What To Do When You Lose Your Wedding Ring? Incubate a Dream, Of Course!!!

Those of you following Twitter may know that I foolishly lost both my wedding and engagement rings - after less than a year's wear, dammit. They weren't rocks of largeness like the one in the picture - but they meant a great deal to me.

My brain is fried from thinking through what could have happened to them.

So - I took it upstairs to the dream level.

Dream Incubation Statement: Help me find the rings.

The resulting Dream Stuff took the form of:
A verbal: "take a perspective you've never taken before"
An image: many plastic bags are crumpled within one transparent ziploc bag and the rings are in there, winking at me.

Now that I think about it, they're waving bye-bye. (sigh)

Anyway ... upon waking, I could not make heads or tails of either the sentence or the image in the context of the incubation question, so I took the information to a set of experts (Linda Schiller being one of them).

(Looking at your own dreams, I've learned, is like looking at the back of your own head without a mirror ... )

At first, there were a lot of up front logical, and quite legitimate, questions that made my brain spin again, like, do you usually take off the rings at any time? where were you when you last remember having them? etc.

But then the Gayle Delaney Alien Question was asked: pretend I was an alien and you were describing the plastic bags crumpled in a plastic bag to me. What are these things, what is their purpose?

And I proceeded:
"One of the items is a clear plastic sheeting constructed in a way that allows it to hold things inside of it. It contains things. It has a mechanism at the top that makes it easy to close, so one can store food in it."

From this "describe it to me as if I were an alien" exercise and some more work came a BUNCH of recommended search strategies ... (in less than half an hour!) all of which asked me to "take a perspective I have never taken before:"

1. check into whether the rings fell into the garbage pail, which is lined with a plastic bag and commence to dumpster diving
2. check the drawer where snack food is stored
3. check within any containers around
4. lie on the office floor and look up

and finally, 5., and my favorite:
Be like a shaman: become the rings and find yourself.

What Tarot Card Are You?

The social/personality psychologist in me is flabbergasted at how much I enjoy taking little quizzes to tell me what such-and-such I am. You may have read my prior post, when I went all ga-ga over Dena Decastro and her astrological consulting.

Is that true for you? Do you have many sides? Sometimes warring? Or is that just a Gemini Sun/Aries Moon/Aquarius Rising thing ;)

You are The Star

Hope, expectation, Bright promises.

The Star is one of the great cards of faith, dreams realised

The Star is a card that looks to the future. It does not predict any immediate or powerful change, but it does predict hope and healing. This card suggests clarity of vision, spiritual insight. And, most importantly, that unexpected help will be coming, with water to quench your thirst, with a guiding light to the future. They might say you're a dreamer, but you're not the only one.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

Synchronicities as Signposts Along the Journey

I just got Richo's Power of Coincidence book today ... and something like the chart above was on the page I opened to. I love it.

What else I love is that Richo doesn't pretend that the parameters he sets forth are "the final answer."

He writes:
If you experience a series of losses (or in my words, many things going kaput on you), that may call for more effort instead of letting go.

He also cautions against:
Assigning meaning occurrances in order to fulfill our own ego need to feel special.

I'm totally guilty of doing this.
I want to feel special.
I want to feel loved.

So - how do you know what to believe?
How do you know which occurrences are truly synchronistic and which are ego straw?

1. Pay attention to your body.

I'm not going to you hanging with just that thought though ... If someone told me to pay attention to my body, I would say, okay, here it is, standing in space. So what of it?

What I mean is: come to understand what your body feels like as you experience different feelings.

What parts of your body engage when you're feeling smug? What does that feel like?

What parts of your body engage when you are craving attention? What does that feel like?

What parts of your body engage when you're honestly and wholeheartedly doing someone a kindness? What does that feel like?

2. Check in with someone who knows you well, whom you trust, who can truly see you and who can notice things about you closely and curiously, but without judgement. Ideally this person would feel free enough to be straightforward with you ... even to the extent of pointing out discrepancies between your words and your facial expressions and body posture.

It helps also to check in with several such people - for two reasons - first, to see if there is a consistent thread of perception and, second, to overcome the effect of any individual biases

At the end, though, it always comes down to your own gut and your own heart as to what feels right and true for you.

And yes, it helps to sleep and dream on it too.

Upcoming Workshop Alert: THE ENERGY OF DREAMS

Mark your calendars ...

Linda Yael Schiller MSW, LICSW

IASD invited speaker

Group development and group work pioneer

Expert on Post-Traumatic Dreams

Psychotherapist

is offering a full day's Energy of Dreams workshop

in the fair city of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Friday, September 26, 2008

Here are the deets:

Our dreams come in the service of health, healing, creativity, and connection; even those that feel like nightmares when we awake. They can offer pathways to heal unresolved issues, open our creative potential, problem solve, tell a life narrative, and connect us to spiritual resources.

In this experiential and enjoyable workshop, you will learn how to access this treasure trove of information and resources both for yourself and your clients.

A hint at what's to come:

1. easy and fun ways to remember dreams


2. dream symbolism


3. multiple ways of accessing dream gifts


4. Linda's Kabbalistic Lens model of dream inquiry (Read more juicy detail about her method here)


5. specialized techniques for working with post-traumatic dreams

You get to work on DREAMS of your very own. Samples of client dreams also welcomed.

CEU’s for social workers
LMHC’s are in the application stage

Workshop date: Friday, September 26, 2008

More about Linda:
Linda Yael Schiller, MSW, LICSW has been practicing and teaching dreamwork for over 25 years. She is a frequent presenter at the International Association for the Study of Dreams, NASW, AASWG, hospital grand rounds, and numerous other venues. Linda has been a founding member of her own on-going dream circle for 28 years. As a psychotherapist in private practice, she is trained in multiple energy and mind/body techniques, including TAT, EMDR, EFT, HBLU, NLP, imagery and hypnotherapy. A professor of group work and an instructor in the Trauma Certificate Program at Boston University School of Social Work, Linda also uses her group work skills to make each workshop and dream circle a safe yet powerful and enriching experience.
For further information, see http://www.lindayaelschiller.com/ , or 617-926-9529.

LOCATION:
The Life Works Center, 50 Dudley St, Cambridge, MA.
TIME/DATE:
Friday, September 26, 2008, from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm
Light refreshments will be included.

Over 10% off, if you register by September 19, 2008!
Workshop fee:
$95 if postmarked before Sept. 19, 2008
$110 if postmarked on or after Sept 19, 2008.

Submit registration/fees to:
Linda Schiller, LICSW
98 Channing Rd.
Watertown, MA. 02472

Every Dream is a Whole Orchard in and of Itself

Dreams have way more than one right answer. Dreams have many answers, many can be right, some can be "righter" than others. AND there are layers of rightness as well.

My favorite model by far comes from the work of Linda Yael Schiller. She proposes looking at the depth of dreams through a Kabbalistic lens. In her view, there are at least four realms a dream can open us to.

There is a literal level, where what you see in the dream is what you get. If you are chased in the dream, it is a dream about chasing, and that is interesting in and of itself.

There is a next level, where one can discern meaning just past the surface level of the dream. This is where puns might point us, or emotional or physical reactions. If you are chased in a dream, you might think about what being chased or chaste means to you and where in your waking life you felt chased recently, for starters.

A third level lies deeper within a dream, which takes a bit more work to uncover. This level is beyond what we think we intellectually understand in the dream, beyond the puns, the symbols, and yesterday's lunch. Accessing this level is often via the surprises that emerge when one re-enters a dreamscape to take another look or to play out a dream scene further.

If you dreamed you were chased, you might consider going back into your dream and maybe slowing down time inside the dream to find an alternative place to hide, or freezing your chaser, to see what s/he's after, or granting your dream self a power that renders you safe from harm. You get to do what you want in the dream. It's your dream, after all.

I once had a dream where my father was taking a nap in a room, and his nap-taking suppressed all vibrancy and joy from that room. I went back into the dream and it spontaneously occurred to me while I was in the dream to painlessly and lovingly shrink my father to palm-size, and carry him gently from the couch to the back bedroom without waking him up, where I then re-grew him in the bed so he was comfortable.

This third level of meaning can be tapped into through Gestalt dreamwork also, in which every part of the dream represents a part of the dreamer. If you dreamed of being chased, you could look at the "chaser part of you" and the "chasee part of you." Even the seemingly inanimate objects in the dream you could work with as parts of you: the lamppost part of you, the piece of gum part of you that stuck to your shoe as you were running and put you off balance. And so forth.

Finally, sometimes dreams reveal to us the Jungian "Big Dream" level of meaning, the dream current that is part of the transpersonal collective-unconscious realm. There's a sense of communion with the ancient, the mystical, the Divine. When you've hit this level, you know it. I can't really do it more justice than that.

If you have questions on how your dreams might fit in with this model, how you might work with a puzzling dream of your own, or if you have further thoughts on these different levels of meaning, please contact me at http://www.dreamcurrent.com/ or leave a comment below.

May your dreams be ever fruitful, and may you enjoy the fruits of your dreams.

Dreams in Song: Feet in Dreams

"Funny how your feet in dreams never touch the Earth"
Heart, "These Dreams," 1985

Actually, I can report that one's feet in dreams CAN touch the Earth. Right now I'm remembering a dream where my bare feet were planted among blades of freshly mowed grass.

Now: What might it mean for this Dreamer, that her feet never touch the Earth?

First thought: Is the Dreamer sufficiently Grounded in waking life? Is the Dreamer TOO grounded, and compensating in her dreams?

Even though a hypothesis about the dream's meaning came to me pretty quickly, it is crucial to stay with what the Dreamer experiences: What is having feet never touch the earth in dreams LIKE for her. A positive experience? Neutral? Negative? Would the dreamer Want her feet to touch the Earth?

When Dreams Are Not Your Friends

And as I fall asleep, sometimes I'm afraid—because my dreams are not my friends. My dreams are wild like bracken or sudden hot winds that sweep down into the parched valleys of Galilee.
Anne Rice "Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana"

At some times, dreams do NOT seem like ideal friend material.

It's certainly been true for me. I've had dreams that were too vivid, dreams with disturbing plotlines, dreams with unpleasant body sensations. The ones I most remember are flying too high from the earth or propelling too fast along high power lines.

There may be unpleasant features to dreams - scary characters or creatures or scenes or encounters ... the list goes on and on. But all dreams, including the ones with the unpleasant stuff within, come to you in the service of your health and your wholeness.

They are your allies at their heart.

If you have a dream that "is not your friend," come talk to me about it at www.dreamcurrent.com.

Dreams and Synchronicity. Dreams ARE Synchronicity.

Photo courtesy: romkaz
Heard the following on Deborah Harper's Psychjourney Podcasts:

Synchronicity? probably.

"We sometimes dream of events that then happen. So that's a coincidence. I happened to dream of the very thing that occurred. But in every dream, we are seeing pieces of ourselves that are not yet fully complete or resolved. … And so, the dreams are coincidences between what we need to work on and what we met up with in our unconscious during the night. In that sense, all dreams are examples of synchronicity because they all coincidentally show where our work is, what is our work to resolve the issues that are still hanging on, either from our childhood, or from our present or past relationships. Dreams give us indicators of where that unfinished work is."

Due credit to Dr. David Richo; The Power of Coincidence: How Life Shows Us What We Need to Know (6/24/07). Emphasis added by yours truly.

How can you to gain the benefits of coincidences/dreams?

1. Track what synchronicities occur and notice similarities in messages coming through across time.

2. Become ever more conscious of the little examples of synchronicity (e.g., the parking space you did or didn't get that impacted your time to get to an appointment)

3. Look back over your life and consider the decisions, relationships you entered, the big events that occurred to you, and ask yourself "how much of the origin of these things was in your hands and how much happened due to a string of seemingly happenstance occurrences."


Hm?


And visiting http://www.dreamcurrent.com/ of course is great option for you as well. Have a wonderful day fraught with yummy coincidence. Mine started already ... thank you James Wells and the Clock Tower fire alarm!

Dreams: Five Reasons to Start with Symbols

photo credit: gvictoria
1. It's easier to lead with the head

2. It's less scary to lead with the head

3. It's traditional (Freud, anyone?)

4. It's the default to "go look something up"

5. Dream dictionaries are generic enough to have a wide reach (and therefore be worth publishing en masse)

But the richness, joy, and full meaning of dreams doesn't come from just the symbols!

That soft silky carmelly nougaty yummy core goodness comes from the whole of the dream, the layers, the feelings that come up, those little sparkles of insight.

Share a dream with someone today. See if you can uncover some of that yummy core goodness together.

Why the Tarot and Dreamwork are Complimentary

Tarot

* Finite symbol set (for decks like the Rider Waite Smith and the Thoth, the originators aren't alive to produce more cards)

* You don't have to go to sleep or go into a reverie to produce the symbols and you don't have to remember them or record them - they already exist in the world to project onto, on easily shufflable card stock

Dream

* The symbol set is constantly being added to by the dreamer

* Symbols are both uniquely the dreamer's and universal (e.g. childhood home)

* The dream's structure and sequence are generated by the dreamer, and are also uniquely the dreamer's

* Dreams have to be brought out(communicated) from within (that letter that has to be opened)

* Dreams may benefit the dreamer without being communicated (just having the dream may be enough, according to some theories

Both Tarot and Dream can be consulted in the service of set-breaking insight, both can generate new ideas - via looser, more associative ways of thinking. Both tap into something beyond logical a->b cognition, via images and evoked emotions.

I have a sense, too, that working in one modality stimulates the other.

What do you think about this alignment of dreamwork and tarot work? Not quite the "devil's play" many think tarot is ... that's for sure.

I was inspired to write this post, by the way, because I got wind of a Healing Collage Workshop, taking place on May 22 in Oak Park, CA, hosted by Lauren Schneider, who created the Tarotpy technique, and Sheila Asato, who created the Healing Collage process (and won an award from the International Association for the Study of Dreams). The workshop is limited to 16, so if you're in the area - do take the spot I wish I could claim.

The Secret and Law of Attraction DEMYSTIFIED

It occurred to me today that I was going about my being attractive to prosperity and abundance -

oh, who are we kidding - attractive to fat wads of cash, at least enough to bring the house we're living in out from the 1970s and from the ongoing curse of its prior DIY inhabitant - did i mention the hole in the wall our cat fell through? oh yes, here. Last year there was even more fun, with an even bigger hole, in our living room ceiling, due to plumb- oop, digression.

Sorry.

The goal is NOT to accumulate more of an abundance of home repair issues ...

SO. It occurred to me today that I was going about my being attractive to fat wads of cash in completely the wrong way.

If like truly attracts like, then, to achieve the prosperity I seek, I should be thinking and acting like several piles of large-denomination bills.

Dollars? Hm. These days, perhaps Euros.

Let's see, how to go about this?

Sit

Be crisp, fibrous, and slightly rough to the touch

Acquire a scent of fresh ink

Acquire a base tone of gray-green

Be signed by a Secretary of the Treasury

... right now I'm running out of thoughts ... but I'm desperate to do just the right things to manifest abund- er, fat wads of cash. Have you any ideas on thinking like like fat wads of cash? Share your ideas in the comments section. If this technique works, let me know ...

Readers Studio 2008: A Novice's Top Seven Offbeat Highlights

1. That meditation room. I entered and achieved instant solace, embraced by the circle arrangement of chairs, gentleness of light, and soft sweet music. The central altar with its subtly winking cloth, crystals in various shapes, and the four corners of color-shifting light drew me to settle for a good hour. I'm not a routine meditator, but I simply could not help myself - it was so lovely.

2. Flinging my legs up a wall for a spontaneous embodiment of the Hanged One, to surprise bursts of applause!

3. The Fool's Journey toward a Dunkin Donuts ... in a minimall featuring a triple-x video store, pool hall, and check-cashing hut.

4. The Wellsian instruction to take ONE card through five alternately positive and negative spread positions. An eye-opener, to be sure.

5. The Thalassian spread featuring the conventionally off-putting cards (Death, etc.) as positions.

6. A tag team oracular experience with esteemed Mary Collin, in which I hesitantly pointed out something that caught my eye (in the 3 of wands, Death position) ... right after which Mary summarized that sighting in a way that fit the querant's issue exquisitely. The table filled with gasps, shivers, and goosebumps. Maybe they were just mine ;) but still ...

7. This post Readers Studio blow-by-blow.