Little Bird and the Temple in a Green Place

The summer shut down so many of my normal urges and interests. Some kind of funky, vaguely depression-shaped fugue took over on most days, aside from the points of great success and fun (like Whigg Meadows and teaching a workshop and swimming in cold water). My drive to move around or get crafty definitely suffered. Since summer’s heat and driving sense of SUN EVERYWHERE ALL THE TIME YOU CAN’T HIDE FROM IT broke on Labor Day, it’s been cloudy and breezy and I’ve felt like walking through the woods and making things with my bare hands instead of a keyboard again.

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via Kireina Amapola

I’m not usually one for dreamwork. Most of my dreams involve nonsensical parades of meaningless images and words that can’t be deciphered even with the help of the stoutest Dream Dictionaries. My friend, who is a professional therapist using Gestalt Dream Therapy to help his clients, claimed that my dreams weren’t sending me important messages because I was neglecting my “active dreaming” during the falling-asleep cycle. But that’s not it – I learned about “active dreaming” as a teenager trying to overcome anxiety-driven insomnia. I fall asleep every night through the practice, and when I neglect it I don’t sleep. When special dreams do come, I become effortlessly lucid inside of it and everything is clear and easy to see. During normal dreams, parts of my field of vision are blacked out and I can’t turn my head or look around. The details of normal dreams are confusing and nothing fits together, but in those rare dreams there’s a clear storyline that progresses, even if I don’t understand the relevance of the story when I first wake up again.

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