Cynthia Nodland
My life is much like a recurring dream in which I’m being taught to juggle spheres of colored light. In the dream my teacher is an ageless man with sparkling eyes, welcome humor and a black top hat. The lesson is to FOCUS, without allowing my attention to linger with any one sphere, lest they all fall or fly beyond my reach.
There have been many iterations of this theme over the course of my life. The dream recurs because I am still learning to juggle, to balance the paradoxes and the outright mysterious ways that life unfolds for each of us.
I was born smack dab in the middle of the American Dream. And I suppose that everything would have been just fine if I hadn’t been so curious. It seemed like most everyone else was fine with the way things were. But I was one of those kids with a few imaginary friends that included a tribe of Plains Indians in the backyard and an African village in my bedroom closet. I also saw that between our neighborhood and the city there were miles of towering tenements where people lived in a dark nightmare of broken windows and laundry hanging in sooty air. There was also the nightmare in our house that was never mentioned until the day my dad left because he just couldn’t get sober.
The first twelve years was an intensive on-job-training that took another decade to integrate and put to use. In the meantime, I struggled to balance the light and the dark via the constant support of my inner world. I graduated from high school and sought refuge in the friends I made. I lived in a commune in the city, moved to a tipi in the mountains, had a short stint with a guru, and finally went back to school to study medicine. But the path turned and I found myself working with patients in a hospice. I changed my major to counseling. During my internship I worked with kids who learned to tie their shoes for the first time every single day. And every single day there was a celebration of the "first time." Those kids taught me that I could only ‘be here now’ or miss the party.
The dreams kept coming and I found a therapist who helped me to begin sorting through the confusion of voices, dreams and reality. I was startled to discover that there was a big piece of my early life that had been hidden for many good reasons. Together we opened the door and met those old demons.
My work with children with developmental disabilities eventually led me to an agency that supervised visitation for divorcing families, and then a private psychiatric hospital. I was taught the value of multi-disciplinary team work in the healing of children and families. And for a number of years I flourished there.
But once again, the path turned and led me to an analyst who actually worked not only with dreams, but also visions, and a practice revived by Carl Jung which he called “active imagination.” My top-hatted juggling instructor jumped for joy and I began to refine my focus and balancing skills in an environment of support.
In time I opened my office to private patients and completed my doctorate in Jungian Psychology. And now, these twenty years along the road, I am learning to juggle this new sphere of internet communication. Dreamways is a shared dream of bringing the mysterious ways of waking and sleeping consciousness into tangible focus for all who are curious and willing to revive their imaginations.