I’ve been accused at various times of making too much out of nothing. Does everything have to mean something?
My adversaries, usually hard-headed realists, want to know why I can’t just go out and shoot a game of basketball. Why do I insist that basketball is an extraverted attempt to keep shooting for the center of our being.
Pass the ball. Take a shot! Are you kidding us? That’s a bit far-fetched, isn’t it?
I’ve been sitting so long at this typewriter that it’s now a computer. At least there’s no blank sheets of paper staring back at me and heckling me to create something, some meaning – anything!
I get tired of it too!
It’s most tiring, this matter of writing, when I’m out of touch with myself. My ego gets pushy about creating something.
At my best it doesn’t work that way. I’ve got to drift a bit, soften my eyes, notice what’s on the margins of my awareness, pay attention to what meanings are already around in my life like pieces of drift wood or dead heads floating just beneath the water’s surface.
So then, I’m just reporting on what is now.
I will see some meaning that others don’t. What seems significant to me may seem “ho hum” to someone else. There’s a lot of “ho humming” going around in our world today. I’ve made my contribution to it as well.
We like those dull, but solid, down-to-earth realists, people, not so-much children, who would rather be on a swing than have both feet on the ground. We get nervous if we suspect someone isn’t fully connected to what we like to call “reality” – whatever that is, a question that philosophers have been pondering for centuries.
Our society quickly rewards people who prove to us through material rewards that they are safe, secure, financially stable. Show us some concrete, tangible signs: a house, a car, a well-manicured lawn and a good IRA plan. How many years have you been an American Express member? Is this security, the kind we can count on, really reality?
I’m wondering where all the dreamers have gone? Imagine having a business card read: PROFESSION DAY DREAMER. Mine sort of reads that way having looked at thousands of dreams among dreamers who enter my office and begin, “I had a dream last night….”
The therapist’s office, particularly a Jungian analyst’s, of which I am one, may be one of the few places where dreamers can seek shelter and find receptivity for the more than rational, especially their dreams and day-dreaming as well. We don’t just deal with so called “reality issues.”
Some of the most honest, sensitive, creative people have sat down with me through the years and talked about their dreams - for their lives and for those dear to them. They’ve spent time, money, energy, tears and laughter on who they are and who they want to become.
Really, what could be more practical than to develop an intimate, ongoing relationship with our dreams, fantasies, and those so-called unacceptable thoughts?
As C.G. Jung reminded us, our dreams have us. We do not have them. And out of our dreams, those dream images, often woven in a story in the night, we unfold our lives. We are often called forward by those images of who we are to become seeded in the soil of each dark night when the ego is at rest, or re-set for a daily adventure. We want awareness of what those dream images are suggesting.
Maybe it gets down to this. I just don’t think it’s practical not to embrace the wisdom in our dream images. It would be an unreal life not to shelter them and let them have their influence on what we already know about ourselves.
And out of that philosophy, I have chosen to live my life and to be there for other dreamers as well.