To begin at the beginning...

Do you know, it's very strange...I never know what title to put on a blog post, at least I rarely do and this one just popped into my mind. As I tried to recall what it was (they are the opening lines from Dylan Thomas' wonderful play for voices Under Milk Wood), I then had a fuzzy remembrance of dreaming about that play last night, or at least those lines. I have no idea what else happened, but I am wondering how much of our nocturnal wanderings shape what goes on in our day. How much do we dream? How significant is it in our lives? I don't know the answer, but it has excited my interest.
I've had really vivid dreams in the last few months. I don't remember them all very clearly, just moments or impressions. Often they are impressions of great richness, in the way you get the sense of a mythology as being very rich - and you know what they say about our dreams being part of the great collective unconscious!!! Sometimes I want to just keep sleeping so I can inhabit this fantastical world, even if it is at times scary, because it seems so much more. It is nice for the brain not to be limited by the "realities" of the everyday world, to be part of fairytales and magic and adventure.
And often it is the sense of the deeper truth is coming across through these very resounding images and sensations. Sometimes you know you have grasped this truth when you wake up even though you don't know it with the part of your brain that you use throughout your waking hours. I used to think that all these truths were lost as soon as you awoke, but now I think differently. I don't think we store all our knowledge in our immediate consciousness, I think we learn differently from the way we are taught to, if that makes sense! We don't always need to understand things immediately, we simply take them in and they are processed and assimilated without our conscious effort. Our interior lives change beyond our conscious perception, through living, through practice.
And sometimes you wake up and you know exactly what God or your higher self or your unconscious (whichever you choose, tis not the main point of distinction here!) has been trying to tell you. I had a really interesting dream just over a week ago. Normally I don't recall dreams in enough detail to be able to make a huge amount of sense of them beyond the feelings they leave me with (which I suspect at times act alongside my intuition), but this one, perhaps for the first time in years, I wanted to write down because I had a really strong feeling I knew exactly what it meant when I woke up.
I was stuck alone in this scary house and I knew there were two rooms in the house I was terrified to go into because they were haunted, there were horrible things in there I didn’t want to encounter. And I don’t know if there were things I was scared of outside and maybe I was waiting for people to arrive, but I knew I had to be alone for a spell of time. So to protect myself, I started going through the house systematically turning on all the lights, but I couldn’t go near those two rooms. However, I thought the rest of the lights would keep me safe. The thing is I am not sure if it was to keep me safe from what was outside or what was in those rooms or both...
When I think about this dream, especially in the context of what happened the day before, when two unpleasant things happened that raised ugly ghosts from the past, bringing me back to an old way of seeing myself that I had thought I was finished with and I was a state for the rest of the day, the first thing I realised was that the house was my soul. It's what they generally say, isn't it? And it was strange cause I had only imagining my soul as a house the day before and had pictured all the different rooms it would need as I was falling asleep.
I have been reading alot of Marianne Williamson lately and of how she says we need to bring light to the darkness inside of us, to confront it with light rather than staying in the dark and over-analysing it. And it seems I am doing that, but the dream seemed to show me there are more rooms in my soul that I need to be brave enough to go into in order to heal. There was a strong message that I need to be brave enough to bring light in there.
I am not speaking today as an expert on dreams, or even an enthusiast. I wasn't even going to write about dreams until the title of my post brought me into this territory which I hadn't even realised was interesting me as much as it has been, but I want to keep this blog to muse over things more and explore what is going on in my head as I don't really have the opportunity right now, or perhaps am just unwilling to share it in everyday conversation. I haven't written in ever so long and I just took this up as an impulse after reading the thoughts of a friend on his blog without a clue what to write about.
I mentioned the notion of practice earlier and the notion of practising even when you don't fully understand yet. I am speaking in relation to A Course in Miracles which I have taken up recently. In general, I have been faithfully reading one chapter a day and doing the accompanying exercises. I find the text difficult to penetrate and some of the exercises quite obscure, but I find as I go, the text is revealing more and more and the exercises provide some supreme moments of insight which flicker for a moment and then disappear back into the swirl of my thoughts, my ego. But, like with my dreams, I know they are working. They just are.
I realised when I studied abroad in Moscow and Bali, when I overcame my resistance to the truth inherent in contradiction and the my need to have information delivered to me as it were on a platter, beautifully presented and ready to digest, that this where what you need sinks in at a deeper level. It becomes part of you and because it creates a certain amount of mental conflict, it individualises what you take in, thereby neutralising the danger of a generic learning experience or, even worse, a brainwashing effect. It helps us to learn with our intuition.
And it helps you to realise, no matter how much you learn, you don't know much!