July 2010 Newsletter – Dreaming The Gulf
“in dreams begin responsibility” Yeats
“you’ve got to serve somebody” Dylan
by Judith Sarah Schmidt, PhD
There has been a nightmare happening: We are in the Southern part of the United States. Suddenly, from deep under the water a deafening explosion is heard. Slimy oil floods the waters Grotesquely slick rainbows float on the water’s surface. The plants and grasses, refuge and food to young fish, shrimp and other living things are burning. Life bearing creatures searching for breeding grounds but they are gone, destroyed. Our eyes see all of this in disbelief. A hand lifts up to the heavens, asks the stunned question: how is this possible! Then we see more: birds covered in oil, unable to fly. Sea turtles covered in oil, unable to swim. Fish under th waters unable to breathe or find refuge anywhere. The slowed heavy movement of the waves sounds a dirge. The stench is terrible. We hold our noses and breathe death And in the dream we know that human being has let loose this destruction upon the precious body of the earth.While in a dream we go on sleeping, a nightmare usually startles us awake, overwhelming us with frightening images and energies that cannot be absorbed by either our body or our psyche.
Even when we are awakened by the nightmare, we cannot wake up from it. Its horror hijacks us. Oftentimes a nightmare is recurrent. The force of the nightmare intrudes upon awareness like an unwelcomed guest, shouting: attention must be paid to me.
The only way to meet the nightmare is to respect it by taking it into dreamtime to reflect upon it in a serious way. While the ego of the dreamer may want to get a good night’s sleep, the soul wants to find out and tend to the task that the nightmare is holding forth. This is true for both individual and collective nightmares.
Nightmares are not only visitors in the night. They are also unbearable experiences lived in broad daylight that seize hold of body, mind and spirit. War is a nightmare. The devastation of Haiti is a nightmare. A diagnosis of cancer is a nightmare. Sexual abuse is a nightmare. The too muchness of the nightmare cries out to have its shattered bits and pieces taken into the holding container of consciousness to be dreamed into bearable form. It waits to be taken up by the soul to become a thinkable and redemptive spiritual and ethical task.
The Gulf nightmare has been one we have been overwhelmed by and unable to wake up from in the past months. This nightmare is happening to the vulnerable body of our earth, and, because we are part of the earth, what is happening to the earth and waters of the Gulf is also happening to us.
The nightmare of the Gulf is calling out to be dreamed, demanding that our collective soul take up the task of healing. This nightmare will not stop unless we give it serious attention. It will repeat itself in other places, but it will be the same nightmare.
Nightmares usually carry collective archaic patterns of energy, meaning that they are often not only personal, that they are ancient and that they contain large conflicting forces that are playing out on the stage of the human psyche. They shatter our sense of reality, bring us to our edge, often to our knees, and threaten chaos out of which transformation and evolution might arise. This cutting edge is true both at the individual and the collective levels.
Consciousness is being called upon. Toward this end, the nightmare asks us to reflect: Why is it here? Toward what end has it come? In service to what is it calling us? These are difficult questions waking dreamers will find themselves asking. In order for answers to come, shadow parts of the individual and social unconscious will have to be encountered.
We each feel called upon to carry some broken piece of creation in order to raise it up to wholeness. In this way, we are partners in caring for and creating our world. For those of you who feel called upon to dream the nightmare of the Gulf, dream on with me while we carry the questions: toward what end is the nightmare asking to be dreamed? and in the service of what?
The containing spaciousness into which we carry the nightmare is one in which we are neither fully awake nor fully asleep. We enter a state of reverie in which our thinking mind steps aside, where we wait with our breathing to receive what comes up to us from our depths. This is the space of waking dreaming.
In my waking dream:
there is a character who goes by the initials ‘BP’.
BP is committed to limitless dominion over nature,
the water and earth and their creatures, ancestral fishing
cultures, life itself into serving its needs. BP sees
everything and everyone in the world as created to be
there for BP, to provide whatever BP might wish for.
BP’s distorted vision and needs are the center of the
world. BP does not feel the needs or the wounds of
the other. The other exists only as a means to the ends
of BP. Bp carries no sense of responsibility for the other.
BP has traded self-reflection for a reflexive power that
eradicates the possibility of an I-Thou existence.
In my waking dream, BP carries the archetype of the
one who holds self higher than other, who looks into the
mirror of the other and sees only his own face. BP lives in
service to what builds its inner and outer wealth, power
and grandeur. In the waking dream, I sense BP to be
an ‘it’, rather than a person, dehumanized by
its own greed, empty of a human core. BP has cold
reptilian eyes.
The space of waking dream asks us to hold every part of the nightmare as a part of our own being. If I hold BP as the bad Other who is not me, there will be no possibility of transformation for BP. In dreaming this nightmare, I am being asked to look into the face of BP, to know BP in all the facets of its being, thereby coming to know the many selves that live within me.
Facing BP in myself, I ask: in what ways do I abuse the earth and its resources? In what ways do I see myself as separate from and more important than the seamless web of Creation? In this heat wave, for my comfort, do I overuse my air conditioning? Yes. Do I drive where I can walk? Yes. Do I too often forget to shut out the lights when I leave a room? Yes. The BP in me greedily uses the resources of the earth to serve my needs for comfort. In these ways, and in so many more, the BP in me wants more and more and more, and wants it now, no matter the cost.
In waking dream, the door of imagination opens wide. We enter a larger reality, where everything is possible, where we can be in any time, at any place, meet or become anyone. This is imaginal space in which our conscious thinking self can become surprised and open to larger ways of seeing and being.
In my waking dream…
through the thick morning fog rolling over
the wounded Gulf waters, I see an old man
in a rickety boat. His craggy sun lined face
is unshaven, with a long unwiedly white beard.
He is stooped but still has a powerful body.
How strong he must have been!
As he comes in closer to shore, I see that Old
Man of the Sea (1) is entering my waking dream.
High over his head the Old Man carries the skeleton
over a very large and once mighty marlin. Through
the fog, the magnficent spectral whiteness of its bare
weathered bones gleams. The Old Man has been sailing
with it for a long time. I wonder why.
Old Man of the Sea is sailing toward BP who
stands on the shore, looking out at the disaster, trying
to devise a way to clean it up, to continue to mine
the underground oil.
Old Man brings his boat on to shore. Then
he carries the skeleton of the great marlin
off the boat and places it on the sand in front
of BP. With this silent ritual, the Old Man
has caught BP’s attention.
Old Man tells BP that he came face to face with
the marlin and struggled mightily with him.
For the first time he knew that he was meeting a
wholly other creature, no less worthy than himself.
The Old Man became sorry for the great fish that
had nothing to eat and “his determination to kill him
never diminished his sorrow for him.’ (2)
Something happened to me out there in the sea, Old
Man went on: I went out just to kill and bring in
the marlin for food, didn’t care about anything else
Just like you went out for the oil and didn’t care
about the water or its creatures. I was you BP. But
something changed me out there, the Marlin
changed me. When we struggled, I looked into his
eyes and saw each of us facing death, each of us
wanting life. I remember thinking: “It is good that
we do not have to kill the sun and the moon or the
stars.” (3)
BP looks at Old Man, wondering what this has
to do with him. Old Man tells how after he harpooned
the great marlin, the sharks came to eat its flesh,
leaving only the skeleton. Old Man tells
BP: we are like the sharks, scavengers and killers
taking, devouring and killing. With the marlin, I
became a creature facing another creature and
caring about its life. For the first time.
Old Man looked deep into the eyes of BP and said:
“You see, I shouldn’t have gone out so far, neither
for the marlin or for me.” (4) Look out there BP, you
too went out too far…We shouldn’t have gone out too
far.
BP listens to the story the Old Man tells. Two opposing forces in our nature sit together. Who is this Old Man? He is the one who comes to carry being a part of all life, who comes to know that his life is no more valuable than that of any creature; who honors the creature he will take for food; who looks the marlin in the face and promises to take no more than is needed for food and to use the food for raining up the broken pieces of the world.
Old Man carries the white skeleton of the marlin as a memorial to the creature who taught him that there is a limit to how far our any one can go before upsetting the balance of creation. Old Man carries the white skeleton of the marlin as a talisman to help him remember to choose between the power of being over the other and the power of being face to face with the other, in I-Thou contact.
In waking dream work, we are called to hold the energy forces contained in opposing images. In this holding of the opposites, a creative process unfolds in which a new way of being in and seeing of the world becomes possible.
Old Man takes BP to the oil covered birds and sea
turtles. Old Man says: Here, take these shocked
ones into your hands, look into their eyes. This
is the only repair for going too far outside.
With his own hands BP bathes the thick oil from
the birds and fish and turtles, finally in direct,
intimate and responsible contact with other living
beings.
BP looks into the innocent eyes of each creature
he holds. He understands that it is his task to
know that he has gone out too far. He looks into
the eyes of Old Man and lets him know that he too
will be in service to Kindness. He understands that
kindless must look every living being in the face.
As BP looks into the faces of the creature he holds,
feels the frightened frozen body in his hands. His
heart is cracking open. He beings to know himself
to be no more powerful than the creature he is holding
and no less vulnerable. He is beginning to have a heart of
mercy, like Old Man. Alchemy is happening.
In waking dream work, there is a responsibility to carry forth what we receive in imagination out into our daily life as an intentional personal spiritual practice. In this way, our ego bows to the depths and uses its strength to support the choices that serve greater wisdom and greater good.
What practice shall I carry out of this waking dream? I recall that at my 50th birthday celebration, someone asked me, “What do you wish for your next fifty years?” not having planned a talk, I heard these words come out of my mouth: “I want to become simpler and simper and simpler, until…”
Twenty-five years later, these words still ring through my life, still call me to become simpler. Is it possible, I wonder, that our BP craving has at center a sacred longing to have more and more of this precious life? Knowing that death is the one thing we can have no dominion over, do we deny death by going out too far, each in our own way? Is that why the Buddhists place a human skeleton head at the entrance of their homes, to know limitation in their comings and their goings?
The practice I will carry out of my waking dream is to walk with BP on one side of me and Old Man on the other, to witness when BP is in dominance and to call upon Old Man to help me feel the harm of excess, to restore balance, to help me not go out too far, to help me live simply and in small ways, with my small life, to serve Life.
Please, share your own waking dreaming of the Gulf nightmare. In your dream, what task, no matter how small, is yours? What are you in service to? in Sharing within the circle of our CIL community, we create a matrix of healing in which the trauma of this nightmare can be dreamed for the sake of healing and transformation.
1. The Old Man of the Sea came to my waking dream from Ernest Hemingway’s novel: The Old Man in the Sea, a beautifully told story. All quotes are from that book.
