The Power of Dreaming
O God, the stars are shining: All eyes have closed in sleep; The kings have locked their doors. Each lover is alone, in secret, with the one he loves. And I am here too: alone, hidden from all of them. With you.
- Rabia,At night, when our conscious minds are at rest, our deeper wisdom, the holy wisdom, speaks to us through our dreams. There are answers in the darkness that we need, answers that cannot be found in the light of day. They speak the language of the soul, opening wide the windows of our perceptions, helping us to respond to the urgent need of our time.
A friend dreamt recently of a voice telling her, "If enough work together, the world will change. This must be done in the way of women." This means that we cannot impose on life. The changes that will take place must be done in the feminine way, listening, listening to life and what it needs. Working with our dreams, we learn to listen with the heart, to work with the fluidity of the inner world, to stand at the doorway where love flows from the infinite emptiness into life.
I paid little attention to my dreams until the age of thirty-six. I was on a rare trip to Hawaii with my parents, my brothers, nieces and nephews, and my own husband and children. The hotel was brightly lit with tinsel-covered artificial Christmas trees for the tourists. I felt hollow, filled with sorrow. There were strained relationships among many in the larger family, and I went to bed crying on Christmas night.
The next morning I awoke when it was still dark. We were going to leave the following day, and I felt a need for something that I couldn't even identify. Compelled by a barely articulate desire, I walked down the long hotel road to a little path I had seen each day. It frightened me a little, this path into the lava beds, and each day I had avoided it, walking instead on the other side of the road. This morning, however, I had to go in.
Turning off the main road, I left behind the soft glow of the street lamps. I followed the narrow path for at least a half hour. The sun had not yet risen, but there was just enough diffuse light in the east to discern the path. It felt good to be walking alone, and my mind became very calm and at peace.
At some point, I decided it was time to go back to the hotel and turned around. But instead of the single path that had taken me to where I was standing, I saw that there were many paths, and the lava formations were so high that I couldn't see how to get out. The hotel and the main road were now out of sight, and for some reason, it seemed darker than when I had started.
I began to panic. I realized I didn't even know if it was safe to walk here alone. I tried a path but it forked several times, and then I knew I was completely lost. The lava field extended for acres, so my only recourse was to wait until the sun rose. I sat on a rock and closed my eyes. I had recently learned to meditate and knew that it might help to calm me. I relaxed and slowly the panic subsided. Another half hour had gone by when I felt the first rays of the sun rising over the hills, touching my face.
As I opened my eyes, ready to find my way out, I saw hundreds of petroglyphs etched into the dark lava. Below me, on the walls surrounding me, were hundreds of symbols that seemed to be representations of the elements, of life. The most beautiful was a circle with a dot in the center. Squatting, I ran my fingers around the circle, then the center dot, astonished that that I had been sitting in what was clearly sacred spot. I explored the petroglyphs until the sun became hot, and then it was time to find my way back to the hotel.
I spent the day with all of the family, and went to bed that night feeling that I had been touched by something deeper than the appearances of my life, if only for a moment. But still, the sorrow about my relationship to my family remained. That night I had the first dream I ever remembered.
The dream was direct and simple. I was shown the circle with the dot in the center, the symbol I had seen that morning. I then heard a voice say, "If you would be that dot in the center, which is Love, then the problems with your family would not exist." And then I became the dot in the center, and an ocean of love poured into me and through my body. It went on and on, streaming into every part of me, and then I woke up, amazed and in awe of what had just taken place.
This dream changed the course of my life. It awakened a longing to return to the experience of love, to live from the center of myself, although I had no idea what that even meant, or how I would go about doing it. I only knew that I could no longer live my life as I had done before. For the next three years I stumbled along, having little understanding about the relationship between dreams and daily life. Eventually, I forgot the dream.
When I finally grew desperate to make sense of my life, I met a teacher of Sufism who specialized in dream interpretation and meditation. One evening I heard him speak about dreams and the qualities needed for the inner journey. I heard in his voice an echo of what I had experienced in my dream, and knew that he could help me. Over the next few years I gradually learned how to access the wisdom within me that I had first glimpsed in my dream.
Wisdom is so simple that we overlook it, undervalue it; often we do not even recognize it. Yet there is nothing more important. This wisdom is the deep natural understanding that springs from and takes us back to what is Real, to what nourishes and heals. And somewhere we long for it now, because there is a real need not just in ourselves but in life and for the earth. And yet, how subtle are the ways that we run from the wisdom we so badly need. We look for it everywhere other than where it resides, inside ourselves.
This wisdom lies underneath our beliefs, behind our perceptions of how life works, beyond our personality. It is a river hidden so deeply within us that we can barely remember what it feels like to live in relation to it. It goes beyond any belief or idea of spirituality, and yet deepens our own practice within a spiritual tradition. It is ancient, and yet we can experience wisdom in a way that is fully conscious and responsive to the complexities of contemporary life. Sometimes the suffering that life may bring can open us to real wisdom, because suffering opens the heart. It is in the heart that we are able to perceive the deeper state of consciousness that wisdom brings.
A woman recently dreamed of a natural hot springs that had been covered over. Only when she stopped cars from driving over this area would it again become pure and rise to the surface, creating warm pools for women to bathe in. This pure water is real-it comes from the source, from the innermost sacred place within us. There is an old Sufi saying about Khidr, who walks where the two seas meet, where inner and outer worlds come together. "That magic spring where Khidr once drank the water of life is in your own home, but you have blocked its flow."
To say yes to this deepening, to allow our desire for wisdom to nourish our lives, seems simple but is not easy. It is like walking in the lava field, in the darkness, and being unable to do anything but wait until the sun rises. It is like stumbling around for three years, waiting for the one person who could help me to find my way back to the state of being that was shown to me in my dream.
One friend who had experienced difficulty in her life for many years, recently heard in a dream, "You know nothing, and you are nothing." It was a phrase so simple that she barely noticed it; only a week later did she realize that it was an answer to her prayers for understanding. Finally, she was given what she needed to heal her relationship to life. To know nothing was to allow for the dream to be wiser than her fears and doubts. To be nothing was, for her, to give up her complaints and comparisons to others and to instead bow down before the sacredness of her life. She then had subsequent dreams revealing the hidden rich texture inside her life, imaged as brocade and green silk, indicating that she could now live in relation to this deeper aspect of her being rather than focusing only on what was lacking.
This deeper place has always been with us. This place is so vast, where the river of Wisdom runs through, waiting for us to remember it. This place where wisdom surfaces from our depths, invites us to drink from its clear water; it is not personal, although it touches us in an immensely personal way. If we try to bring to the dreams our preconceived ideas or any imposed rational way of thinking, it is like driving cars over the natural hot springs.
What do we do with a dream that opens us to a new way of being even though the outer framework of our lives remains the same? It is usually not a matter of changing our lives, but learning to be attentive to the new quality that has been born. This attentiveness is like standing at the doorway between the dream and our daily life, an expression of devotion to the emerging new life impulse. Gradually our daily life becomes infused with meaning that permeates everything that we do.
One friend had the following dream at a time when she felt deeply troubled by the state of the world. Although she valued her life, there was still a nagging sense that what she was doing was not enough. Her dream came like a bolt of lightening, waking her up to the power of her ordinary being, taking care of children, facing the complexities of marriage, working.
I dreamed I was walking in the pitch-black night of the world. The night was like all the darkness in the world right now. As I was walking I saw a beacon of light that was surprising to me. Then as I was walking, I saw one by one thousands of lights stand up out of the darkness -- beacons all over the world, each one a person holding their own portion of the light in the darkness. I got the sense that each of these beacons was outshining the darkness...more powerful than the darkness. The lights were like lighthouses or beacons for other souls in the world to gravitate to -- they would be attracted, so to speak, to the light.The dreams are here to help us, to guide us, to bridge what has been cut off in our lives and in life itself. When we work with dreams for the sake of the greater whole, then the clear waters can flow into our lives. We learn how to work with the current of life where love flows out from the source, and those who are in service to life are given access to this love. For many, the knowledge of the ways of love lies beneath feelings of despair or anger or experiences of suffering, but through our devotion, we can learn to bear what the dreams reveal. Just as inside our own darkness is a light that is the very core of our being, so it is with the world.
Feeling vulnerable or uncertain in our life makes our need for wisdom more acute, our heart more receptive. During one particularly bleak winter I had the following dream. I heard, in this dream, a voice saying, "Just love Me and then the branches will blossom and the heart will sing."
I have learned to hold dreams carefully, to allow them to unfold in their own time. Without knowing how I would reach this love that would make the trees blossom, I knew only to follow the thread of the dream, to follow the intimacy and tenderness that I felt when I awoke, and to wait. Slowly, the truth of these words became real; a quality of wonder returned to my life. I remembered again what I had forgotten, to be the dot in the center of the circle.