Transcript: Episode 28

Hey friend, and thank you for being here for today’s episode. I’m Mary, and I hope you’re doing well whenever and wherever you’re listening.

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This month, I’m going to be doing something that is sometimes considered obnoxiously gauche and self-obsessed—I’m going to tell you about a totally weird dream I had (two totally weird dreams, actually). If you’re the sort of person who actually loves this topic, then you’re welcome! And if you’re not that sort of person, please stick around anyway, because I promise this has a point that’s not about personal naval-gazing. (Or at least, not just about that.)

I’m going to be describing two dreams I’ve had that fall into the category of what you might call “big dreams.” And I’m using that term in both the generic or self-explanatory sense and also in the Jungian sense – in Jungian psychology, a big dream is a basically a dream that feels somehow transpersonal. It’s made up of images and symbols that are clearly archetypal as well as personal (or maybe even more so than personal). And a big dream is also a dream that comes to us with a big message, something that can shift and shape our process of becoming ourselves.

I’ve never shared either of these dreams with anyone before, so of course I’m choosing to share them now on the internet for anybody to potentially hear… there is something very 21^st century about the ability to both hope people are immediately listening to or reading your work as soon as you post it online, and then also having another part of your brain that would be horrified to have to actually witness somebody you actually know listening to or reading the thing.

Anyway: Here is the first big dream.

This dream visited me about 15 years ago now, when I was in my mid-twenties—and this was an especially low phase of my life. I’d just realized that my plans for what I wanted to do as my career at the time were not compatible with who I actually was. And on top of that setback, I was also in a serious relationship best described as a peer feedback minefield, in which any and all of my day-to-day behaviors could unleash a concern-trolling lecture on how I was too awkward, too sensitive, too introverted, too idealistic and impractical. Basically, how I was fundamentally too fucking weird to be a functional adult.

(The fact that all this faux-constructive criticism about my weirdness led to a mystical dream experience is maybe not the best bit of evidence against my ex-partner’s thesis… but that’s not actually the point of this story.)

In the Dream, I found myself walking down a road with a crowd of strangers, heading toward a mountain. We were pilgrims, and I had traveled on my own to join this big company or troupe of people. I knew no one. I spoke to no one. Everybody was walking in companionable but sacred quiet.

The closer we got to the mountain, the larger the crowd became, and we began to shift into stranger guises. Somewhere in the foothills I lost my shoes. By midway up the trail, I was dressed neck to ankles in downy white fur. Further along the way my hair got replaced with a veil of braided plumes.

At the top of the mountain, we started to dance. More and more of us flooded in, and this holy crowd, with me inside it, danced a ritual that I have never seen before in waking life. It was a feeling of both total dissolution and unbounded connection. We understood with complete certainty that the dance would always work, that it would always bring this release and joy. It would always be available if we needed it. These steps and leaps were the only thing we all had in common, and it was more than enough.

I woke up from this Dream literally crying (and already trying to hide my weirdo, too sensitive tears from my partner). I was completely bereft to find out that I’d been sleeping, that the dance wasn’t real.

 

Several years later, after a much-needed breakup and a couple of other major life phases, I had the second Dream.

This time, I was wandering through a huge stone building, some sort of echoing and formal place like a temple or museum. The nooks and chambers were filled with shrines to different religions and philosophies and sacred schools of thought. A flow of people moved through, talking and placing offerings.

One circular room was almost entirely filled with a massive granite reclining couch, with the fresh imprint of a huge body pressed into the rock, as if we’d just missed whoever had been lying there—like the surface would feel warm to the touch.

In the center of this temple-museum building was an open space, for gatherings or rituals. Suddenly, as I stood at the edge of the inner sanctum, I was taken over by a fit: jerking, twitching, falling to the stone. Choking on something that was fighting to climb free of my throat. I tried to call out for help. But either nobody understood me through my locked jaw, or nobody could help me.

In fact, nobody even seemed particularly alarmed. They all just gathered around, watching. Waiting. As if I were a ritual, and I just didn’t know it yet.

 

These two big dreams are about more than just one distinct theme like spirituality or creativity (or about the fact that twenty-five-year-old me really needed to not be in an emotionally abusive relationship). The reason these are big dreams is that they’re potentially about a lot of stuff.

As I’m creating this episode, I admit that part of me wants to keep them secret, to keep them just for me. But it feels correct to share them in this particular space because I do think one of the things they’re about is creative expression, and the power of that expression. And because these are big dreams, I think they’re very potent for me, as the dreamer—but they’re not about me, specifically or exclusively.

One of the symbolic, archetypal elements of these dreams is a ritual act of exchange between self and other—a creative and sacred flow or discourse between the individual and the crowd. But it’s not a smooth flow. Or maybe the best way to say it is that it’s not a simple flow. If you want to step deep into that sacred exchange and come away with something tangible, you have to learn how to let go of yourself while still remaining yourself.

There are as many ideas about how to do this as there are shrines in that dream museum I visited. It’s one of the core mysteries of religious experience, and of creative practice as well. And I think the practice and craft of writing can sometimes be particularly tension-filled when it comes to that flow between self and other.

Writing is isolating if we let it be. I’m partly talking about the reality that writing requires a lot of time spent doing a solitary activity (and many of us need a certain amount of actual physical isolation in order to do this activity, at least some of the time—whether that means “weekend hermit writing retreat” or just “do not open this closed door except in case of fire”).

I’m not only talking about this literal kind of isolation, though. There’s also a certain isolated type of thinking that a lot of writers have—a sense of being a perpetual observer that I’ve heard a lot of us describe. A sense of standing to the side of things, taking notes. And I’ve definitely encountered more than one writer who wears this as an affectation, who’s coolly eager to have you believe they’re mentally composing something cutting or beautiful (or both) every time you interact with them.

(Why yes, I did once have a crush on this kind of writer, and no, it did not go well for me.)

I don’t think the role of the creative observer is just a stereotyped personality performance, though. I think for many of us, it’s a way of thinking that goes deeper than simply an affected attitude.

Creativity thrives in interstitials and thresholds and tide zones, spaces where things move and mix and mingle in unexpected and generative ways. And so storytellers and artists often tend to be interstitial sort of people—people who feel somehow inherently in-between or both-and. We tend to be inclined to follow cracks and dive into edges, because that’s where all the interesting stuff is.

It’s only natural that we might start to think our distance from the consensus center is central to who we are and what we do. And it’s natural that we might start to relate to it as a fixed point, something we have to hold on to with intention or even discipline if we want to do deep creative work.

There’s a problem with that kind of rigidity, though: As soon you start trying to cling to the cracks and pin down the edges, they slip away from you. The generative threshold moves on and leaves you stranded in the little egoic observation post you’ve staked out, wondering why you can’t seem to fully connect with what you perceive. When you get too attached to the role of keenest eye or quickest tongue in the room, it becomes impossible to surrender yourself into flow and exchange.

There’s another common writerly trait that I think can make it hard to stay open and connected to flow. That sense of being in-between or both-and is also a sense of being permeable. Your particular creative expression emerges from the way you’re affected by the world and by what you experience in the world—it’s an artifact of being sensitive to what’s around you. Creatives are often more permeable or sensitive than what’s deemed “normal,” or even what’s deemed “acceptable.” And then that judgement or that dismissive disregard hits us particularly hard, because see above re: being extra affected by things.

When the first big dream came to me, I was in dire need of a reminder that my ability to be deeply affected didn’t make me broken or unacceptable. Being permeable wasn’t a glitch or a weakness. It was the very thing that made me a pilgrim dancing on that mountain, ecstatically connected to the collective experience of existence. (Which sounds a bit grandiose, but on the other hand, isn’t that kind of connection what creativity in its best forms is all about?)

The second dream has always felt to me like a direct continuation of the first, even though they were in completely different settings and were separated by almost ten years in waking life. And one of the symbolic aspects that has always struck me is how different the exchange felt in the second dream, that exchange between self and other—between me the dreamer, pulled into a ritual I didn’t know how to surrender to, and everyone else in the temple, standing around and watching.

Both dreams had an overt element of group spiritual practice, of seeking meaning in connection with others. Both involved ritual, and yet the experiences were almost diametrically opposed.

One of the phrases that emerged in my retelling of the first dream has suggested one possible way of describing and thinking about those two opposed experiences. It’s the difference between an “audience” and a “holy crowd.” Sometimes you feel like you’re being observed and weighed by a collective gaze that’s fundamentally separate from you. And sometimes you feel like part of that gaze, even as you create your work and offer it up to the collective.

Sometimes the work makes you feel stranded with yourself, grappling with something holy you can’t get your hands or your tongue to release. And sometimes the work releases you, lets you hear and see and feel the holiness as part of the crowd.

Whether you feel observed by the audience or immersed in the crowd is going to be strongly influenced by the way your creativity is received by the people and culture around you. And one of the hard things about creative craft is that you don’t really get to choose that. You can sometimes choose the kinds of people you surround yourself with in your immediate circles and communities—and that can go a long way toward shifting how you experience and express creativity. But there are always elements you can’t control when it comes to collective attitudes about the creative and the sacred.

One thing you can control, though, is what kind of collective you’re creating for, what kind of collective you’re seeking and connecting to when you practice your craft. Are you writing for an audience, standing off to the side in your observation post and hoping it becomes a podium? Or are you writing for the holy crowd? Is your craft one of the steps that draws you into that dance up the mountain—that brings you into the threshold where you experience holiness with and through your art?

 

I’m tempted to find something else to keep talking about, to stretch things out and make this episode closer to the usual length. But I’ve decided to trust these two big dreams to speak mostly for themselves, and for the symbol of the holy crowd to reach whoever needed to hear it today.

So in lieu of over-analyzing here, I’m going to invite you to fill out your listening time with me this month by picking one of two early episodes of the pod that explore themes connected to these dreams. Think of it as a choose-your-own-adventure conclusion to this episode.

Your two suggested choices are Episode 9: Hearth and horizon, and Episode 11: Telling the story that breathes. Pick whichever title feels intriguing and hit the link—both are timestamped to jump to the point of the episode when the good stuff starts, so you won’t have to listen to any intro talk.

Thanks for sharing this space with me today and letting me talk to you about dreams and other weirdo sensitive stuff. And just in case you’re not able to join me in one of those other episodes—keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you next month.