Loosening lifelong fears through Intentional Dreaming
“Dreams offer themselves to all.
They are oracles - always ready to serve
as our silent and infallible counselors.”
-Synesius of Cyrene, a Greek bishop living around 400A.D.
Around six months ago, while participating in an Advanced Spiritual Psychology training, I chose to couple my training with a nightly dreaming intention related to healing and resolving lifelong fears. Before bed, my prayer sounded something like: Please help me experience the deepest levels and layers of healing related to my fears of being kidnapped and tortured. Please show me: what does it feel like in my body to heal this?
I engaged this same intention over a series of three nights - and today, I'm called to share with you the dreams that followed. Imagine I am writing these dreams to you via candlelight, feathered ink on papyrus, sealed with honeywax & hand-delivered on horseback :)
Perhaps grab a cozy cup and let's lean in….
DREAM ONE
Please help me experience the deepest levels and layers of healing related to my fears of being kidnapped and tortured.
Please show me: what does it feel like in my body to heal this?
I dream I am walking alone on cobblestone streets. It is a different time - feels like the early 1800s. It is night, and I can hear my shoes clicking on the cobblestone. I have a feeling someone is lurking, watching me, following me. My heart rate picks up - I walk faster. It is late, dark, no one around. I turn a corner and see the shape and shadow of a man about 20 feet behind me; he is picking up his pace. I walk into a side-door and somehow find a bathroom where another woman is hiding. We both shrink in the corner of the bathroom stall, terrified. He is coming. Then I woke up.
DREAM TWO
Please help me experience the deepest levels and layers of healing related to my fears of being kidnapped and tortured.
Please show me: what does it feel like in my body to heal this?
I dream I am on an ancient island in the sea - feels like sometime and somewhere in ancient, ancient Greece. Pre-Roman. Pre-empire. Salty sea air that somehow smells like honey, linen white dresses, meadows and fields of wildflowers, ivory sunkissed stones, lavender, honeybees, honeycomb, hives. Women weaving baskets barefoot. Village laughter. Men rubbing feet, loving and longing to serve. I have never felt so safe in my body and so fully connected to the Earth. My breath is Lavender's breath is all of our breath. I am nourished and free. I am me - yet I am also the sea, the stone, the bone, the breath, the village laughter. The olive trees and warm wind. We are a thriving ecosystem. Then I woke up - and immediately grabbed my dream journal.
This poem poured through me:
The stones are the bones of the land
Singing stories
Woven among their fragrant memories
I long for a time when
I could walk with my eyes in my womb
Open and soft
Lavender trailing every turn
Safe in my body
Safe in this land
Nestled by a world that revered
The Sea
DREAM THREE
Please help me experience the deepest levels and layers of healing related to my fears of being kidnapped and tortured.
Please show me: what does it feel like in my body to heal this?
I have the same dream setting as the first night - except this time: there is a visible golden, honeyed light surrounding me as I walk alone on the cobblestones. I feel like this warm light has always been here. With me. With everywhere. With everyone. This warm light that lives before and beyond time. This time walking alone on the cobblestone street, I do not feel afraid with the warm light around me. I sense the man lurking behind me - instead of running away, this time I stop on the cobblestones and face him. When I fully turn toward him, he shrinks and turns into a crying baby boy. Crying. Crying. Screaming. No one will nurture him. I walk over to him and pick him up off the cold, wet cobblestone. He is immediately embraced by the warm honeyed light,
and his body dissolves into ether. Then I woke up.
At the time of this writing, I had these three dreams around six months ago, and I am still processing them. I feel they gave me not just a personal insight into the roots of my fears, but also acknowledged the cultural context and collective trauma related to what has felt like a personal fear throughout my life.
This dream gave me insight into hidden fears and beliefs I've held while also giving me a full somatic experience of what it's like to feel safe, held, nurtured by people, place, and land.
Before bed now, I sometimes imagine myself on the island; it has served like a lullaby for me in moments of feeling fear before going to sleep. While this series of dreams didn't magically remove all of my lifelong fears (yet), they highlighted hidden dynamics that have empowered me to continue loosening and untying knots within me. I have made progress and am further along than I was before engaging this dreaming process.
I share these three dreams with you today as invitational encouragement to turn towards your dreams as wise and soulful guides that can meet you through the big, existential, necessary, nuanced, and complicated questions you hold in your heart at this time.
While you do not need to take a course to experience a deeper relationship with your dreams, if you're called to receive a helping hand along the way - I've poured all of the practices, meditations, and dream teachings that have greatly assisted me into Dreaming Deeper.
This self-paced course will offer you step-by-step practices, meditations, and workbooks to help you find your dreaming questions and begin to dream deeper. I am offering $100 off if you sign up by May 15th - receive all the details and sign up here!
With a honeyed hum,
Madeline