Dream tide

I love the tang of seaweed on the air, although, as a young child, I was scared of slip-sliding across the beached slimy tangles to reach the waves.

Once in the water I was happy enough, but on murky green sea days, eels lurked below the surface, wrapping themselves around my legs, or so I imagined. On clearer blue sea days, I could see they were nothing other than harmless fragments of drifting seaweed.

Earlier this month we descended from a nature reserve clifftop walk onto a hidden, and perhaps secret beach. The tide was out, and the sand was strewn with such a diversity of seaweeds, speckled with shells and leaves and seeds blown down from the clifftop that I too was blown away, albeit in a different sense. Out came my phone, and I took a barrage of photos thinking they’d be great inspiration for an artist, perhaps a printmaker. I realise now that the pictures were inspiration for this blog, a metaphor for the fragments of dreams that are beached each morning onto the shores of our waking consciousness and, ideally, captured in some form—writing, pictures, audio, art–for later contemplation.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could grab our phones in the morning and somehow record our dreams as photos!

Some mornings our waking shores are empty of dreams, even though everyone dreams, every night. Perhaps we jumped too quickly into waking mode, forgetting to linger a moment and peruse the tideline before the dream wisps, untended, unloved, were drawn back into the oceans of the unconscious.

Some mornings we notice scatterings of dreams, fragments of this and that, with no remembered storylines.

There are ways in which you can work with dream fragments, doing the detective work to imagine how they might fit together, or forgetting about storyline and focussing instead on the elements and what information and insight they carry.

Look for patterns in your dream fragments, in the same way that you might seek out patterns in the tangles of different varieties of seaweed fragments delivered by the tide. Does this type of seaweed keep appearing alongside another type of seaweed? Do leaves and seeds from a nearby clifftop tend to settle into patterns with a specific seaweed? Is there flotsam and jetsam and how does their placement fit into the pattern of the tideline? Are there shells and if so, are they open or closed? Stand back from the tideline, what overall patterns do you see, and how do they make you feel? Are there walls, blocks, obstacles in the patterns? Are there freeways, paths, stepping-stones? Are there conflicting patterns, merging patterns, emerging patterns? Move the metaphor into your washed-up morning dream fragments. What themes can you see, and how do these make you feel? How might they relate to your recent experiences, to your life?

After a storm, a tideline might be piled high with elements torn up from the depths of the ocean. I suspect the calm and beautiful beach we visited had experienced such a storm, given the diversity of seaweeds and bits and pieces of intermingled trees and plants.

After an emotionally stormy day, your dreams of the next day or two will probably involve high emotion, making them more vivid and more likely to leave their mark on your waking mind.

Such dreams are potential treasure chests, bringing you bounty from the depths of your unconscious mind that you can explore to understand the dynamics behind that emotional storm and discover the best way forward.

Walking the tideline at the hidden, secret beach, I noticed some standout feature items, an unusually deep red floret, a single shining oyster shell, a delicately placed tree nut. In full length dreams and in dream fragments, there may be single standout features, a particularly surreal image, or an oversized element, or a vividly coloured item. These are dream symbols shouting for attention, symbols holding hidden secrets of their own, ready to share them with you when you approach them with wisdom.

Do you notice recurring motifs in the dreams of a single morning, or in a spread of dreams over time?

These relate to recurring motifs in your waking life, both those you are already aware of and, more significantly, those you are as yet unaware of, those deeply unconscious thoughts, feelings, and patterns of behaviour that­­­—unbidden—powerfully influence the way you live and experience your life. There’s magnificent alchemy awaiting you when you explore recurring dream motifs.

Lay in bed long enough, after waking, to capture what your dreams have tossed onto your waking shore. Don’t let these treasures fade or be reclaimed by the next tide. Revel in the magic, and take it into your day.

PS The image I’ve used for the blog header is from one of the many photos I took that morning.

 

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