams and participation in the thick of things make us human; they make life and they make life worth living.
PS I loved reading Jung when I was in school and maybe need to check him out again!
Dreams.. I know that when I dream, I know I have had a good sleep. Mostly don't remember them, bits and pieces. Nightmares, however, I do seem to remember. I don't think I have ever actually had a reoccurring one. Nor do I write them down. Although there have been times I wish I could understand them.
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I have the odd dreams where I am trapped and trying to get out or cnat seem to find the end of a tunnel! Not sure what that says about me.
ReplyDeleteI also think where we are in life impacts thedreams we have and what we are looking or searching for. Maybe?
I think studying dreams (maybe with a good therapist) could be useful; someone with a degree in counseling suggested writing down the symbols rather than the narratives of your dreams, but in mine it seems as if the people are symbolic. That tunnel or place of no escape is familiar to me, too, and in terms of where we are and what we seek, no way am I looking to recover a past that wasn't exactly Egypt but also wasn't quite Eden, but for sure those dreams remind me of my ongoing sense of call and need to express it somehow in real life.
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