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Two startling dreams roused me during the pre-dawn hours:
My brother Mark asked my help in removing thousands of silver needles and straight pins from a magnificent display of unique fabrics that commanded rave reviews, worldwide. The venue for this artwork was at the St. Louis Cathedral.
Sleep returned immediately, only to have the following dream surface the next hour:
Many crowd a playing field on a sunny afternoon. Suddenly, the loud speaker system clicks on, and a warning voice announces: “If by 3 P.M., tomorrow, letters, T, O, M and Ed Buegge have not stopped drinking, they will die.” At least the announcer did not disclose the anonymity of my brother, I muse to myself.
Remembering that dream stories are replete with symbols and hidden in the unconscious, I had much to work with, their terror firing me for several hours afterwards.
To deal with these lessons, I prayed, with the psalmist: “Unless the Lord build the house, in vain do the laborers build it.” In my perception, dream work constitutes co-creating with God. He is the Master Builder.
The symbol of thousands of silver needles and straight pins in the first dream has multiple associations: their sharpness and invisibility, their impermanence in holding things together, their potential to inflict pain. Others’ perception of my well-defined character is fleeting, at best: a cover for multiple disorders still lodged in the darkness of my psyche. My brother Mark, already in the next life, invites me to explore this stinking morass with God, so as to remove it, before my own transition.
In the second dream, the announcer’s warning caught me unawares, so lulled I was by the afternoon sun and camaraderie of the participants on the playing field. Only after he clicked off the microphone did the full import of his words strike me with dread: alcoholism, our family disease, and death.
For generations, I’ve Twelve-Stepped my alcoholism and grasped its lethal nature, also evidenced at funerals and memorials. But the felt presence of death in my psyche is a first.
For years, studies of death have attracted me: its multiple expressions found in the work of psychologists and theologians, even authors and musicians. In blogging this subject, I’ve grown. But much of this buzzing about has not touched the core of my death, until this morning’s dream.
I’m grateful to having been so nudged, but more will be revealed. I’ve only to surrender and participate. This is working out…
Skeletal fingers, fevered spirits, agonize for a fix before the next holiday bash—and there are many, in the glitziest of venues. Desperation sours puke, hiccoughs frenzy the chest, joints scream in pain. Too chicken-hearted to opt for death, there seems no way out.
But there is—for those willing to change. It’s all about waking up to the full implications of our humanness, rife with loss. Within such losses that knee us before a Power greater than ourselves, we sense a faint voice emerging from our depths: so unlike the carping one with the bullwhip. We sink back on our haunches. We listen. Tears pool our eyes. Chests stop heaving. Hands fold in prayer. Something akin to peace blooms like a fragrant rose: its white satiny gloss bespeaks Joy.
And then it’s over. Still on our haunches, we slip to the floor and prostate ourselves beneath the mantel of silence. We have been visited and we know it, but its memory mandates action.
Nothing left for us but to pick up our cell and call for help. It’s out there, even during the Christmas holidays.
The shredder’s whine and engorgement of previously valid documents reminds me of the ego’s painful process of letting go—Certainly, the experience, for most of my life.
My collection of paper caricatures of who I thought was began with baptism and communion and confirmation as drawn up by the parish church, followed by signatures on vow formulas, as a nun, and later, on its dispensation granted by the Vatican in Rome. I was also collecting paper degrees, with corresponding certifications as teacher, as social worker, and as hospital chaplain, each of which substantiated my identity. Outside of what I did for a living, I had no identity.
With the early onset of rheumatoid arthritis came more reports from internists, rheumatologists, and surgeons, results of lab and x-ray work-ups, and a spiral bound notebook for notes, remembered from office visits.
Then, came the three-year marriage: with more signatures at City Hall, at the church, followed by the divorce decree and the subsequent annulment. The bottom drawer of my desk housed these documents; it remained shut until the next change. Never did I ever know whom everyone was describing. It seemed like someone else.
And it was. Only after a series of painful dreams did I seek Jungian analysis in 1988. Thus began close listening and study of my unconscious that was desperately seeking to be heard. Imperceptibly, I began to change: the fruit of daily recording my dreams and their meanings, enclosed within thirty-two loose-leaf binders that lined my bookshelves.
With my 2001 retirement, I began serious writing and Twelve Step work on my character defects. The rest is in print.
The shredder’s power to re-constitute whatever it was fed is like another Power who has reshaped my past: it is me and not me, at the same time, with conscious contact of my Higher Power.
Heart Whisperings 