Sleep Dream. I am at the Mental Health Center. It’s the office here I worked, but in the dream it is a different building, friendlier looking. It seems to be located in Colorado Springs, the town of my childhood. I have arrived for a reunion of the drug and alcohol team that I was part of. The festivities are taking place in a large, plain, group room. I feel curious and a bit cautious about being around these folks, who in waking life I've not seen for years.
I spot Jaye. She looks completely emotionally collapsed. There is not even a spark of joy or liveliness in her eyes. She could be a hundred miserable years old. I don’t know if she sees me, but I make no effort to talk to her: it feels like it would be too, too depressing. I interact with Lizzie P. She is a bit timid around me, as if unsure as to how I will react to her. I see the sparkle in her eyes, she still has the child-like enthusiasm that I always enjoyed about her. I offer her my business card and suggest that we get together soon to catch up. The temerity and sadness in her eyes disappear, she lights up, and hands me her own business card. Lizzie S. appears, she too initially timid, but quickly opening up when she perceives my friendly stance. The three of us chat and laugh. Jolene walks by, but she seems gray and lifeless. I decide that I don’t need to talk with anyone who seems like an energy sucker, and don't try to interact with her.
At some point I decide to leave, to head back to Denver. I go outside and get into my car in the parking lot. I feel that this has turned out to be a very pleasant reunion.
DREAM EXPLORATIONS. Reunion at the Mental Health Center. For a variety of reasons, my years at the mental health center proved to be difficult for me. A significant challenge turned out to be working in a female-dominated venue, where my unresolved thoughts and feelings regarding women and Mother could easily manifest. At one time or another, at one level or another, I experienced huge disappointment with each of my female colleagues at the mental health center. (Experiencing disappointment with females is a life-long theme that continues in all bailiwicks of my life, it having culminated in the crash-and-burn with Ruta a few years ago.)
Jaye always seemed to me to be trapped in unexamined rage and depression. Her attitude of accommodating anything and everything that superiors mandated angered me. "They say 'Jump', and I ask 'How high'!" It seemed like she would never stand up for herself or for the team. Or me. This pattern I knew well from Varimants and Armīns. I always felt erased by it.
Jolene physically reminded me of Zaiga. She too seemed contracted and fearful, also a bit censorious. A Zaiga mirror for me.
With both of these women I always hoped that their behavior patterns would change. The reality was, of course, that all the only thing I could have insured be different was my own pattern of interaction with them, which I did work on. Yet I often felt trapped by my dynamics with these femmes.
With the other dream ladies I felt more waking-life heart connection. But, ultimately, I wound up feeling somehow trapped and erased in my interactions with them, too.
This dream would seem to indicate that I am ready to revisit all these feminine relationships. Perhaps I've sorted through some of my archetypal expectations that weighed these connections down with emotional overload. Some women I've had snarls with I will never re-connect with. With others, those that I still have positive feelings about, perhaps I can re-establish ties. But I mustn't load the container of these connections with the raw garbage of my own primal emotional needs. As long as I don’t expect the impossible with women (or anyone), there is the possibility of all sorts of life-enriching relationships. The key for me is to pay attention. Connections that impoverish me are to be minimized or avoided. Ones that do, indeed, enrich me, I should mindfully and heartfully cultivate.
Colorado Springs was the venue of much childhood unhappiness for me. I've recently come to understand that the source of my youthful distress was not so much the Springs, as it was 2515 N. Union Blvd., the family house, where many dark patterns were initiated. This dream situates stories from a certain time of my adult, Denver life into the town of my childhood. Compelling thought and feeling patterns in one of my adult-life phases are re-contextualized into the childhood environment where they began, making the origin and continuity of these patterns more evident to me. I have been working on re-visioning of my connection with my childhood, as well as with the town of my childhood. Perhaps this work is allowing me to also re-vision my mental health center experiences. Healing is never an isolated event.
I experienced no feelings of discomfort or guilt in the dream. Not talking to people who I didn’t want to converse with felt fine. Opening myself to those whose energies I like also felt fine. I had no sense of needing or wanting to fit in. I felt authentic, not hamstrung by niggling imaginings of what I "should" do.
After a recent drought of remembered dreams, this feels like a gift signaling quiet healing.