Dream Our Way Home
Our dreams can help us find our way home in the darkness.
At Winter Solstice we feel the full power of the direction North, which in the Celtic tradition is the direction of battle, “rough places” and transformation. According to Frank MacEowen, in his book The Celtic Way of Seeing: Meditations on the Irish Spirit Wheel, “The archetypal figure sitting in the North of the Irish Spirit Wheel is the Warrior, who can have either an actualized and enlightened expression that leads to peace, discipline and personal refinement or an imbalanced expression that can lead to violence, unconscious conflict, and even bloodshed.”[1]
We are confronted at every turn with the unbalanced Warrior that seems to dominate our world: police murdering young African-American men in the streets, ISIS fundamentalists beheading journalists and stoning gays in the chaotic aftermath of US-initiated war, the shameful legacy of CIA use of torture, mining companies stealing even more sacred Native land for exploitation. Who are we that we have created a world in which such things can occur? How can we face our personal and collective shadows – the positive and negative aspects of ourselves that are hidden from us – without being sucked into a black hole and crushed? (We ordinary mortals don’t have at our disposal the technical wizardry of the film “Interstellar.”)
The most creative times are often also the most chaotic and difficult. Patterns of separation, projection, oppression, and violence are being made visible in uncomfortable, even devastating ways. We must see what is happening if we have any hope of changing it. If we ignore our shadows, they will rule us. If we make them apparent we can integrate them in a conscious way with our brilliance and our healing capabilities. We need both light and darkness.
Often the shadow side will make itself visible in dreams. We call the frightening ones “nightmares,” from an old Germanic word for an evil spirit that rode on people’s chests while they slept and brought them bad dreams. Some dreams may disturb us so much that we keep them secret, try to forget them, run away from them. But the dreams have a healing intention: to bring to awareness that which must be seen so that we can be whole, so that we can become enlightened Warriors. Listening to and honoring the dreams – remembering them, writing them down, sharing them with others, understanding the messages in them – is our path to personal and collective peace. Dreams can guide us to action in the best interest of all.
We can’t do this alone. It’s overwhelming. We need strong, safe circles and communities to share and explore our dreams, bringing shadow into light and light into shadow. This is the path of the North.
During the winter and spring of 2015, I will be leading a series of workshops called “Dream Our Way Home: Facing Our Fears, Claiming Our Power, Changing Our World.” In these workshops, participants can share dreams of all kinds – powerful, strange, confusing, beautiful, scary dreams. We will work with them using intuitive insights, shamanic journeying and Dream Constellations[2] to understand their meaning, for the dreamer and for all of us. If you are interested in learning more about these workshops, click here.
Have a beautiful Solstice!
[1] Frank MacEowan, The Celtic Way of Seeing: Meditations on the Irish Spirit Wheel (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007), 106.
[2] Dream Constellations are a powerful way of working with dreams in which people stand in the middle of a circle to represent people, beings, and places in dreams, making visible the connections and interactions among the representatives and bringing greater clarity to the dreamer and the group.