Dreamwork as Spiritual Practice

Author: kirstenbackstrom (Page 1 of 17)

Pass It On

[My second “Dream Alchemy” column, first published in DreamTime magazine in 2019, is concerned with transformation and also the sharing of gifts. The dream I share here was certainly a gift in my own life—in fact, only a few days ago, this dream came back to me and the memory of it helped me through a long night when I was feeling ill and disconnected. The dream reminded me that I belong to a human lineage, and that belonging carries both responsibilities and blessings. I hope that the “bread” of this dream will nourish you, as it nourishes me.]

In keeping with the theme of “Dream Alchemy,” I’d like to consider some of the transformative processes at the heart of both alchemy and dreamwork. Alchemical change occurs when something ordinary is subjected to various procedures (heating, cooling, distilling, coalescing…) until something extraordinary happens. The remarkable result of alchemical experimentation is the transformation of a dark heavy substance (prima materia, like lead or feces) into a substance of great value (usually gold), or into a potion with special properties, perhaps an elixir of immortality. Alchemy breaks the rules of our predictable lives, and, metaphorically at least, shows us that true value may be found in unlikely places when various elements (people, circumstances, natural forces, chemical compounds) combine to become more than the sum of their parts. When these components come together in the right way, even time itself can be suspended or reshaped so that, in a sense, we might live forever. 

Dreams experiment with these same elements, stretching the bounds of what we believe is possible and offering us infinite abundance, while reminding us that authentic treasures are not to be kept, but to be shared and passed on as wisdom. Here is one such dream:

The Dalai Lama’s dearest friend is dead. He weeps openly. I’m escorting him through the crowd of mourners. He needs to return home, to sleep, but he’s barefoot and there’s snow on the ground. I intend to go get a car to drive him, but I realize that he has become a small, crying child. I can’t leave him alone, so I must carry him. As I lift him, he transforms—becoming an infant, then an adult corpse stiff with rigor mortis, then both simultaneously. I have difficulty carrying him, so I drop all my personal belongings and devote myself to the task completely. 

Later, alone, I’m standing in line for the bathroom. The Dalai Lama as a tall young man emerges from the crowd with his retainers. He’s reserved and distracted. I don’t expect him to recognize me. But then I feel his hand on my arm. He asks me to get him a snack—a packet of cookies—from a nearby bakery counter. I get the cookies; he thanks me. This seems to complete the process I began by carrying him earlier. I feel deeply honored to have had a small part in the reincarnation of a holy one.

(I wake from this dream in awe, wondering whether the Dalai Lama has actually died. Outside in the dark, it begins to rain—a downpour—the wind blows hard, the wind chimes ring. There’s lightning, thunder. It’s magical. I return to sleep and the dream continues…)

Now I’m indoors and the whole building fills with people: the Dalai Lama’s entourage, plus a crowd of followers, gathering for the closing ceremony of his visit. A woman from his inner circle brings me a gift. It’s a carafe filled with a thick, yeasty liquid that looks like sourdough starter, with a thin red ribbon tied around the neck of the carafe. She hands the potion to me, saying that it is “for you”—but when I ask if I’m really supposed to keep it, she says “no.” I try to give it back, but she won’t take it, repeating that it’s “for you.” I ask, “Is it mine?” and again she says “no,” but won’t take it back. She leaves. I’m bewildered about what to do with the gift. Holly [my partner] explains that it must be like yeast: we should take some of what I’ve been given and add flour and water so it will grow. Then I can return the original carafe and keep growing more. I can’t “keep it” for myself, but I must “keep it alive.”

For me, the Dalai Lama represents profound wisdom and extraordinary leadership, manifested through an authentic, gracious, humble human being. He is said to be the reincarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion (Avalokiteshvara/ Kwan Yin/ Chenrezig). Having passed through many forms, suffered death and rebirth over and over, the bodhisattva returns endlessly, serves willingly, until all beings can come to full awakening. In my dream, I find myself in the role of literally carrying this awesome loving presence through the transformations of a lifetime. Perhaps this is the true meaning behind all of our lives: we are part of a lineage, carrying forward the awakened potential that is our inheritance, manifesting that potential through all of our actions in this world.

The compassionate grief that the Dalai Lama feels for his friend, and the sense of tender responsibility I feel for the barefoot, crying child provide the energy, the life force, the fire that sets the crucible boiling and makes birth and death and rebirth unfold. The passage of a lifetime is both a difficult task, and a mutual dance of love and blessing.

The dream becomes more ordinary when the Dalai Lama is a young man preoccupied with his responsibilities, and I am just another person waiting my turn to tend to my own physical needs and ablutions. What’s asked of me here is simple: to provide a snack for someone I respect, to offer him a respite in the midst of his daily business. Nothing more is required, yet the “cookies” I offer are a kind of sacrament. The Dalai Lama accepts them matter-of-factly, yet there’s a tacit acknowledgement that the very ordinariness of the gesture has confirmed my part in the whole miracle of compassionate love, passed from one person to another.

I awaken briefly to experience the wonder of the natural world, to participate in it just as I have been participating in the miraculous dream world. Rain, thunder, lightning, wind, windchimes… The music of the spheres, the bubbling of alchemical potions and preparations, the transformation of lifetimes, all offered up as easily as a midnight storm passing through—as I slip back into sleep and return to the dream.

As always, the reward for service to others is ambiguous, and invites new questions, offers new challenges to learn, share and change. The red ribbon around the neck of the carafe is like the red thread that people of many faiths wear as a bracelet, as a reminder of our life-blood and the circular, braided path of our interconnectedness. And what about the liquid inside the carafe? What is this frothy stuff that’s been given into my care? It’s “for me,” but not “mine.” It’s “to keep alive,” but not “to keep.” It’s my very life, and its only value lies in allowing it to develop, to expand, to provide for others, to return to the giver with gratitude but still have plenty left to pass on. What a dream this is! It’s the loaves and fishes, it’s the circle of life, it’s every cliché that conceals a real truth. With such yeasty stuff, we bake the bread of heaven, each tearing off a warm, crusty piece as it’s passed around. 

The alchemy of the dream completes itself when the dream is shared. The ordinary becomes extraordinary; the finite becomes infinite. Indeed, the elixir of immortality can be concocted through the deep work of dreaming.

[This article was originally published in the Spring, 2019 issue of DreamTime Magazine. If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing to DreamTime by joining the International Association for the Study of Dreams ]

Dream Alchemy

[Welcome back to Compass Dreamwork! After a three year sabbatical, I’m finally emerging from hibernation, blinking in the sunlight, ready to reconnect. It’s been a difficult time for many of us, and it’s good to return to my dreaming community, to share ideas and, I hope, hear from some of you as well. Instead of writing a regular blog, I’ll be opening up the conversation by posting articles each month that were originally published in my “Dream Alchemy” column for DreamTime magazine. If you’re a member of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, you might have seen the column, but if not, the articles will be new to you. From time to time, I’ll be sharing other essays and excerpts from various projects I’m working on. I hope you enjoy reading what I’ve written, and I invite your comments. ]

Each night as we sleep, the caldron begins to bubble. Unremarkable raw materials, mixed with infinitesimal droplets of mysterious tinctures, get cooked down to their essential elements. A cleansing steam rises as the impurities are filtered out, and the elements interact in new combinations—sizzling, sparking, shrinking and expanding, changing color. The pungent catalyst of emotion sets off a chemical reaction. Images appear in the drifting smoke. Occasionally, something explodes. Sometimes we have to discard the burnt sludge at the bottom of the beaker and begin again, but often there’s a glimmer of gold. Deep transformation can emerge unexpectedly from the chaotic process of dream creativity, rewarding us with bright insights and alchemical treasures: precious metals, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Universal Solvent, or even the Elixir of Immortality. When we begin to experiment with our dreams, we discover that anything is possible.

As we dream, a strange concoction is created. Whether we see this concoction as a psychological experience, a neurological event, a profound message, or an encounter with other worlds, our dreams represent a dynamic aspect of our lives that can inspire us to experiment. As we explore our dreams, we find ourselves delving into the vital essence of our perceptions, our choices, our beliefs, our relationships, our environment. Dreams are strange. They give us plenty of raw materials, but it’s up to us to simmer, stir, titrate, distill and filter those materials, using our tools and skills to realize their potential. We really don’t know what we’re doing when we’re dreaming, but if we bring curiosity and courage to our dream experiences, we can find authentic valuables in this process of alchemical investigation. 

I’m calling this column “Dream Alchemy” because both alchemy and dreamwork have to do with finding meaning and life in a transformative process that includes everything: the worst and the best, the mundane and the miraculous, the corporeal and the ineffable. I’ll be exploring dreams from a wide variety of perspectives, applying what I’ve learned from others and what I’ve discovered through my own alchemical investigations and life experiences.

Because of my particular background and inclinations, I’ll be emphasizing certain aspects of dreams and dreamwork. As a dream alchemist, my apparatus includes: 

1) Working with dreams about death, and particularly the kinds of dreams we have when we are ill, grieving, aging or experiencing big life transitions and thresholds. I’ve been exploring my own death dreams, and studying death dreams in hospice chaplaincy, pastoral care and spiritual direction contexts for many years, and they seem to represent a concentrated quintessence of change and renewal. 

2) Working especially with unpleasant dreams, difficult dreams and nightmares, because they invite the alchemy of transforming heavy, dark substances like lead (or feces) into gold. 

3) Finding meaningful ways that dreams can change the world—exploring the implications of dreamwork as a personal task or quest that can be part of a larger, universal task or quest. The metaphor of dreamwork as pilgrimage is especially significant for me, and I want to explore how the dream-pilgrimage of an individual lifetime reflects and contributes to the shared journey of all living beings, the whole earth, the cosmos. 

4) I’ve been a student of world mythologies all my life, because they express central human existential concerns: the nature and origins of our existence, consciousness, identity, reality. Mythologies and dreams are manifestations of our longing for the Philosopher’s Stone, our endless search for meaning, which can be conveyed as story, rich with metaphor, paradox and mystery.

5) Fun and creativity! I love turning dreams (and waking life) upside down and inside out, like an alchemist messing about with ingredients, stirring up and sometimes exploding the “stuff” of our waking and dreaming experiences so that new and surprising substances can come into being.

There’s a lot of dream alchemy ahead in this column… so, watch this space! 

Here’s a dream, to play with:

Giving Away the Marble: An older, wiser woman has a lot of wonderful small objects: marbles of all kinds and tiny stone animals of all species. I get to keep a few of them, and I’m trying to choose. A man with a toddler is nearby—I offer the boy a little giraffe (now a stuffed toy rather than stone) and a clear marble that reflects everything upside-down. He accepts the giraffe, but ignores the marble. I roll the marble on the floor, and it becomes much larger, the size of an earth globe. It is mostly clear, a slightly irregular glass sphere with sparkling lights in it. I pick it up (it’s heavy!) and feel its shape—finding it beautiful. Now, the man would like to have it, but I would like to keep it. I decide to give it to him.

Alchemical transformations occur in this dream: the stone giraffe becomes a stuffed toy; the marble, when rolled on the ground, becomes a sparkling glass globe; my desire to keep these treasures becomes a willingness to give them away. Gifts are passed on from generation to generation as the old, wise woman gives them to me, and I give them to the small boy and his young father. 

What are these gifts? They are simple, toy-like, and “wonderful”—the kinds of gifts we all need to inspire our growth and development. The child accepts a giraffe—an awkward yet graceful creature with a long neck, reaching for the heights—just as this child will eventually, inevitably, grow into the longing aspirations and awkward grace of adolescence. Instead of a hard stone animal, this giraffe has become a soft toy, supple and comforting. 

I’m a woman in late middle-age, so the gifts I choose (marble and giraffe) represent things that I can appreciate but know I can’t really keep. I recognize that the child should have the chance to choose, too. The marble is still mine for now—the spherical glass jewel that reflects everything within it upside-down… but then I roll it on the ground, on the earth, and it grows into an entire globe-like world, slightly irregular, imperfect, but full of sparkling light. It is heavy, too heavy for one person to carry forever. Even Atlas had difficulty carrying the whole earth; I can’t carry it for long. Much as I’d like to hold onto my important role of bearing the weight of this beautiful world, I recognize that the next generation needs to receive it from me. And so I give it away, just as I gave away the giraffe. Maybe now I’ve become the wise old woman myself, passing on the blessings I have in abundance.

The shifting shapes of our dreams give their gifts freely, playfully, to the holy alchemical fire that will transform them. We grow, age, choose, offer, receive. Let’s explore the transformative power of our dreams together, sharing the gold that results from our experimentation. I’ll be looking forward to the expanding possibilities of this column, and the dream-alchemy we can create together. 

[This article was originally published in the Winter, 2019 issue of DreamTime Magazine. If you enjoyed it, please consider subscribing to DreamTime by joining the International Association for the Study of Dreams ]

Changes in Compass Dreamwork

Everything is always changing, and that’s good, of course—but also often sad. Without change, there would be stagnation and death, but where there’s change, there are endings as well as new beginnings.

A lot of clichés! Admittedly, I’m stalling here. It’s hard to write this, but I won’t be maintaining the Compass Dreamwork blog on a regular basis any longer. We’ve been dreaming together in this blog for seven years now, and seven years marks a completed cycle. I’ve begun to repeat myself, so it’s time to pause… look around… listen…

I don’t yet know what’s coming next. If you enjoy reading my work, there will still be occasional posts coming through on Compass Dreamwork: maybe some surprise blog articles from time to time, and some reprints of articles published elsewhere. There’s also a huge archive here on the site (if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you can browse through the “Categories” menu and pick posts on any topic you choose). And, of course, I’d love to have you read (or perhaps re-read?) my book, Just Walk.

Among the potential projects I’m considering is a sequel to Just Walk… called Just Wait. Also, a book on dreams is brewing. However, my biggest project, for now, is just waiting, just dreaming. I’ve made a commitment not to let myself become busy. It’s time for spaciousnes and patience, time to breathe, to live.

Wishing you all the time you need in your life, too.

Thank you, for the ways that you have nurtured my work —your reading, your insights, your comments and questions. I trust that the community we’ve made together will continue, in new ways. I’ll be in touch with you, when the time is right.

Just Walking: A Gift For The Journey

click on the photo to find the book

If you’re anything like me, you’d like to give meaningful gifts, but also feel bombarded by advertising, sick of shopping, and reluctant to add to the clutter that tends to accumulate in all of our lives. I hope that suggesting a good book will not add to your seasonal stress. Some gifts can be worthwhile, and I really believe that Just Walk is one of those gifts, especially if it’s chosen with the right person in mind.

If you have a friend or family member who is coping with illness, aging, discouragement or uncertainty, who is approaching new possibilities or seeking creative change in their lives, please consider giving them a copy of Just Walk: Following the Camino All the Way Home. It’s a very intimate journey that is also universal, following a traditional pilgrimage route on the Camino de Santiago, and a parallel pilgrimage through illness.

The book has been used by book groups and classes, and for daily readings during personal retreats. Couples have read it aloud to each other, and solitary people have read it to themselves for companionship in a crisis. If you are looking for a meaningful gift, for a loved one or for yourself, I hope you’ll read a few pages and see if Just Walk is what you’re looking for.

Here are a few of the things that others have shared about the book:

 I have been very sick for several weeks and… what kept me going was being able to savor your amazing book while I lay in bed. Not only was/is it a riveting story, but the telling of it was so artfully done. I love the way you would go back and forth between the pilgrimage in Spain and the one you’ve been presently on since coming home. Your setting up the scenes was just right to let me feel like I was there close by. Now I understand better why you are such an inspiration, your strength, endurance, but also how well you share from your depths… 

A.D.

I was thinking that it would be so wonderful if all those we love could write such a book that could take us inside each other’s journeys. Such a gift, such a joy! I look forward to it each day.

M.H.

We finished “Just Walk” this morning. We’ve been reading a little each day since we got the book. I wept through the last page–a perfect ending to your pilgrimage story (though, as you said, the story continues.) We are both grateful to you for writing the book, for all it has given us in the way of insight, strength, acceptance, humor, and all the other good things of life.

K.O. & T.H.

[Click on the photo to find the book…]

Keep Dreaming

Lately, I’m hearing (and sometimes feeling) a lot of discouragement, anxiety, and even cynicism about the prospects for our future survival on this earth. People are saying that it’s too late—climate change will destroy the home we share with so many other precious beings, and there’s nothing we can do about it. This seems to be true, and yet…

There’s always something we can do. Maybe we don’t have the super-powers that would be required to turn the world around, but we can create positive change, and positive change spreads just as powerfully as negative change. It’s hard to remember this when I’m feeling scared and sad, however. What I can remember much more easily is what I’m still able to experience right here and now, on this magnificently beautiful planet filled with abundant life and possibility.

When I look around me, I appreciate that, although there’s plenty to be concerned about, the earth is still a wonderland. On my daily walks in city parks or neighborhoods, I can see healthy beeches, oaks, cedars and  sequoias; wrens and herons and sapsuckers; turtles, squirrels and owls; grapevines and marigolds and crabapples. I can see water flowing over stones, autumn leaves blowing along the path, sunlight and shadow shifting as the day progresses. I breathe it all in, and remember that most of the glorious life we’re afraid of losing is actually still here, right now, all around us. Appreciating the natural world, recognizing how blessed we are to be a part of it… This is what we can do.

Savoring abundant and glorious life may be more vital than anything else we can do, and it’s certainly more important than reminding ourselves of all the things we can’t do. If people had been appreciating this earth all along, we wouldn’t have done all the terrible damage we’ve done. If every living person appreciated the earth fully right now, positive change would happen naturally and inevitably. There would be solutions. But, even if it wouldn’t change the future at all, it would be still be meaningful to savor what’s here in the present. Breathe it in. Love it. Don’t waste this gift!

My personal, physical resources have been at low ebb since my spinal surgery last May, but as the tide slowly begins to turn and my strength slowly begins to return, I don’t want to lose the increased appreciation I’ve gained during these months of healing struggle. Not knowing whether or not I will ever heal fully has made me pay attention to every small delight that I might otherwise take for granted. I recognize now that walking outdoors—feeling my own body alive in the open air, surrounded by other living beings—is sheer bliss, even when I can only walk for a few exhausting blocks. I want to remember that every moment can be filled with sensations, with connections, with surprises, with spaciousness. When I’ve been most afraid of pain or loss, I’ve also been most aware of how much I have to lose, how much there is to love about this life. I believe this is the kind of caring attention we must bring to our planet, and to all of our relationships with others. It is also the fundamental approach we should take to our dreaming lives as well as our waking lives.

Before we start worrying about what a dream means, or what we should be doing about it, we need to ask ourselves how it feels. We need to appreciate the undiluted experience of the dream, just as we need to appreciate the experience of the world around us. If we appreciate fully, we will naturally respond, naturally learn and grow in relation to the dream or to the world, and we will naturally see and feel what the dream has to offer and the possibilities that are open to us. On the other hand, if we sum up the dream with definitive interpretations or quick fixes, the dream will lose all real meaning. We’ll end up feeling helpless, or doing harm inadvertently, if we don’t first connect with that which is already meaningful in its very essence. 

The dream world, like the waking world, is not always easy to savor, of course. There are industrial wastelands—brutal, empty, ugly places in dreams or nightmares, just as in “real life.” As I work toward healing, my own dreams often feel desolate, even horrifying. But, the desolation, too, must be fully experienced, even savored, before meaning can be made of it. Such a poignant contrast between the grim “reality” of an ugly dream and the glimmers of beauty I can still remember, and still sense just beneath the surface! Feeling the intensity of the contrast compels me toward the light. If I dig deep in the dark, I find the splitting seed of a sunflower, a pale green sprout spiraling upward. If I allow myself to feel the sadness, the suffering, the uselessness and helplessness of a harsh dream, I discover the vitality of my own urgent longing and love for life itself—the longing that Dylan Thomas described as “the spark that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

I dream of a world that is made up of everything—an utterly wild, yet strangely familiar place where I am not in charge of what happens, yet not entirely helpless either. My best response to this chaotic and contradictory dreamworld (which we all inhabit, awake or asleep) is to surrender my plans and my explanations and just listen, appreciate, savor the exquisite uncertainty, and keep dreaming.

Bowing To One Another

Click on the photo for “Bowing to One Another”

I don’t have a new blog post this month, since I’m still healing and taking time for reflection before writing more. Instead, I’d like to share an article about vulnerability that I wrote for Presence magazine. Presence is published by Spiritual Directors International, so this article is specifically connected with my work as a spiritual director (which includes working with dreams)—but the larger theme of relationship and authenticity is certainly applicable to other contexts.

“Bowing to One Another” was written over a year ago, and although I was coping with illness and loss at the time, my understanding of vulnerability was still developing. Then, my central consideration was how vulnerable I should allow myself to be with other people, particularly with clients. By the time the article appeared in print last June, however, I had gone through major surgery and a month-long hospitalization, and vulnerability meant something quite different to me. I’m now learning about a more profound level of vulnerability, which has little to do with allowing or choosing.

So far, I’m not really ready to write about this deeper sense of vulnerability—perhaps because it must be fully experienced (willingly or unwillingly) alone, before it can be shared. But, eventually, this, too, is an experience I hope to be able to explore with you in a meaningful way. In the meantime, please join me in contemplating the essential, preliminary question that I posed in writing this article: What does it mean to be vulnerable with one another—in our work, and in all of our relationships?

[Click on the photo for the article]

Noninterference In Healing And Dreamwork

The body’s capacity for healing amazes me. As I slowly recover from my spinal surgery (I had surgery on May 1st), I’m more and more aware that my primary task is not to help the healing along, but to trust that healing is happening, sometimes even in spite of my interference. 

My first experience of myself after surgery was of shocking physical damage. There was a puckered ten-inch incision down my back, held together with staples. There was a raw four-inch incision across my throat, held together with glue. Ten vertebrae in my upper spinal column had been pulled apart, rearranged, and bolted back together. Nerves and muscles and blood vessels in my neck and back had been severed. I couldn’t reposition myself in bed, turn my head, swallow properly or manage my own beleaguered senses. My heart sputtered under the strain, and I felt so sick, feeble and disoriented that I really couldn’t imagine ever being whole and strong again. 

Yet, almost immediately, the healing began. Soon, the wounds in my back and throat became neat seams. The chaotic sensory panic signals found a tentative rhythm, so my body’s communication became comprehensible again. Each day I felt better as I relaxed my ineffectual instinct to struggle against this experience. My body had been overwhelmed, but my body knew how to heal. All I could really do was cooperate, bear witness, and rest.

Before the surgery, with the progression of my neuro-muscular disease, it was almost impossible to believe in healing. No matter what I did or didn’t do, the symptoms steadily worsened. Yet healing was happening even then. Sometimes healing can be an increasingly profound spiral downward into the unknown, even into death. Or sometimes things just have to get worse before they can get better, and that’s how it was for me. The disease intensified to the tipping point, against my will, but in the post-surgical wreckage of my body, healing began to show itself as naturally as a green shoot breaking through rubble. Now, it seems to be growing easily in me. I’m not approaching death (not yet)—I’m relaxing into possibility. 

Five months after surgery, all of my current symptoms can be seen as forms of healing in themselves. The inflammation that causes me pain is actually promoting bone growth in my spine. My weakness and lethargy are my body’s call for patience; I truly need the rest that this fatigue imposes. My heart’s arrhythmias slow me down, because it’s good for me to go slowly. 

I’m not making this happen. Healing resists my interference. But noninterference can be active; it certainly doesn’t mean apathy. I’m fully engaged in recovery, and my noninterference includes caring deeply, using all of my senses to discern what to do and what not to do, how to nurture the green shoot of the moment as it spirals upward. 

I have a strong preference for long-term survival and physical well-being, of course—but ultimately it’s not up to me. Ultimately, I will die, even the earth will die, and when the time comes, it could be a kind of healing, a not-yet-conceivable transformation. However, as long as I’m alive, healing must include appreciation, and participation in the life force that sustains my body and the earth. Interference is always a lack of appreciation, a lack of respect which creates distortions in natural cycles and developmental processes that would otherwise resolve themselves in balance over time.

Dreams are healing processes, and good dreamwork is also about noninterference. I don’t think there can be any effective prescriptions for interpreting dreams, just as I don’t think there’s any medication or surgery that will “fix” my body permanently, or any intervention that will “fix” our planet. Dreamwork is a fluid process, not a “fixed” method. Dreams move in the direction of healing and wholeness—but the key word I’m using here is move. All healthy processes are changing, moving. “Fixing” invariably means interfering by interrupting that movement. 

If I claim that certain dream images always symbolize certain things, or that a dream’s meaning can be found only according to a particular method, or that there is only one correct meaning to be found in a dream, then I am interfering with the momentum that makes the dream what it is. A dream is a changing, unfolding, un-pin-downable experience. We can’t “fix” it or define it without violating its wholeness and preventing its potential. Yet dreamwork through noninterferenceinvites engagement, commitment, and patience with our own unknowing. 

As I heal, I’m being invited to trust. I’m being invited to enjoy my life, with all of its discomforts and upheavals, and even with the inevitable unknown potential of its ending. As I explore dreams, I’m being invited to enjoy the sometimes disturbing and confusing impressions that those dreams make when they break through the rocky soil of my life and grow wild, escaping my understanding. I can nurture the green sprouts of healing possibilities, through trust and appreciation, without interfering at all.

Out-of-Body: A Mystery

During my hospitalization in May (following spinal fusion surgery), I had an “out-of-body experience” that was on the threshold of a “near-death experience.” It wasn’t a dream, though it may seem somewhat dream-like as I describe it:

I’m sitting up uncomfortably in bed, trying to remember how to eat and drink. My partner Holly is feeding me tiny bites of food. Swallowing is painful, exhausting and scary. I’ve choked several times already, but I think I’m managing okay. Holly turns away for a moment while I rest between bites, and suddenly… I’m up near the ceiling. The room is whirling slowly, as if I am on a merry-go-round, or as if I am weightlessly turning in space. Everything looks much clearer than normal—stunningly bright and gorgeously detailed. The upper panes of the tall windows come into view, dazzling me with sunlight and sky. I can’t ordinarily see that part of the room from my bed, but there it is. The pocked surface of the ceiling tiles, the lintel of the bathroom door and the gap of the doorway pass by. The television mounted high on the wall shows a PBS children’s program with Buddy the adorable orange dinosaur grinning and revealing his T-Rex teeth (rounded, cartoon teeth, that don’t look dangerous). The room is fascinating, lovely, as it swings around and around, suspended, like a mobile in a warm breeze. What is happening? I wonder, but I’m not worried. Then Holly is shouting my name, shouting at me to breathe. There’s a a loud buzzing and everything becomes harsher and blurrier than it was a moment ago. I’m back in bed. Holly is leaning toward me, her face desperate. I try to reassure her, though I don’t know what’s going on. She apparently called for help, and now the room fills with people. I try to explain, but I can’t explain. Someone else explains what they saw on the monitor: my heart stopped for seven seconds. My heart still isn’t working right. It feels awful. Now, there are plenty of things to worry about. My heart is in atrial flutter, my blood pressure is way too low… Did I choke? What caused this, and what if it happens again? Soon my bed is jolted into motion by a team of young men and I’m clattering through the halls at high speed on the way to the ICU, leaving Holly behind.

Although the “out-of-body experience” itself had been curiously pleasant, it was soon tainted by the nightmarish days that followed. I kept asking myself the same unanswerable, existential questions over and over, “What happened? How could it happen so suddenly, without any warning? What if I’d died?” My body was a precarious place to be. 

I didn’t die, and the separation between my body and me lasted less than a minute, but the experience was so fundamentally strange that I couldn’t leave it alone. Unlike slipping into the alternate reality of ordinary sleep, I’d been catapulted right out of my identity—still in the same room, but no longer in my body, no longer in my own life at all. If the separation had continued, where would I have been? Not whirling around the ceiling in that hospital room forever. There wasn’t enough of “me” to grasp—but the world (even the orange dinosaur on television) was so clear and complete in itself that it didn’t seem to matter what happened next. In the midst of the out-of-body experience, I perceived the world as a puzzling and pervasive sweetness. But immediately after it was over, I started grappling with the mystery: How could I have perceived anything without my body? Who experienced this experience? Certainly not the same helpless, frightened and wretched patient who was tormented by these questions in the ICU afterward.

In the three months that have passed since this experience, the big mystery of “not knowing” has become a lot less traumatic than it felt at first. Instead of being preoccupied with relentless questions, I keep remembering the ease of that sparkling, turning world, where I wasn’t embodied and no questions needed answering. The strain of surgery and hospitalization had triggered some cardiac arrhythmias that briefly disconnected my body from the directed flow of my life and myself—as if I’d been unplugged. Somehow, I was still present to experience the unplugging. But I don’t know whether that was death, or just a glimpse of what it’s like not to be entirely corporeal. We are never entirely corporeal anyway. Our dreams allow us to forget our physical bodies, or at least to perceive them differently, on a regular basis—yet this was nothing like a dream. In a dream, the world is insubstantial (even though the dream seems real), but in this out-of-body experience, the world was acutely manifest, while I was nothing but awareness.

The world I see from my everyday perspective is somewhat blurry, distorted by my well-worn 59-year-old eyes and habitual expectations. Yet somehow, without physical eyes, I “saw” this world with the dazzling clarity of pure vision. My body was confined to the bed, and I couldn’t turn my head (due to the spinal fusion), but somehow I saw—accurately—parts of the room that I couldn’t have seen through my physical eyes. How is this possible? I don’t know. Why was everything going around and around? I don’t know. I was a point-of-view rather than a personality, yet this “point-of-view” had distinct characteristics and a way of experiencing that surprised me. Whatever “I” was, I could be surprised! Not knowing, and not needing to know, made this constantly shifting perspective feel spacious, fresh, and quite easy; in its enchanting impossibility, it was perfectly real.

Having seen the world in this way, there’s an opening for me now. As I recover my strength, resume my work, and see my life from a new perspective with a newly healing body, I’m finding that the easiest and best response to every question I encounter is, “I don’t know.” How has the ordeal of serious illness and major surgery changed me? I don’t know. Where will I go from here? I don’t know. How should I respond to the thousands of tiny, pleasant and unpleasant surprises I encounter every day? I really don’t know. Though I find myself responding, one way or another, to each moment, there’s nothing I “should” do or be. I really don’t need to be certain about anything. It’s delightfully liberating, not knowing. There’s space—like sky—between the cloudy, complicated questions. Instead of defining and redefining myself and my circumstances, coming up with plans and explanations, I often find myself floating, weightless, in slow circles, just looking at the world as it drifts around me. Can I be a point-of-view rather than a personality? When my mind gets snagged on something and starts grappling again, can I remind myself that uncertainty is not a problem? I don’t know. And that’s fine.

The Body’s Metamorphosis: Posture & Stance As Dreams

The countdown has begun, and my body knows it. In a few days, I’ll be going into the hospital for a major spinal surgery, and probably won’t be home again for several weeks. When I do get home, after hospitalization and rehabilitation, my body will not be the same; it will not be this body. Not only will I have nine fused vertebrae and a permanently straight spine, but I’ll also have a different stance relative to the world around me, other people, and myself. I will have to stand, sit, and lie down differently. I won’t be able to move in familiar ways, and I might be able to move in new ways, or in ways that I haven’t moved in years. Putting on my socks, washing my hair, feeding the cats, reading a book, hugging Holly and my friends, walking, eating, sleeping, maybe even dreaming… everything will be different. 

While my mind is trying to tell me that this is just a medical procedure, a repair job, no big deal—my body knows better. As soon as the surgery date was finally set after months of waiting, my body figured out what was about to happen and, like a dog who gets wind of the fact that she is about to be taken to the vet, my body reacted with visceral, physical fear—shivering, glancing around furtively for a place to hide, losing appetite and concentration, flinching at small sounds. While my mind tries to calm me down, my body remembers past surgeries and injuries. She knows what’s coming. 

It is impossible to separate myself from this body, and I wouldn’t want to. The body has a kind of clarity that is expressed in her instant response to cues in her environment. I depend upon the way she breathes and lives without the mind’s conscious guidance, the way she feels truths from the inside, the way she moves into action on my behalf, her courage and cowardice, her competence and clumsiness, her compassion and raw vulnerability. These qualities are the body’s language, and also fundamental aspects of the person I believe myself to be. So, no matter what my mind tries to tell me, when my body is changed by this surgery, there is going to be an essential change in who I am.

Posture and stance and gait make us recognizable to others, almost as much as facial features do. When I had extensive radiation treatments for cancer in my thirties, the molecular disruption began to work on my body gradually, over so many years that the physical changes were not much different from the ordinary changes of aging. Slowly, my muscles got weaker, my heart had to work harder to keep up, my shoulders slumped, and my neck eased into a curve. Then, three years ago, the changes sped up. My posture deteriorated noticeably, and I began to develop ways of moving to compensate for the wasting muscles in my upper body. Finally, about three months ago, the cascading changes became an avalanche. Within these few months, I’ve become someone who cannot hold up her head for more than a few moments at a time. I slouch, stumble (because the weight of my head throws me off balance), and peer up at people from an awkward angle, my head dangling or propped on my hand. I’m in pain most of the time, and exhausted all the time.

Physical symptoms can be communications from our deepest selves in much the same way as dreams. If a character in your dream is slumped and “cannot hold up her head,” this character will evoke certain instinctive responses and assumptions: She could be lazy, or embarrassed, or hiding something. Maybe she represents a part of me, or another person or situation, that can’t stand up and face the world. Similarly, I notice that the more my body’s posture crumbles, the more uncertain and insecure I feel. There’s even a strong sense of shame, humiliation. 

I’m seeing this punishing dissolution of my physical confidence as a difficult challenge, but also trying to see its positive, transformative potential as well. Just as I might ask “Why am I having this particular dream at this particular time?” I might also ask “Why is this happening to my body? Why is this happening now?” The immediate answer comes from my body herself. There’s the predictable but apt image of a chrysalis. The confident caterpillar must go into her private cocoon and completely disintegrate before becoming any kind of butterfly or moth. My body recognizes the metaphors of metamorphosis, and understands the imperative of letting go.

I’ve been on the threshold of big personal change for a long time, contentedly occupying my larval identity as well as I can. Although I’ve been learning and growing through many metamorphoses over the course of my lifetime so far, this one could be the most irrevocable (short of death). Physically as well as developmentally, I’ve reached the limits of my old posture, my stance, myself. I’m not sustainable anymore. There’s no more adapting to be done—my body will not, cannot, cooperate. So, along with all of the physical changes, I must lose or release my plans for myself—my ambitions, my certainties, my habits, my resistances, my needs, my resentments, my strong stride and my adroit rationalizations. Maybe some of this stuff will be returned to me in another form, maybe not. Metaphorically and literally, my stance is changing; my posture is changing; my gait is changing. My relationships with others are changing because, although my care for them is consistent, I don’t know (or care so much) how I appear to them. My slumped posture reflects a genuine desire to humble myself, to step back into the shadows, into the secret chrysalis where the deepest possible metamorphosis can happen. 

These are the last few days for my body to be as it is: in a state of flux and confusion. For years when I was younger, I dreamed of initiations. Then, for many more years, I dreamed of graduations. Now, the graduation dreams have stopped. Have I graduated? What happens next? Post-surgery, I’ll have a new body with a straight spine. Will I recognize myself in this new body? Will other see me differently when my body is upright, stiff and strange, when I can’t tilt my head back to watch the geese fly over, when I can’t dance fluidly or even sway to music, when I can’t bend down to look at a friend’s snapdragons, or wrestle and play with a puppy? Will my rigid posture make me a more rigid person? Or will I stand tall, with the grace and flexibility of a tree, spreading my branches in the sun? 

I’m going into this surgery not knowing what the outcome will be. I might have less pain and more mobility than I do now. Or, there might be more pain, more disability. The unknown stuns me. For now, I’m allowing myself to come apart, piece by piece, trusting the process, open to the possibilities, afraid and excited. 

Human beings have always had rites of passage for big, transformative life events, and I find that I’m instinctively following some ancient rituals of preparation. Yesterday, I got my hair cut very short so that it will be easier to wash it when I’m recovering—a practical motive, but one that recalls the ceremonies of initiates entering a monastery, or recruits going into the army. Cutting the hair is preparation for sacrifice—giving up the old stance, the old appearance, the old self, before the new one can come into being. When I was about to start chemotherapy 24 years ago, I had my head shaved (anticipating that it would all fall out anyway). Just before walking the Camino de Santiago three years ago, I got a short haircut like the one I’ve got now. I make my posture consistent with my experience: the shorn hair symbolizing vulnerability, humility, a kind of self-erasure. 

The night before surgery and the morning of surgery, I’ll shower with antibacterial soap, erasing my own familiar smell. When I’m leaving for the hospital, I will remove my necklace, my wedding ring. I will empty my pockets. I will carry nothing. I will say good-bye to Holly before I’m taken into the operating room. Under anesthesia, I will become nothing for a while. And, I will trust in my own restoration, in a new form, a new body.

It’s no coincidence that my largest scar will be on my back, where I will never see it directly. This kind of deep change is not my business—at least not the business of my busy self-defining self. Big change happens behind my back. My body will know it, though. And I think my soul knows it already. When I come out of surgery, there will be more space in me—more spaciousness because I will not be able to confine myself to what I was before. I will be emptier, and there will be more room for life itself to expand whoever I am. Going through such an experience does not make me special or important, but it makes me feel that I am precious. My whole life is precious, and includes every possible posture, every way of walking, every stance, every opening. I’m nothing but infinite transformation, infinite dissolution, infinite manifestation, infinite mystery.

This is true for you, too—whatever you think of yourself will change, and every change is a chance to expand and include. You are not what you think you are, yet somehow you know yourself. When you see me next, I will be different and so will you—yet somehow we will recognize each other.

[Note: Kirsten had her surgery on May 1st. This post was written a few days before. If you’d like to follow her recovery, you can go to the Caring Bridge website, enter “Kirsten Backstrom,” and you will find journal entries and updates from Kirsten and Holly there.]

Flashes of Memory and Dream

As I prepare for sleep, I lie in bed with a book and let my mind drift. It is peaceful; there’s nothing to be done, nothing to be decided. Drowsiness comes over me slowly, and during this interval between bedtime (according to the clock) and the untethered dreamtime, I often have flashes of memory that are unlike the everyday “remembering” that makes up the narrative of my life. Instead of remembering events and stories linked together sequentially, I experience memories that have no beginning or end. Perhaps they are located in space rather than in time. They are vivid impressions of a place, a situation or a circumstance from my past, with all of the vivid sensations and emotions of the immediate experience. 

This is an entirely different kind of memory. It is not really like remembering at all. It is an eternal present, an unfolding moment fully realized. It is as real as now, lying in my bed with my book. Here comes a moment: In my first grade classroom, the dusty, nutty smell of the pencil sharpener, the oblique afternoon sunshine falling through tall windows and warming a corner of  my desk, so many details along with the feeling of being six, forever. As if that moment, that day, never actually concluded or became another day. As if I could resume that life any time, and live into it. And then the memory flits away and another alights: A salt marsh on a winter night, cold stars, frozen tussocks of grass, reflections of silvery alder saplings in the dark water, wind low to the ground and wood smoke rising, the feeling of being twenty-five, forever. I could slip back into that life just as easily as falling asleep now. 

These memory moments keep coming, almost every night. Sometimes, I turn them into more ordinary remembering: I think about first grade, the classmate who died of leukemia, my mother picking me up at the end of the school day and taking me with her to the college library where she would study while I read my treasury of Peanuts comic strips… Or I think about what happened next, after I left the rough log cabin on the salt marsh and moved to another cabin on another island on the other side of the country… But these ordinary, orderly memories are like remembering the story of an experience, rather than the experience itself. Most memories are really just the memory of a memory. By contrast, my immediate memory flashes are far richer, far deeper: I can taste them, smell them, breathe into the many dimensions of actually living those experiences. It’s better not to elaborate them, or organize them. By themselves, as impressions, they allow me to experience immortality. As if, somehow, every moment of my life is ongoing, as if every moment is a hologram containing all of my experience, and nothing can ever be lost.

I love these memory moments, these momentous memory flashes—they seem to be a gift that has come with aging and illness. When I am too tired or too ill to be somebody with a whole personal history to sustain, I can let myself be made up of moments. Just these flashes of perfect presence. Sometimes they are so poignant that they are painful, but even the painful moments are to be savored. They come and go so quickly, taking no time, lasting forever. I imagine this is what is meant by the idea that “your whole life flashes before your eyes” when you die. I’m not dying at this time (as far as I know), but I’m understanding how it might be to die—to live instantaneously and simultaneously, experiencing all possibilities as “now.” 

Some of those flash memories have no context—I don’t know exactly where or when they fit into my life story: …a dimly lit hallway with a thin pink carpet, a staircase descending to the left, closed apartment doors on the right, a feeling of mild apprehension and also curiosity, the feeling of being lost… Perhaps they are moments that weren’t substantial enough to add to the narrative of my life events, or perhaps they are moments from the future rather than the past. Perhaps they are even someone else’s memories. Yet, they are real, and they belong, in a way, to me. 

Obviously, the kind of memory moments I’m describing have a lot in common with dreams. Like dreams, they are filled with vivid impressions and emotions, but can be very difficult to describe, and impossible (or unnecessary) to hold onto. In order to remember dreams as stories that we can share, we generally manage to find a narrative structure that approximates the experience of the dream while giving it a linear coherence that can be followed. All the rest of our dreams are forgotten, but perhaps still present within us as moments, as flashes of experience, flashes of life being lived onward and inward.

My theory is that when we are young adults or teens our dreams often seem more like accounts of consecutive events. We fill our dream-journals with long, detailed narratives. But when we are small children or older adults, our dreams may be more impressionistic, more like those flashes of momentary memory that don’t lend themselves to narrative as readily. This makes sense because young adulthood is the time when we shape the story of who we are and what has happened to us. By contrast, when we are children or elders, doing things and describing what we’ve done may be less important than just following life as it unfolds around us and within us. 

Children and elders can sometimes dream (and live) in the midst of experience itself, rather than perpetually retelling the stories that define their lives. Of course, throughout our lives, we still want to “get a handle on” our stories and make sense of ourselves, but maybe in childhood and aging we’re more willing to give that handle a twist and let it go, rather than trying to wrench and wedge it into a set position.

Perhaps this is why remembering dreams often gets more difficult as we get older, and why children’s dreams can seem so disorganized. I’m trying to understand why I, and many of my clients (who are mostly over fifty), wake up feeling that we have been completely immersed in a dream reality, yet even though we grope around in our minds, looking for that “handle,” we cannot find the faintest thread of a dream memory. The impression is strong, but the narrative isn’t there. 

At this time in my own life, making a story out of my experiences seems less and less important. I’m even accepting the fact that few of my dreams can be remembered in the unequivocal way they once were. Not so long ago, I had a clear sense of the narrative trajectory of “me,” my memories, my dreams. I could tell you who I am, where I’ve been, what I’ve done, what I’m dreaming, where I’m going. But as the uncertainties and losses mount, I’m losing the thread. Yes, I still know my own story, and it still interests me… but I don’t know where it’s going, and I’m not sure who I really am or what will become of me. I’m aware of death—that stark perspective reminding me that I will eventually be forgotten—yet also more aware of life. The kind of remembering that matters is like my momentary memories, like impressionistic dreams, rich with the experience of being alive in a particular way, right now, exquisitely, eternally. My flash memories remind me that I have always been alive in this way, maybe even beyond this lifetime. Someone has been experiencing something, always. We are all experiencing. Maybe that’s the only thing we really are. Our dreams, our waking lives, all of our moments in this world—this is authentic reality.

As I write these words, I pause. The clock chimes and keeps ticking, the world is humming around me. I notice this moment. I can’t even describe it. Maybe, later in my life, this moment will come to me in a memory flash or in a dream. Maybe someone else is experiencing an identical moment right now. Maybe this same moment has been going on since before I was born. No moment is really separate from the next. Past is present, present is future, and forever is everywhere and always. Do you remember?

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